White Supremacy and Racism in the Post-Civil Rights Era 9781685850272

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White Supremacy and Racism in the Post–Civil Rights Era

White Supremacy and Racism in the Post–Civil Rights Era

Eduardo Bonilla-Silva

b o u l d e r l o n d o n

Published in the United States of America in 2001 by Lynne Rienner Publishers, Inc. 1800 30th Street, Boulder, Colorado 80301 www.rienner.com and in the United Kingdom by Lynne Rienner Publishers, Inc. 3 Henrietta Street, Covent Garden, London WC2E 8LU © 2001 by Lynne Rienner Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Bonilla-Silva, Eduardo, 1962– White supremacy and racism in the post–civil rights era / Eduardo Bonilla-Silva. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 1-58826-004-6 (hc : alk. paper) ISBN 1-58826-032-1 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. United States—Race relations. 2. Racism—United States. 3. Minorities— Civil rights—United States. 4. Minorities—United States—Social conditions. 5. Whites—United States—Attitudes. 6. United States—Social conditions—1980– 7. Civil rights movement—United States. I. Title. E184.A1 B598 2001 305.8'00973—dc21 2001019619 British Cataloguing in Publication Data A Cataloguing in Publication record for this book is available from the British Library. Printed and bound in the United States of America

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The paper used in this publication meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials Z39.48-1984. 5

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Contents

Acknowledgments

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1 Introduction: Why Are Racial Minorities Behind?

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2 What Is Racism? The Racialized Social System Framework

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3 Racial Attitudes or Racial Ideology? An Alternative Paradigm for Examining Actors’ Racial Views

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4 The New Racism: The Post–Civil Rights Racial Structure in the United States

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5 Color-Blind Racism: Toward an Analysis of White Racial Ideology

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6 Color-Blind Racism and Blacks

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7 Conclusion: New Racism, New Theory, and New Struggle

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Selected Bibliography Index About the Book

209 217 223 v

Acknowledgments

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his book would not have been possible without the vision of Bridget Julian, one of the tireless editors at Lynne Rienner Publishers. Thanks for believing in me. I am who I am today because of my family. My mother, Ruth María Silva, a sociologist, taught me how to think critically and challenged my common-sense understanding of the world all the time. Thanks mami—even though we disagree a lot, I am very grateful to you. My father, Jacinto Bonilla, is a man of few words. He has given me unconditional emotional and financial support all my life. Thanks viejo! My son, Omar Francisco Bonilla, has been an inspiration in my life. Gracias Omar, and please stay humble and Puerto Rican! I studied sociology at the University of Puerto Rico–Río Piedras. My professors there—Myriam Muñiz, Arturo Torrecillas, Carlos Buitrago, Juan José Baldrich, Carlos Ramos—and many others shaped my sociological imagination. Although I received my Ph.D. at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, I regard myself as a product of the University of Puerto Rico–Río Piedras. At Wisconsin, two people supported me unconditionally from day one: Charles Camic and José A. Padín (now a sociology professor at Portland State University). Thanks, Chas, for being there for me; and José, you helped me in my darkest moments at Wisconsin. At the University of Michigan sociology zoo, David Williams, Julia Adams, Mark Chesler, and Howard Kimeldorf made my life vii

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Acknowledgments

bearable. At Texas A&M University (TAMU), almost every professor in the Sociology Department has supported me. For example, the members of the Sociology Seminar on Race and Ethnicity have read my work and provided invaluable and timely feedback. My colleagues, James Copp, Dudley Poston, Jane Sell, John Alston, Alex McIntosh, Mark Fossett, Sam Cohn, Barbara Finlay, and Harland Prechel, among others, have been wonderful to me. Special thanks are due to three TAMU friends: John Bois (now at the U.S. Census Bureau), is one of the smartest and funniest sociologists I have ever met; Benigno Aguirre and his wife Laurice (now at the University of Delaware) gave me friendship de gratis y a montón; and Rogelio Saenz, my boss, has supported me beyond the call of duty. Tyrone A. Forman and Amanda E. Lewis, colleagues at the University of Illinois–Chicago, deserve special mention. They have been my closest intellectual allies in the United States, and along the way we have become the best of friends. I thank them for their intellectual honesty and friendship. Last but not least, I dedicate this book to Mary Hovsepian. Mary is my colleague, friend, comrade, and strongest supporter, as well as critic. She is the reason why I keep swinging the sociological bat in the United States. She is also loyal beyond belief! Thanks, Mary, my life would be meaningless without you. Now we just need to produce one or two little revolutionaries to seal our dialectical love forever! —E. B. S.

