In earlier research, Sedlacek and Brooks provided evidence for the validity of a measure of attitudes of whites towards blacks. In developing the Situational Attitude Scale (SAS) one of their major methodological points was that an appropriate measure of racial attitudes would provide a racial context to make difficult the psychological withdrawal from the measure. They criticized the conclusion of Rokeach and others that belief in an issue, not race, determines the attitude of one person toward another. One question remaining unanswered was whether the particular method employed in the SAS caused the results of whether the SAS really measured racial attitudes. The purpose of this study was to determine the effect of beliefs rather than contextual situations on the attitudes of whites toward blacks. Results indicated that whites generally responded the same to a person holding a belief whether a black held the belief or not. The conclusion reached by Sedlacek and Brooks is that a nonracially related belief provides a way for subjects to ignore race in responding. Hence, there is further support for the necessity of providing a racial context before racial attitudes can be successfully measured. (Author/JM)