can Americans within the context of a more general psychological temperament provides a clue to the fact that it has its greatest potential as a vehicle of what is commonly today called wellness. But wellness is elusive when the mainstream culture holds different attitudes "about how blacks and whites are to be treated" as a matter of course (Grier & Cobbs, 1968, p. 183).
To the degree such attitudes are internalized, they can be enacted to varying degrees of personal or group hostility. But the authors contend that even if there is no acting-out of overt violence, the experience of attitudes has the same psychosocial consequences. The feeling of devaluation is a difference only of degree, not of kind. It is in this way that the devaluation of a white-owned home by reason of its "proximity [to] a family of blacks" (Grier & Cobbs, 1968, p. 188) is psychologically identical to a lynching of a black by a white mob. Further to this point, Schaich (1975, p. 374) remarks on what he terms "collective racial violence and war" in a way that equates physical enactments of hatred with the psychological experience of it. He sees World War I as a watershed for the reason that it was during this period that the residue of slave consciousness began to erode within the black community. As the black self image improved, white hostility remained intense and continued to be acted out as destruction of black property, but became more indirectly expressed on a personal level, with police agencies in an official (and willing) proxy role of physical actions against blacks. The same dynamic was at work during World War II and the Vietnam war, which Schaich attributes to a generally more violent social psychology during wartime. But the psychological impulses toward racial strife, which aims at more or less purifying the mainstream while excluding or further marginalizing anything that is "other," appear to be a constant of the culture, as Schaich ...