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

During the era of Jim Crow, Black people were kept subordinate by a variety of overt racist practices, including restrictions on land ownership, the types of jobs they could work, and union membership. A table is included to show that only 1.1% of Black workers in 1890 worked in professional careers, while well over half worked in agriculture jobs. This trend continued until World War I when Black people migrated from the South to the North to fill jobs in the working class that were left vacant by soldiers going to Europe. However, even in the North, Black workers were relegated to lower paying, low-skill jobs.

During the same era, Black people were kept socially subordinate by laws that were passed to maintain the social racial order, including segregation, curfew laws, and disenfranchisement through poll taxes, literacy tests, and the powers of political machines. Lynching was common in the South, and in the North race riots would occur if Black people left their segregated neighborhoods. Racial ideology at the time was, thus, explicitly racist. Most white people believed Black people were inferior morally and intellectually. The institution of racial apartheid only began to crumble once Black people formed groups like the NAACP, CORE, and the National Urban League and once Black people served in the armed forces in World Wars I and II. The Cold War encouraged politicians to support the rights of Black people since the nation was promoting American democracy abroad, and finally a variety of court decisions and legislation ended Jim Crow. This occurred while the American political economy at large changed rapidly.

The Great Migration, the process by which millions of Black people left the South for the North between 1910 and 1970, helped improve the overall condition of Black people, who were able to create a small but thriving middle class and, more important, to train generations of leaders who helped unite Black people nationally into a cohesive political group. Beyond that, capitalists began to see the benefit of integrating their workforces, which helped improve Black people’s lives. In the North, factories were able to employ Black people in jobs that white people did not want; in the South, pushback from overt racists toward the Brown vs. the Board of Education decision made it difficult to recruit investment and capital. As such, reluctant politicians started to move toward integration. Conditions were thus ripe for a change in structural order, but the order had to be directly challenged by mass protests by Black people in the Civil Rights Era and the years that followed. Still, the end of Jim Crow did not mean the end of racism. 

In an inversion of the optimism at the end of the previous section, Bonilla-Silva offers a very short transition into hard data that shows very little progress has actually been made since the 1960s.

Residential Segregation

In a data-filled description, Bonilla-Silva notes that rates of segregation have decreased over the past 50 years, but Black-white separation persists. Segregation has increased in the suburbs, extremely impoverished Black communities are more segregated than ever, and in those places that have become more diverse, most of that is because of an increase in the Latinx population, not an increase in Black-white relations. Further, the problem with statistics as research tools is that they are too blunt; people can live in the same census tract while living very different (segregated) lives, especially with gentrification on the rise. Beyond that, diversity and integration do not translate into equality.

It is still far more difficult for a Black person to escape poverty than for a white one to do so, and it is far more difficult for a Black person to own property than it is for a white person to do so, not to mention that property in Black neighborhoods tends to not increase in value at the same rate as white-owned property, preventing intergenerational wealth from being shared. Though there are no longer overt laws that keep Black people from owning homes (as was the case in the Jim Crow era), studies consistently have shown the obstacles people of color face in home ownership today from government agencies, homeowners associations, banks, and white residents. Black people, according to these studies, are likely to be shown fewer apartments, quoted higher rents by landlords, and to be steered to specific neighborhoods by realtors. Additionally, Black people have been shown to receive higher than average interest rates on mortgages and to be denied mortgages more frequently. The increase in Black homeownership has come in large part from the subprime mortgages that fueled the Great Recession. Both Wells Fargo and JP Morgan Chase have settled lawsuits for their racist lending policies.

Education

Scholars have traced a narrowing of the gap in quantity of education Black people and white people receive but not in the quality. Indeed, schools today are more segregated than they were in the 1970s due to de facto segregation. Schools where there is a Black majority in the student body tend to have lower quality equipment, overcrowded classrooms, and out-of-date textbooks. A Supreme Court decision in 2007 that outlawed race-based policies to diversify schools (in a decision that used color-blind racist language) has made it possible for school districts to continue to increase the level of segregation. Even in integrated schools, Black students have been disproportionately punished compared to their white peers and have been more likely to not be placed on an honors or more rigorous academic track.

Other Areas of Social Life

Interracial marriages between Black people and white people remain low. Recent studies have suggested that over 90% of white people cannot name a single Black friend (making it less likely to, as so many white people do when they are accused of being racist, credibly claim that some of their best friends are Black people). Black professionals have recounted (both in interviews and in academic surveys) times that they were mistaken for menial employees, and studies of restaurants have noted that Black patrons are more often seated in undesirable locations in a restaurant or denied services extended to other customers (such as use of a coatroom).

More recently, a body of work on “microaggressions” has “chronicled how people of color are subtly put down” in inter-racial reactions (104). These can stem from crimes of omission or commission, omission referring to the practice of an organization only showing aspects of white culture and commission referring to statements made that imply that a person of color is unqualified for a job and is the recipient of affirmative action. This stress has had a negative effect on the mental and physical health of Black people.

