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

After quoting the psychologist John Dollard, Bonilla-Silva asks what happened to Jim Crow racism. Although conservative commentators consider racism over, Jim Crow racism has just been replaced by color-blind racism, which is the theme of this chapter.

Bonilla-Silva opens the chapter with theory-laden discourse that offers a rhetorical counterbalance to the straightforward conversational tone of Chapter 2 and the dense data-filled style of Chapter 3. Ideologies, he writes, are about “meaning in the service of power” and are, as such, symbolic level expressions about dominance (145). Ideologies of the powerful are essential to reinforcing the status quo. Dominant racial ideologies set paths for interpretating information and act as cul-de-sacs that filter all information through them into predictable routes that cannot be escaped. This means that information is misrepresented by result but is not wholly unfounded. It can be true, for instance, that people of color are better off today than they were a hundred years ago while still being victims of systemic discrimination and lagging behind white people in all aspects of power.

There are four main frames of color-blind racism: abstract liberalism, naturalization, cultural racism, and minimization of racism.