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

Bonilla-Silva addresses the elephant in the room: Some readers will note how out of date his data is and assume his claims are no longer relevant. However, he has found that most readers immediately recognize the tropes and themes he discusses because they are so widely used by most Americans. Additionally, multiple social scientists have corroborated his arguments in the years since the book was first published by examining color-blind racism on the internet and television shows as well as the ways it has been used by government agencies to rationalize policing or immigration policies. Scholarship has proven that color-blind racism still dominates parent-teacher relationships and even that college students use naturalization framing to explain the difference between white and Black quarterbacks. Since color-blind racism is still the dominant frame, it is no wonder it popped up during the pandemic.

Stories about our “heroes” were ubiquitous during the pandemic. Advertisements from Budweiser, Amazon, and Walmart all put out ads thanking “essential workers,” while media stories referred to “heroes of the front lines” (339). While it is true these workers deserve our praise and thanks, labeling them as “heroes,” Bonilla-Silva argues, made everything confusing since our economy and health care system cannot depend on “heroes” to survive, especially when so many “heroes” are Black or Brown people. Labeling them “heroes” made many less willing to support their actual needs or defend their right to demand more compensation from their employers or better working conditions. Thus, when “heroes” protested or threatened to strike, they were often vilified. Such was the case when 10 nurses in Santa Monica refused to enter Covid-patient rooms until they were supplied with adequate N95 masks. These nurses were suspended by hospital management, with the hospital putting out a statement about being “grateful for the heroic work” their nurses do and not letting “the actions of a few diminish the appreciation” management had for nurses overall (341). Thus, the nurses were expected to risk their lives in poor working conditions because they are supposed to be heroes, not employees.

This relates to color-blind racism in part because the “heroes” were disproportionately workers of color. Black and Brown workers had jobs that left them more likely to be exposed to COVID-19 than white workers. These jobs were often lower pay manual labor jobs at agricultural plants or jobs in the public sector, such as nurses, bus drivers, and correctional officers. The abstract liberal way of calling them “heroes” made white people naturalize the fact of these workers’ realities rather than ask questions about why workers of color were overrepresented in those low-paying, dangerous jobs in the first place. Additionally, the coronavirus often required underpaid workers to learn new skills without receiving additional pay. Phlebotomists (who draw blood) were asked to “volunteer” (Bonilla-Silva puts this in quotes, implying that it was mandatory) to do the hands-on COVID-19 swab testing (341). These workers, 50% people of color, received no extra pay beyond their median yearly pay of $35,000. Bus drivers, janitors, and meatpackers were all exposed to even higher levels of COVID-19 than were the phlebotomists, and they deserved more than songs by Alicia Keys and thanks from management. What they needed was more money, paid sick leave, and masks. The pandemic merely highlighted the erosion of America’s radicalized welfare state, a condition exasperated by politicians (of both parties) in the 1980s and 1990s who demonized the imagined “welfare queen” and the idea of “welfare dependency.” The heroes were not threatened just by the virus, then, but by years of anti-government, radicalized rhetoric and the systemic racism that plagues the United States. 

The title for this section was taken from a post on the website of Feeding America. Non-essential workers began losing their jobs just two weeks after government-initiated lockdown and social-distancing measures began. This caused the number of food-insecure Americans to skyrocket to around 30% of the working class and an even higher proportion of workers of color. As a response to this, the media began to tell stories of food banks serving way more clients than usual, stories that usually ended with requests for donations. However, in doing so, the media suggested that food insecurity was an issue created by the pandemic rather than merely exacerbated by it. Various data pools confirm that in the years prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, food insecurity effected between 10 and 15 percent of all households and between 17 and 27 percent of Black and Latinx household. Thus, the framing of hunger as a pandemic issue helped universalize hunger in an abstract liberal way rather than letting people see it as what it has always been: an issue of racial inequity. As a result, few have thought about the need to craft race-targeted solutions to food-scarcity issues.

Why are so many in the United States food insecure? It’s because wealth stratification in America has returned to “Gilded Age levels” (344). For example, CEOs in 2018 were paid 278 times as much as average US workers while restaurant servers (as just one example) have not seen an increase in their wages since the 1990s. Roughly two in five Americans lack enough savings to deal with an emergency, with the typical Black household having enough savings to survive a mere five days without pay (compared to 31 days for the typical American, a number that itself is rather low). Three billionaires (Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, and Warren Buffett) own more assets than the bottom half of the nation, and the wealth of the billionaire class actually increased during the first few months of the pandemic. Racial disparities in food insecurity are a direct reflection of the general trends in racial inequality in America. Framing these needs as charity cases helps people pity the less fortunate and help them, but it also forgives the responsible parties (businesses, government) by remaining ignorant of them.

This heading came from a statement made by Dr. Anthony Fauci during a press conference from Donald Trump and his Coronavirus Task Force. During those press conferences, the media would occasionally ask about why there were racial disparities in COVID-19 morbidity and mortality. Experts converged on one point: that people of color are less healthy than white people. This naturalized the reason for their health preconditions, allowing white people to assume that something in biology or culture made Black people less healthy. Fauci noted that Black people were not getting COVID-19 more frequently but that the underlying medical conditions of Black people (diabetes, high blood pressure, asthma, obesity) got them in the ICU more often. The Surgeon General, Dr. Jerome Adams, suggested that Black people were “socially predisposed to coronavirus” in addition to the underlying health issues mentioned by Fauci. Both Adams (who is Black) and Fauci were praised for speaking straightforwardly on these points, but neither advocated for any policy solutions to address these disparities, which could have included providing hazard pay to workers, reopening the health insurance exchanges, dropping work requirements for Medicaid, or eliminating spending caps on Medicaid. Thus, color-blind silence helped literally kill people.

The reason for these health disparities existing even free of the pandemic goes back to systemic racism. Segregated communities of color tend to have higher levels of pollution (as they tend to be closer to industrial areas of cities) than do segregated white communities, and people who live in them tend to experience higher levels of crime, poverty, and unemployment, leading to higher stress (which is exacerbated by discrimination too) which leads to higher stress-related health ailments (hypertension, for example). Again, nothing is natural about this segregation.

Some commentators, such as Senator Bill Cassidy (R-Louisiana), a doctor, tried to pretend that race wasn’t really a factor at all. He suggested that if research controlled for diabetes and high blood pressure, “a lot of racial difference [in COVID-19 mortality numbers] would go away” so we ought not “get distracted” by the issue of racial inequalities (349). This is an example of pretending a problem does not exist and is also pointless to Bonilla-Silva, who points out that attempting to control for factors is a statistical trick that obscures huge disparities. For example, if we “control for” Black people who earn more than $200,000 a year, racial disparities tend to disappear completely, but that seems pointless since the median family income for Black people in 2018 was $41,361, more than $29,000 less than that of white families.

Other commentators including Black celebrities Charles Barkley and Van Jones blamed Black people’s health problems on poor diets or individual responsibilities even while mentioning that there were systemic factors as well. However, such cultural racism claims also did not explain why so many people of color were and are dying of COVID-19. Rather, they died in higher numbers because of our racialized social system and the way that system has impacted their communities.