Keep this in mind
The experiments also highlight the difference between asking people whether they still believe a falsehood immediately after giving them the correct information, and asking them a few days later. Long-term memories matter most in public health campaigns or political ones, and they are the most susceptible to the bias of thinking that well-recalled false information is true.
The experiments do not show that denials are completely useless; if that were true, everyone would believe the myths. But the mind's bias does affect many people, especially those who want to believe the myth for their own reasons, or those who are only peripherally interested and are less likely to invest the time and effort needed to firmly grasp the facts.
...while reading this.
...I thought of that young woman when I read recently about James Ford Seale, the former Mississippi Klansman sentenced last month to three life terms in prison for his role in murdering two black teenagers 43 years ago. The killing of Charles Moore and Henry Dee in 1964 was one of several unsolved civil-rights-era crimes that prosecutors in the South have reopened in recent years. Seale's trial was a vivid reminder of the days when racial contempt was a deadly fact of life in much of the country. His sentence proclaims even more vividly the transformation of America since then. White racism, once such a murderous force, is now associated mostly with feeble has-beens.
Yet many Americans, like the woman at my debate, still seem to view racial questions through an antediluvian haze. To them, white bigotry remains a clear and present danger, and the reason so many black Americans die before their time.
But the data aren't in dispute. Though outrage over "racism" is ever fashionable, African-Americans have long had far less to fear from the violence of racist whites than from the mayhem of the black underclass.
Several myths are embedded here. One is that racism is strictly a matter of physical violence. There's also the belief that racism against group A can only be implemented by directly flexing on group A. We beg several significant questions such as why black underclass even exists for the moment.
That Mr. Jacoby, a professional writer. enquotes the word 'racist' when discussing Black people's outrage shows he is aware we are outraged over something other than that about which he writes. Mr. Jacoby is asserting that any time the word 'racism' or a derivative was, is or is to be used, we are to understand it to refer to lynching and murder. This isn't directly asserted because it is absurd on its face. But it is necessary to limit 'racism' to something the collective American psyche can handle. So when Mr. Jacoby says
Americans overcame white racism; they can overcome black crime. But the first step, as always, is to face the facts.
it doesn't really inspire much hope.
But by this definition, redlining isn't racist. Redlining was anti-Black and anti-Jewish racism (yes, Jews aren't a race, but technically neither are Black folks...we're talking the state of mind of the particular white folk under discussion). It was implemented by punishing white folks for living around Blacks or Jews with lower property values...yes, someone would explicitly say, "Oh, one of them moved in? Drop the value of all the property on that block by X%."
I picked redlining because it is relevant to the begged "why does a black underclass exist at all?" It remains unaddressed here because each step in its creation has an assigned mythology. It would take a book to undo it all. For the moment, I'll say it was the inevitable result of the decisions that made the USofA what the majority of its citizens wanted it to be. Decisions like redlining, and limiting city services in minority areas and, well, you know the list.
Mr. Jacoby knows the list. He's in Boston, right? If he's over thirty years old he should have some direct memories he can access. But it's not just that he can afford to say, "However you feel about how we got here...we are here. How do we go forward?" as regards race and racism, it's that he's speaking for the large fraction of the American public that can't afford not to say it.
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