that they should be provided with unique opportunities. I think that they should have the same opportunities as everyone else. You know, it’s up to them to meet the standards and whatever that’s required for entrance into universities or whatever. I don’t think that just because they’re a minority that they should, you know, not meet the requirements, you know. (Bonilla-Silva 2003a:31)
This response under the conceptualization of racism in its “old-fashioned” form would have been recognized as anti-racist since it does not espouse a belief in justifiable racial discrimination in areas in higher education – rather, it seems committed to egalitarian ideals, i.e. equal opportunity for both groups.
However, colorblind racist ideology engages in blaming the victim in an indirect way. It allows Whites to appear to be committed to equality via the assertion of egalitarian values, while simultaneously ignoring the social reality / discrimination underlying Blacks’ social position and purporting an equal playing field. Hence, if Bonilla-Silva had defined racism in old-fashioned terms as being evidenced by (1) a belief in racial superiority, (2) a belief in sanctioned racial segregation, and (3) a belief in justifiable racial discrimination in areas such as employment and higher education, he would have concluded that racism no longer exists and that other factors besides racism must be responsible for students’ resistance to leveling the playing field for minorities in college admissions (Schuman et al. 1998).
In the article “‘I am Not a Racist but … ’: Mapping White College Students’ Racial Ideology in the USA,” by Eduardo Bonilla-Silva and Tyrone Forman (2000), the co-authors describe how colorblind rhetoric contributes to the maintenance of a racialized social system that allows notions of “culture” rather than structure to uphold White supremacy in contemporary discourse (Hunter and Robinson 2016):
Colorblind racism allows Whites to appear not racist (“I believe in equality”), preserve their privileged status (“Discrimination ended in the sixties!”), blame Blacks for their lower status (“If you guys just work hard!”), and criticize any institutional approach – such as affirmative action – that attempts to ameliorate racial inequality (“Reverse discrimination!”). Hence, the task of progressive social analysts is to blow the whistle on colorblind racism. We must unmask colorblind racists by showing how their views, arguments, and lifestyles are (White) colorcoded. (Bonilla Silva and Forman 2000:78)
Given the power of metaphors in “shaping how we make sense of the world and what we value and privilege” (Cammett 2014), it is no wonder that, in the wake of civil rights reforms, the definition of racism itself is apparently now open to interpretation and negotiation.
Central to this negotiation is the reduction of racism from the institutional to the individual (Esposito and Murphy 2010). Institutional racism “requires legal policies of structural change, and enforcement of civil rights laws and race-conscious remedies” (Doane 2006), all of which have traditionally run counter to conservative – and, increasingly, liberal – social policy and political interests. Racism as individual behavior, however, “requires only condemnation and perhaps punishment of individual actors,” with no cost to those whose broader political interests may comport with the spirit of that individual act, other than a “vague commitment to ‘tolerance’” (ibid.). Further, with the role of power defined out of racism, it becomes possible to conceive of “reverse racism,” with Whites now viewed as victims of intolerant Blacks. This inversion is central to challenges to the remedial policies that resulted from the Civil Rights Movement, including affirmative action (Doane 2006; Mayrl and Saperstein 2013), and almost necessarily requires an understanding of racial wellbeing as zero-sum.
A complementary pillar of this negotiation is an open embrace of colorblindness, a principle rhetorically – and, of course, selectively – attributed to Martin Luther King Jr. When King is invoked, it almost complements appeals to “stop looking at race” and focus on individual effort and merit: a defense of historical White economic and social advantages wrapped in an acknowledgement of racial equality. Blacks’ complaints of racism or race-conscious appeals for institutional change are then written off as “playing the race card” or “oversensitivity.” By delegitimizing the claim to pursue equality, since American society has already ostensibly achieved it, opponents can argue for the formal elimination of civil rights gains from the past 60 years (Cokorinos 2003).
When and how these racialized frames emerge, and the effect that they have in shaping debates or stirring national conversations, is no accident. During and since the enactment of the Civil Rights Act, well-funded foundations and think-tanks have been central in shaping public discourse on social and economic policies, both by advancing colorblind approaches to policies, and by reframing the concept of racism itself to include any racially conscious act. This neutralizes challenges to the traditional racialized social hierarchy, by “minimizing the extent of inequality, marginalizing claims of subordinate groups, and moving to make dominant group understandings normative for the larger society,” and, in turn, allows for the framing of White Americans as victims of post-1960s progressive policies (Doane 2006).
Conclusion: American Racism and the Black Community
Nothing handed down from the past could keep race alive if we did not constantly reinvent and re-ritualize it to fit our terrain. If race lives on today, it can do so only because we continue to create and recreate it in our social life, continue to verify it, and thus continue to need a social vocabulary that will allow us to make sense, not of what our ancestors did then, but what we choose to do now. (Fields, 1990:118)
Resurgence of the post-racial ideal results from a failure to grapple with the long history of American racism and how it has integrally shaped the Black community. A majority of Whites acknowledge that Blacks have a “tough life,” but often Whites view this reality as having little or nothing to do with them or Whiteness. The dominant perspective seems to situate racial problems in Black culture and Black communities, rather than recognizing the role of racism, discrimination, capitalism and White unearned advantages in the current state of Black American life.
Sociologists Tyrone A. Forman and Amanda E. Lewis (2015) point to rising racial apathy, and an insensitivity and/or indifference toward racial inequality, among most White college students. Sociologist Margaret A. Haberman (2018), in her book White Kids: Growing Up with Privilege in a Racially Divided America, notes the connection between this apathy and attitudes toward affirmative action. Ideals of deservingness, hard work and earning your way dominate our popular narrative. Meritocracy is the American way. This closely held core belief ignores an inconvenient truth: the extent to which the American educational system was and is rigged against Black Americans. Educational achievement has never been a product exclusively of an individual’s hard work. It reflects the benefits or hardships of parents’ economic and educational achievements, which were impacted by the achievements of their parents. Within two generations, we are approaching a time when Black Americans were structurally marginalized educationally by law, the impact of which reverberates today.
Racism created and maintains the Black problem. By absolving ourselves of responsibility and pointing to cultural deficiencies, we write in red on walls covered in Black blood and claim not to see. In the next chapter, we analyze how the racial frame of Blackness as culturally deficient serves to normalize racial oppression. Stereotypes and controlling images serve to create a monolithic image of Black America, obscuring the intersection of identities further marginalizing some Blacks while privileging others.
Critical Reflection Questions
1 What is the difference between race and racism?
2 Describe conventional and critical approaches to race.
3 Define the term racialized social structure. Using the institution of education as an example, how is racial
