94 pages • 3 hours read
Eduardo Bonilla-SilvaRacism Without Racists: Color-Blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in America
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2003A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
The Power of Ideology
Throughout Racism Without Racists, Eduardo Bonilla-Silva describes the ideology of color-blind racism. He identifies this racial ideology as “a loosely organized set of ideas, phrases, and stories that help whites justify contemporary white supremacy” (339). This ideology has four central frameworks: abstract liberalism, naturalization, cultural racism, and minimization of racism (335). These frameworks are applied to virtually every aspect of racial relations in the US and are not dependent merely on individual viewpoints or ideas. Rather, ideologies are collective products that help to “express and reinforce symbolically” the dominance of white people in the systemic racist society of America. Bonilla-Silva argues that the ideology is powerful not just because people rely on it but because it is pervasive. He notes that even Black respondents to his interview questions often ended up using the color-blind framings of naturalization, minimization, and cultural racism.
The ideology has another form of power though. It allows any complaint from an oppressed person to be dismissed because the dominant person is unable to see past his or her ideology. That means that, for example, a Black person would have a hard time explaining to a white person why they felt discriminated against by a store employee who was too friendly or followed them around the store too much. This is an example Bonilla-Silva himself brings up but also one that several respondents address. A white person hearing this would use their ideology to say the Black person is just too sensitive (minimizing it). Similarly, white people have trouble understanding complaints about police officers targeting people of color. They may say (as was said so many times about Derek Chauvin, the officer who was convicted of killing George Floyd) that there are some “bad apples” or that there are some unfortunate incidents that happen but that they are exceptions to the rule. They may also argue that it is natural for police to assume Black people will be criminals because Black neighborhoods tend to have more crime and, thus, warrant more attention from police. However, in using any of these framings they are ignoring the larger issues of why the neighborhoods are segregated to begin with or why there are enough “bad apples” that police routinely kill Black people with more impunity than they do white people. But facts cannot break through an ideology.
Bonilla-Silva quotes Marx as saying that “the ruling material force of society is at the same time its ruling intellectual force,” meaning that the ideology stems from the material advantages white people have in society rather than the other way around. White people, then, have developed the ideology to justify their place in society. As such, facts about racism or the realities of those structural advantages will never be powerful enough to overcome the power of an ideology. Bonilla-Silva hopes that by decoding the ideology for his readers he can encourage them to do the hard work of organizing and protesting to change the material realities of American life. Only then can the ideology be uprooted too.
The Invisibility of Whiteness (to White People)
Bonilla-Silva defines the major aspects of the “New Racism” and notes that the New Racism is not as overt as “old-fashioned Jim Crow racism” was but that it leads to the same effects for Black people (14). He notes that Black people are disproportionately poorer and less educated than white people, that they have greater health problems, and that they are far more likely to be arrested than white people. He also notes coordinated attacks on the rights of Black people to vote. Yet because of the New Racism, white people tend to ignore these facts, dismiss them, or actively promote them (sometimes all at once). This is because of the newer phenomena of color-blind racism, through which white people claim to be not “racist” or argue that we as a society are “post-racial” and need to honor the dream of Martin Luther King, Jr. and judge people “by the content of their character, not by the color of the skin” (while forgetting why King framed that goal as a dream and not a reality) (29). Through this framing, white Americans will argue that they simply do not see race. However, as evidenced throughout the book, this is at least in part because they do not see white as a race. This logically means they do, in fact, see race since they largely describe race as only applying to anyone “other” than themselves.
Bonilla-Silva notes that many of his white interview respondents noted they thought Black people tended to sort themselves into segregated groups. And yet they did not notice the same behavior in white people even while admitting that they themselves had no friends of color. As Bonilla-Silva notes of three such student respondents who perfectly embody the idea of color-blindness, “Kara does not see white cliquing, Mickey does not see white tables, and Dan does not see white anything!” (260). White people, in other words, do not see white as a race or group at all. Similarly, white respondents often described their own segregated neighborhoods as being normal and often not segregated. Even in an era of heightened racist rhetoric from Donald Trump and his supporters, white people tend to say they do not see race. They may, however, say they see racism and point to those people as the racists, creating (for liberals) a binary of “good whites” and “Bad whites,” but this does not to them imply that white people overall are the beneficiaries of a racist system or that white people themselves constitute a race (in fact, since many can so easily divide white people into camps, they may be less likely to see the camps as having anything in common, racially or otherwise) (83).
All of this color-blindness though makes it harder to create actual changes to the racist structure of America. As Bonilla-Silva notes, “recognizing Whites’ lack of realization that race matters in their lives” helps him make sense of the contradiction between white people’s “stated preference for a color-blind approach to life” and “the White reality of their lives” (262). That is, because they just do not see whiteness, they will never see a problem with their color-blind racist ideology.
Racism as a Societal Rather Than Individual Phenomenon
From the opening pages of Racism Without Racists, Bonilla-Silva hammers home the point that societal racism is not based on individual racists but on systems of oppression. Even the title makes clear that the New Racism is one that persists despite the absence of overt racists (or at least those who identify as racists). It is exactly because the overt racism of the Jim Crow era has become subtle that the new color-blind racism is so hard to overcome. That is, when there were laws that actually discriminated against Black people rather than just cultural practices, it was easier for many people to acknowledge the reality of racism in America. As one example, Bonilla-Silva notes that in the Jim Crow era, “the federal government instituted redlining policies” and “White property owners used racially restrictive” codes to keep their communities segregated (96). In the new era, these overtly racist practices do not exist, yet there is an entire culture in place that uses more subtle practices (steering Black people to certain houses, not showing as many apartments in a building, etc.) in the new era to achieve the same outcome of separate communities. Because it is not overt though, the courts offer little protection, and individual actors can say there is no racism occurring at all and instead argue, as many interview respondents did, that people just like being with people who look like them. And when there is an example of overt racism, often white people will dismiss those actions as exceptions to the norms.
The point of all this is that there is a system of racism employed by the culture as a whole. When many (white) readers read this, Bonilla-Silva fears, they will get angry and feel that he has accused them of being racist. However, he makes overt his point that he does “not subscribe to individual-level analysis of racial-affairs” because he believes so adamantly in the “structuralist or society-wide” views on racism (358). Yet he is equally adamant that individual readers need to make changes in their own lives to fix the societal problems. His conclusion offers a step-by-step guide for white people to become antiracist by looking at their own biases, trying to leave the “white habitus,” and start interracial friendships and relationships. That is, even though he argues individual racists do not matter (though he is put off by the rise of old-style racism in the past half decade), he does argue that individual antiracists do. However, in the end he also argues that those individuals can only make a change if they are “part of the collective effort to get our nation closer to Dr. King’s dream” (376).
