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

“In sum, I still posit that racism, in terms of practices and ideas, is not mostly about the rotten apples but about the nice apples, who believe they are “beyond race” yet act, consciously or not, in racialized ways.”

Bonilla-Silva opens his book by discussing the return of overt racism thanks to President Donald Trump and his followers. Despite the revival of Jim Crow-era white pride, he concludes that his original thesis still holds. Here, he also introduces the cliche of “bad apples,” one he returns to again in the text to suggest that racism is not merely actions committed by a few bad actors but rather something systemic to the whole nation.

“My hope is that the book remains a tool to understand the slippery way most race transactions operate in the place we called just a few years ago ‘post-racial America.’”

After the election of President Barack Obama, several commentators (mostly white people) described America as being “post-racial” since the election of a Black president proved that Americans were no longer racist. To Bonilla-Silva, that framing was not valid in 2008 and seems even less valid after the return of old-style racism from President Trump. This quotation uses irony and humor (which Bonilla-Silva uses at various points in the text) to introduce his main goal: Reading this book will help people change America’s racial structures.

“How is it possible to have this tremendous degree of racial inequality in a country where most Whites claim that race is no longer relevant? More important, how do Whites explain the apparent contradiction between their professed color blindness and the United States’ color-coded inequality?”

These are the main questions Bonilla-Silva poses in the book, and he asks them almost immediately in the first chapter. His answer to the question is that white Americans speak in color-blind phrases that obscures their racist beliefs.