power that justifies who should have it along racial lines. Sociologist Howard Winant goes a step farther, describing race as a “concept that signifies and symbolizes socio-political conflicts and interests in reference to different types of human bodies” (Winant 2004:154). Racism relies on a set of beliefs and practices that make the ideological real and material (Fields 1990). Anthropologist Leith Mullings argues racism relies on “a set of practices, structures, beliefs, and representations that transforms certain forms of perceived differences … into inequality” (Mullings 2005:684). Racism constitutes a system of oppression that creates ethno-racial others (Fredrickson 2002) and generates a process of othering, and normalization of Whiteness as the default racial category (Thomas and Jackson 2019). This othering is legitimized through a system of racial discrimination, exploitation, segregation, stigmatization, exclusion and physical violence against negatively racialized subjects.
There is a fundamental contradiction in the way that conventional and critical scholars approach race and racism. Conventional scholars acknowledge the historicity of race but suggest that its effects are no longer present and any contemporary racism is a remnant of a former time (Alba 1990). Racism in this view is an ideology or a belief and thus lends itself to be studied at the individual level within social psychology (Schuman, Steeh, Bobo and Krysan 1998). Critical race scholars espouse the centrality of race and racism in defining the life chances of racial minorities historically and in the present day (Blauner 2001; Bonilla-Silva 2001). Racism is viewed as being materially based in the structural position of the racial and ethnic groups in the racialized social structure, thus individuals’ racist beliefs or lack thereof are not central because they do not affect the structural basis of racism (Bonilla-Silva 1996). Despite the class fracturing along racial lines, all members of the dominant group reap the benefit of dominant group position in a racialized social system2 even if they do not equally share in the material benefits (Bonilla-Silva 1996).
Scholars and activists, such as Cedric Robinson, Keeanga-Yahmatta Taylor, Angela Davis and Tim Wise, argue that there is an intricate relationship between race and capitalism.3 In this view, racism is a “legitimating ideology used by the bourgeoisie to divide the working class” (Bonilla-Silva 1996:466). Race is not secondary to class, but both are mutually beneficial to one another as the capitalist system exploits the Black community (Robinson 1983; Taylor 2011).4 Critical approaches to race keep as their central focus “the reality of domination and inequality” in the lives of racialized minorities (Blauner 2001:24). They seek to expose rather than downplay the continuing significance of race in shaping the life outcomes of racialized groups.
It is impossible to understand the Black population in America without interrogating the role that racism played in its formation and the continued maintenance of the racial boundaries imposed on it. Yet this argument that racism is central is debated among sociologists with conventional versus critical approaches to the study of race. Jacques Derrida (in Crenshaw 2000: 550) notes that “Western thought … has always been structured in terms of dichotomies or polarities” and that “these polar opposites do not … stand as independent and equal entities. The second term in the pair is considered the negative, corrupt, undesirable version of the first.” Conventional approaches to race and ethnicity accepted this fact as it was the basis for the rationalization of slavery and “old-fashioned” racism as displayed during the Jim Crow Era. However, with the decline of overt racist behavior and increasing economic divisions within the Black community, conventional race scholars posited that class had replaced race as the most salient determinant of life chances for Black Americans (Wilson 1978).
In contrast, critical race theorists recognized this shift as a transformation of racism from an overt to a covert form expressed as colorblind or cultural racism, rather than an actual decline in racism (Bonilla-Silva 2003a). Critical race scholars argue that the underlying belief in the superiority of the White race was still maintained. It just gained expression through a colorblind belief in egalitarian values while disavowing a “head-start” for the dominant group. Alternatively, in the case of cultural racism, subordinated minorities are judged to be culturally deficient and this cultural deficiency/inferiority is the basis of their demeaned social position, not racism or discrimination (Bonilla-Silva 2003a; Wilson 1973).
This book takes a critical approach to race to unpack the Black experience. Even though many claim today to not “see” race and therefore believe they cannot be “racist,” this logic misses a fundamental truth: one can claim not to be “racist” and yet reproduce a racial hierarchy (see Resistance Case Study 1). Sociologist Robert Blauner argues: “prejudiced attitudes are not the essence of racism” (2001:19). While intense prejudice is often expressed via overt racism – explicit mistreatment or denigration of a racial minority group – a racist social structure does not require individual “bad” actors to maintain racial inequality. Blauner argues that racism in America is institutionalized, such that “the processes that maintain domination – control of Whites over non-Whites – are built into the major social institutions” (Blauner 2001:20).
Spotlight on Resistance
Case Study 1 Blacks as the Undesirable Population in San Francisco
In San Francisco, sociologist Christina Jackson conducted an ethnography from 2008 to 2010 in Black neighborhoods in the city: in particular, Bayview – Hunters Point. She joined a diverse community group called Stop Redevelopment Corporations Now (SRCN) that was created to organize against the erasure of Black San Francisco and other groups of color due to redevelopment, gentrification and environmental justice struggles associated with the Hunters Point shipyard. Residents conceptualized redevelopment and delayed environmental clean-up as implicit racism within a social structure that sought to erase their community. Through interviews and participant observation, Jackson captured the effects of redevelopment on the remaining low-income Black residents in the city. She interviewed Brother Ben, a 41-year-old small-business owner and member of SRCN who grew up in the Fillmore neighborhood and organizes in the Bayview – Hunters Point section. When asked about desirability, redevelopment and the SRCN movement he responded:
This [redevelopment] is about removing the people and [to] repeople the area with rich white middle-class people, a dog population, children playing, not even children playing in the street but a playground for rich people. And they want to make it this high-class area where most people make $75,000 or more a year, and just completely remove anyone who’s not what they call a desirable population. And, this is what plays into the depopulation also of Black people in San Francisco, which we say is being done intentionally…. So, SRCN is like a conscious movement or body that just allows people to get information, even beyond just the environment … but educate the people that they must take back the city government and must become aware of what’s happening not just on the hill, but politically aware of what’s going on in the city.
The Stop Redevelopment Corporations Now movement sought to educate the community about scientific language, connecting with trusted scientists to communicate clearly and translate jargon about levels of contaminants in their neighborhood and to help put pressures on the Navy team to clean up the area to residential standards. SRCN also sought to shine a light on the racial and class dynamics of the intended renewal of neighborhoods to prevent erasure of the Black community.
Racism is not an ideological tool nor a purely historical phenomenon, but it serves as a contemporary basis for the allocation and receipt of differential rewards that operates not at the level of racial attitudes but at the level of the social system. Racism in contemporary America can be seen as inherent in the social structure and manifest in our social institutions such that “old-fashioned racism” is no longer necessary to perpetuate the existence of the racial order (Bonilla-Silva 2001).5 A clear example of this can be found in the American educational