While there has been a huge increase in the number of minorities in political office in the United States, many of the elected minorities are “out of touch with the views, goals, and aspirations of people of color” (105). And even though there has been an increase in minority-owned businesses and in Black people’s direct access to power, Black and Latinx people remain subordinate politically. (Further reading: One Person, No Vote by Carol Anderson)

Structural Barriers to the Election of Black Politicians

Barriers to voting rights for Black people still exist and include gerrymandering, voter ID laws, runoff voting, and social media misinformation campaigns. Like poll taxes, Voter ID laws are officially race-neutral but have been shown to have racial animus behind them with some legislators even outright declaring they are designed to suppress Black turnout. The Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act in 2013 too, which opened the door to further racial suppression of the vote. As a result of these restrictions, Black voter turnout still lags behind white voter turnout.

Underrepresentation among Elected and Appointed Officials

Black elected officials make up less than 10% of state legislatures and about a mere 3% of local elected officials. While some might argue Obama’s election reversed this trend, he got roughly the same percentage of the white vote that all Democrats since Jimmy Carter have received.

The Limited Possibilities of Elected and Appointed Officials

Because of their small numbers, the Black delegation in Congress has a very limited role when it comes to policy. Black appointees to federal posts have even less of a role. There is also a “disturbing trend of appointing antiblack Blacks” to positions that makes the political system “symbolically integrated” while maintaining racist policies (109). The Biden-Harris Administration has appointed more people of color to top positions, but it is too soon to tell if this will create real change.

The Limited Impact of Elected Black Mayors

Due to a decline of political machines, mayors have less power than they used to. Additionally, most cities are in rough financial shape and are, as such, dependent on white business elites for money. As such, Black mayors have little power and have had little impact on improving the lives of Black people en masse.

Electoral Participation as Entrapment

Black voters have a problem in that they cannot vote for Republicans because of their racist viewpoints but also cannot always trust Democrats who still support the interests of white people first and foremost. The solution to this impasse may be a return to mass protest politics. Those interested in whether Obama’s presidency helped Black people (according to Bonilla-Silva, it did not) can read earlier versions of this book. 

All systems require some form of control. The historian Manning Marable has noted that since the end of Jim Crow, Black people are still controlled by the courts, the government, and the police. Specifically, he argues that the criminal justice system has replaced illegal lynching with legal metaphorical lynching. The next section of the text looks at the data to check this interpretation, addressing each of the subclaims Marable makes in the extensive quotation offered in Racism without Racists.

The State as Enforcer of Racial Order

The US has the highest per capita incarcerated population in the world, and one in three Black males can expect to spend some portion of their lives in prison. Across virtually every statistic, Black people are disproportionately represented in the prison system. They are arrested more, convicted more frequently and for longer sentences, and face higher recidivism rates due to fewer opportunities out of prison. (Further reading: The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander)

Official State Brutality against Blacks

Studies have proven that the size of police departments in large cities increased as a result of the Black urban mobilization and protests of the 1960s. White people and Black people also view police differently, with Black people likely to see police negatively more frequently and to assume police misconduct occurs more frequently. This is true even after the unrest following the murder of George Floyd; though white people tend to agree that police target Black people more often than white people, they believe it in smaller numbers than do Black respondents. Statistically, Black people are killed by police far more often with numbers that surpass the numbers of death by lynching in the height of the Jim Crow era. And it’s not only police who act as enforcers of the racial hegemony. Bonilla-Silva cites George Zimmerman getting off for killing Trayvon Martin because of Florida’s “Stand Your Ground” law. Police enforcing New York’s “Stop and Frisk” policy similarly seemed to target young people of color under the guise of searching for drugs and weapons, even though white youth are more likely to have used or sold drugs. Recent “Stand Your Ground”-style laws passed in state legislatures have also been unequal, with white shooters more likely to be found justified in their killings than Black shooters. Finally, some states have passed “Blue Lives Matter” laws, which declare the killing of a law enforcement officer to be a hate crime.

Capital Punishment as a Modern Form of Lynching

Over half of those killed by capital punishment since 1930 have been Black people. Several studies have proven that Black people are four times as likely to receive the death penalty than white people for a variety of reasons. These include the prosecutors attaching higher charges to Black defendants than white defendants as well as racial biases by juries (which tend to be older and more affluent than most people in society). The trends do not seem likely to change anytime soon. The Supreme Court ruled in 1986 that statistical evidence of racial discrimination is not enough to prove that a person received the death penalty because of race. Under Trump, the federal government set annual records for the number of executions.

High Propensity to Arrest Blacks

Studies have confirmed that police officers do discriminate against Black people due culture prevalent among cops. Police spend time with other police officers and spend more time patrolling Black neighborhoods than white neighborhoods, allowing them to develop a perception that Black people are more likely to be criminals than white people are. Statistically, Black people get arrested more frequently than white people. For example, only a third of rape victims report their assailant as a Black male, yet 43% of people arrested for rape are Black males.

The Black Lives Matter movement has offered a response to this behavior. The movement started in response to the killing of Michael Brown at the hands of the police in Ferguson, Missouri in 2014. Unfortunately, the movement has been unsuccessful thus far at stopping police brutality, as 2015 was the deadliest year on record for police killings.

Repression of Black Leaders and the Civil Rights Movement

Civil Rights leaders and groups have long been targeted by the FBI. Even Martin Luther King, Jr., the most famous advocate for peaceful protest in American history, was the subject of extensive surveillance by the FBI. The FBI was even apparently involved in the assassination of Malcolm X. Between 1965 and 1971, the illegal FBI action known as COINTELPRO helped dismantle Black organizations by infiltrating them with informants. Another way Black leaders have been targeted is with anti-riot statutes that have allowed thousands of people to be arrested during whatever is deemed a riot. The Justice Department has also monitored BLM and other groups under the “recently invented rubric of ‘Black Identity Extremism Movement’” to prevent domestic terrorism (126).

Post-Civil Rights Social Control and the New Racism

Because the enforcement of the racial order over the past 60 years has been institutionalized, white people tend to detach themselves from police violence, accept it as necessary to maintaining order, or accept the view (supported by the media) that racial bias in the criminal justice system is isolated to a few individuals. Even in the age of cell phone videos, white people can compartmentalize the videos of police brutality they see while Black people experience them more viscerally.

Average Whites and Social Control of Blacks

Although Manning Marable’s arguments are believable, Bonilla-Silva believes that we still need systemic data on the role average white people play informally and unofficially in maintaining racial order. He notes the number of videos that have gone viral in recent years of white people “policing” people of color when they are barbecuing, selling lemonade, sleeping in lounge areas in universities, entering their own apartment gyms, and so on (128). These videos are often ridiculed, but as two sociologists have pointed out, there are real consequences, as police officers often respond to the white people’s complaints and ask the Black person to merely prove their right to exist in public and private spaces.

Bonilla-Silva ends this section by restating his point that it is not only the police and government who secure the racial order but regular people too. He asks the reader to do two things: Watch the videos he describes and ask if you have ever policed Black and Brown people.

Sociologists like to point out the rise of the Black middle class and some other ways that Black people have advanced economically in recent years. The next section of the chapter highlights that the overall situation for Black people compared to white people has not advanced much.

Income and Wage Differentials

While Black people improved financially between World War II and the 1970s, their income relative to that of white people has progressed very little in the decades since. Focusing on income convergence or divergence, though, fails to account for unemployment. Black people are less likely to have employment and more likely to receive fewer hours than their white counterparts, regardless of education level or geography. Recent economic studies have proven that for those who do have jobs, Black people get paid about 3/4 what their white counterparts make, even as Black people move up the professional ladder.

Occupational Mobility and Segmentation

Occupational race typing prevents Black people from improving their economic standing. They are overrepresented in unskilled fields and significantly underrepresented in white-collar jobs, and they have less chance of upward mobility. While there are more managerial positions open to Black people than ever before, that should not be assumed to suggest a decline in racial discrimination. For example, many of those jobs are pigeonholed and put aside for Black workers: jobs in community relations or minority affairs that were created as a response to the Civil Rights movement.

Racial Practices in the Labor Market

Research across disciplines has indicated that Black people are discriminated at all levels of the job process. They are less likely to get interviews than white people with the same experiences. Also, because so many jobs depend on informal social networks to recruit staff, Black people often don’t even have the same access to job openings white people do. This, combined with preferences by companies (both white-collar and blue-collar) to hire people who fit what they call the “culture” of the company, tends to keep companies less diverse. Some companies still require employees to take tests designed in the 1950s and 1960s as substitutes for outright exclusion. Finally, Black professionals are constrained in what emotions they can show on the job, and sociologists have argued that white managers will often attempt to protect white workers when there is a more diverse workforce.

Wealth

More than any other economic area, wealth shows the greatest gap between white people and Black people. Combined, Black and Latinx people have a net worth that is about 8% that of white people. The two primary reasons for this are the higher rates of inheritance of white people (exacerbated by the fact that any Black wealth that exists is only in the past half century) and lower home equity. Black people tend to own homes in poorer neighborhoods, which means their value increases more slowly (if at all) than do houses owned by white people.

Managerial Views on Blacks

Recent research suggests that the views of white managers about Black workers have not changed much in the past 60 years. In studies, sociologists have quoted individual white managers as viewing Black people as having bad attitudes and being lazy and unreliable.

Brief Note: On the Economic Standing of Blacks and Latinx Folks in the Pandemic

People of color were hit harder by the pandemic because they make up a disproportionate share of industries that furloughed or laid off their employees during the lockdown phase. Additionally, Black-owned business declined at a faster rate than did white-owned ones.