Racism Without Racists: Color-Blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in America

While most readers are well aware of the history of the past six years (the history that prompted Eduardo Bonilla-Silva to revise Racism Without Racists), it is important to consider the context for the first editions of the book. Bonilla-Silva does an excellent job of briefly outlining the history of slavery, Jim Crow, and the civil rights movement, and he does an equally outstanding job of explaining the viewpoints of white people in the moment (the era of the late 1990s to the present), but he only briefly glosses over the gaps in racial eras and the way political actors defined that gap period as expressed in several books listed in the works cited below.

Between the late 1960s and the present, the political right in the United States was on the ascendant. Historians often use a push-pull interpretation of history, and such an ideology would work like this: the era of the 1960s pushed too far left, and so a conservative pullback happened. This new conservative movement broke up the New Deal coalition, which was a dominant voting bloc made up of geographically split laborers, the middle-class, Black people, and farmers. Starting in 1968, the Republican party under Richard Nixon launched what he called his “Southern Strategy,” an attempt to break up the bloc of solidly Democratic voters in the South by making race a political wedge issue. To do so, Nixon encouraged a third-party candidate to enter the race, the overtly racist Alabama governor George Wallace. He also let Southern senators have veto power over his vice-presidential pick, and he created the framework for speaking of race in a color-blind way. For example, he spoke of the “Silent Majority” who was not advocating for social change, and many white people also rallied against the concept of integrating schools by relabeling it “bussing,” a topic Bonilla-Silva addresses at length with some of his interview respondents.

In the late 1970s and 1980s, Ronald Reagan attacked the idea of welfare programs by attaching them to Black people. Rhetorically, he created the “welfare queen,” a fictional Black woman who was living the high life on welfare. This became popular with color-blind voters as well as overt racists like the former KKK member-turned Louisiana politician David Duke. As crack cocaine became the dominant street drug in urban areas, Reagan also launched the War on Drugs. Politicians of both parties supported this and made mandatory sentencing laws for drug offenses. This led to a more confrontational approach for police forces, which became better funded and larger as the face of crime in America became the Black gangs controlling the drug trade. But, as no one ever mentioned race in these attacks, white people learned to discriminate without having to be discriminatory. So ascendant was the right-wing political effort that when Democrat Bill Clinton won the White House, he made an effort to reform welfare while continuing to sign into law harsher sentencing bills, very similar to the bills a Republican administration would have also enacted.

It is against this backdrop that Bonilla-Silva conducted his interviews. Affirmative action was a hot-button political issue due to several high-profile Supreme Court cases, and the face of poverty, crime, and drugs in America was that of Black people. Because Duke and other overtly racist figures were defeated and remained local officials only, Americans could argue that racism was over. Finally, two high-profile cases in the early 1990s contrasted each other in the public eye. First, the officers who were caught on video beating up Rodney King were acquitted, leading to the LA Riots. To many in the public, the officers were acquitted because they were white, but many also felt the riots were not justified as a response. Second, years later, OJ Simpson was acquitted in the murder of his wife and her friend. To many in the public, Simpson got off because he was Black. The media suggested as much with Court TV reporters discussing those issues on air without overtly mentioning Black or white. It is this background that helps explain why so many respondents to Bonilla-Silva’s interviewers would talk about Black people making an issue out of race to help them out, despite all evidence to the contrary.