Legal change alone cannot end persistent racial habits.

Evidence

Malcolm X believed that America was in a position to have a bloodless revolution. He was not referring to a blank-out campaign. He was actually talking about the importance of the ballot: if black people “were given what the Constitution says [we were] supposed to have,” we would “sweep all of the racists and the segregationists out of the country.” He was wrong. Because some laws were changed, but much of our racial habits have remained. Something more basic has to happen: we have to break loose from the straitjacket of race that confines how African Americans live and how democracy is imagined in this country. That will involve turning our backs on business as usual in American politics, rejecting certain models of black leadership (a model Malcolm X often exemplifies), letting a thousand flowers of black political expression bloom (we need more than black liberals arguing among themselves), and burying, once and for all, “Negroes,” “niggers,” their cousins (thugs, welfare queens, absent fathers, and all the other ugly names and stereotypes), and the white people who invented them. — Eddie S. Glaude Jr., Democracy in Black, 627

Malcolm X believed that America was in a position to have a bloodless revolution. He was not referring to a blank-out campaign. He was actually talking about the importance of the ballot: if black people “were given what the Constitution says [we were] supposed to have,” we would “sweep all of the racists and the segregationists out of the country.” He was wrong. Because some laws were changed, but much of our racial habits have remained. Something more basic has to happen: we have to break loose from the straitjacket of race that confines how African Americans live and how democracy is imagined in this country. That will involve turning our backs on business as usual in American politics, rejecting certain models of black leadership (a model Malcolm X often exemplifies), letting a thousand flowers of black political expression bloom (we need more than black liberals arguing among themselves), and burying, once and for all, “Negroes,” “niggers,” their cousins (thugs, welfare queens, absent fathers, and all the other ugly names and stereotypes), and the white people who invented them. — Eddie S. Glaude Jr., Democracy in Black, 627

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The core claim of the book: the ballot cannot sweep racism because racial habits persist beneath law — a crystallization of the value-gap argument that directly serves the reader’s analytical goal.
• XREF: Connects directly to the reader’s purpose: Glaude explicitly rejects the ballot/Malcolm X model as precedent for the blank-out proposal, because laws changed but racial habits persisted.
• QUESTION: Glaude faults the ballot route yet his own blank-out proposal is itself a ballot strategy — is there tension worth chasing across the book?
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Eddie S. Glaude Jr., Democracy in Black: How Race Still…, 627