1 Introduction: Why Are Racial Minorities Behind?

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hy do blacks and most racial minorities lag behind whites in terms of income, wealth, occupational and health status, educational attainment, and other relevant social indicators? This is the fundamental question that I will address in this book. But before presenting my argument, I review some of the major explanations social analysts have developed to account for minorities’ inferior status in the United States. First are the deniers. This group of analysts denies that there is a serious racial problem in this country. For instance, writers Ben Wattenberg and Richard Scammon have argued that by 1970 most blacks (exactly 51 percent according to their calculations) had become middle-class and thus were living the American dream. Although in Wattenberg’s 1974 book, The Real America, he acknowledged that blacks are “still well behind whites” and characterized this situation as “a national disgrace,” he insisted that the important part of blacks’ contemporary story was their impressive progress and hence pointed out that “for the first time in the history of the republic, ‘middle class’—as measured by income, occupation, and education—became the adjective to describe the majority of black Americans,” a fact that he classified as “nothing less than a revolutionary development.”1 However, Wattenberg’s analysis relied on such a loose notion of the middle class that virtually everyone in the country could be described as belonging to the ranks of the middle class.2 Actually, according to Wattenberg’s own estimates 74 percent 1

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White Supremacy & Racism in the Post–Civil Rights Era

of all U.S. citizens belonged to the middle class in 1972.3 If we follow Wattenberg’s “duck methodology”4 for the assessment of middle-class status—families of four earning $7,000 in 1972 dollars, people with some college-level education, people who consume goods such as cars or overseas vacations, or people who reside in suburban areas—then over 70 percent of blacks and 90 percent of whites belong to the middle class today. In contrast to Wattenberg’s optimistic view about the size of the black middle class, demographers such as Reynold Farley have asserted that “never in our history has there been a time when the majority of blacks were members of the middle economic class” (emphasis original). 5 Therefore, Wattenberg’s and Scammon’s assessment about the economic wellbeing of blacks is dubious as it is based on a highly deficient notion of “middle class.” Today, whether inspired by Marx or Weber, class analysts agree that professionals such as engineers or college professors have a different class standing—or life chances—than taxi drivers, blue-collar workers, or clerical workers.6 A more recent version of this view of blacks’ status in the United States has been presented by Stephan and Abigail Thernstrom in their 1997 book, America in Black and White: One Nation Indivisible: Race in Modern America.7 The Thernstroms chastise authors such as Derrick Bell and Andrew Hacker as prophets of doom. In contrast to the pessimism of Bell or Hacker, the Thernstroms proclaim that racial “[p]rogress is the largely suppressed story of race and race relations over the past-half century.”8 In their book, as well as in appearances on television shows such as The Jim Lehrer Report and articles written for U.S. intelligentsia in the Brookings Review, as well as for the masses in magazines such as Reader’s Digest, they marshal statistic after statistic to bolster their black progress thesis. Although the Thernstroms recognize that there are still some significant racial gaps in the United States, they believe that these gaps are “less a function of white racism than of the racial gap in levels of education, the structure of the black family, and the rise in black crime.”9 Critics have faulted the Thernstroms for making a one-sided argument and writing with the intent of exclusively representing the conservative view on race in the United States. The political leanings of the Thernstroms and their analysis should not surprise anyone considering that their book project—ten years in the making—was funded by the ultraconservative Bradley Fund Foundation. 10 Al-

Introduction

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though I do not fault the Thernstroms for their one-sidedness, I find their analysis thin and often simple-minded. Let me illustrate what I mean by examining the three statistics that they use to lead their 1998 Brookings Review piece, “Black Progress: How Far We’ve Come—And How Far We Have to Go.”11 The three statistics they cite as unquestionable indicators of black progress are the following: (1) whereas in 1940 60 percent of black women worked as domestic servants, today only 2.2 percent do so; (2) whereas in 1958 44 percent of whites said that they would move if a black family moved next door, today only 1 percent say so; and (3) whereas in 1964 only 18 percent of whites claimed to have a black friend, today 80 percent claim they do. The first statistic is simplistic and highly misleading because it hides the fact, discussed in almost every introductory book on social problems, that black women are still substantially overrepresented (two to three times their 10 percent proportion in the labor force) in secondary occupations, such as nursing aides, hotel maids, and janitors and cleaners characterized by low pay and status, and severely underrepresented (half or less their proportion in the labor force) in high-level and high-pay jobs such as financial advisers, physicists, and nuclear engineers.12 The last two statistics, as I will show in this book, are doubtful indicators of racial progress because they are entirely based on whites’ self-reports rather than objective behavioral data. Given the new post–civil rights social norms, 13 whites tend to inflate the extent of their contact with racial minorities, the character of those contacts (e.g., upgrading acquaintances to friends), and their personal level of racial tolerance. Thus, for instance, although over 90 percent of whites claim not to have any problem with blacks moving into their neighborhood, researchers have found that as a (white) neighborhood reaches 7 percent black, whites begin moving out massively.14 This finding casts some serious doubt on the meaning of the statistics cited by the Thernstroms. The suggestion that 80 percent of whites have black friends is also doubtful. Social scientists have reported significantly lower levels of black-white friendship ranging from 6 to 9 percent.15 Nevertheless, the claims of conservative scholars such as Wattenberg, Scammon, or the Thernstroms, who believe—like Voltaire’s character Dr. Pangloss in Candide—that “we live in the best of all possible worlds” and thus present what Alphonso Pinkney has labeled as “the myth of black progress thesis,”16 have not been taken seriously by most scholars. In contrast, the cultural explanation

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of blacks’ predicament by neoconservative analysts such as George Gilder, Nathan Glazer, Lawrence Mead, Charles Murray, Shelby Steele, and Thomas Sowell has had more success than that of traditional conservatives in academic and political circles as well as in shaping public opinion.17 These analysts acknowledge that blacks and, to a lesser extent, other minority groups are behind whites but blame them for their situation. