Racial habits sustain the value gap and can change only when disrupted

Evidence

If we are committed to American democracy, and by some twisted fate I must be, we have to work for something more transformative. A revolution of value upends the belief that white people are more valued than others. And that goes beyond a mere statement of our commitment to racial equality. We have to break the racial habits that give life to the value gap, and that starts with changes in our social and political arrangements. Most habits come to us in the context of our living in social worlds not of our own making—in our neighborhoods and broader communities. Without question, habits move us about until something gets in the way and interrupts the usual order of things. When they are no longer taken for granted, habits can change, because we notice they are out of sync with the task before us, with the moment we live in, or with the person we hope to be. — Eddie S. Glaude Jr., Democracy in Black, 501

What is required, if America is to become the nation it hopes to be, is a wholesale transformation of our idea of who we are. This must involve confronting, without flinching, the nasty implication of the value gap. … And this will take much more than lofty appeals to the American Idea—the delusion that somehow, if we live up to our principles, all will be well once again in America. Illusions will not save us; they have to be smashed. We have to change fundamentally, and that will require uprooting the racial habits that are the lifeblood of the value gap. — Eddie S. Glaude Jr., Democracy in Black, 132

All Americans are shaped by biases, stereotypes, and the history of racism in this country that incline us to treat certain people in certain ways. We are shaped by our racial habits. And those habits in turn shape not only our lives and personal choices but the policies we create that reinforce the value gap. — Eddie S. Glaude Jr., Democracy in Black, 140

Categorization

• DEFINE: Precisely defines ‘racial habits’ as taken-for-granted arrangements that change only when interrupted and noticed as out of sync — central to the reader’s need to distinguish racial habits from prejudice.
• XREF: This definition of habit as background taken-for-grantedness echoes Pierre Bourdieu’s habitus and William James on habit, and connects to the reader’s broader interest in how unexamined norms reproduce inequality.
• SEED: Essay angle: the distinction between individual prejudice and institutionalized ‘racial habits’ as the operative mechanism—why fighting prejudice alone never closes the value gap.
• corroborated: 3 independent passages support this claim — Eddie S. Glaude Jr., Democracy in Black: How Race Still…, 501; Eddie S. Glaude Jr., Democracy in Black: How Race Still…, 132; Eddie S. Glaude Jr., Democracy in Black: How Race Still…, 140