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

Bonilla-Silva opens with a succinct summary of everything in the book thus far: Most white people in the United States use color-blind racism to articulate their views, present their ideas, and interpret interactions with people of color. They believe that affirmative action is a form of reverse discrimination and that discrimination is a thing of the past and/or not common today. Similarly, they support all the goals of civil rights in principle but do nothing to make those goals a reality. They dislike the supposed self-segregation of Black people, but they do not object to the self-segregation they do themselves, seeing it and their white-coded life as totally natural and race-neutral.

But this does not mean all white people are Archie Bunker-types. Indeed, all racial progress that has been made in the United States has depended on white allies. Today there are still white racial progressives or “white traitors” who support full integration. Who those people are is the subject of this chapter.

Interview data from 1997 and 1998 suggests young, working-class women are the most likely to be racial progressives. This goes against the standard scholarly and media argument that working-class white people are racists due to fear of losing their place in a changing world.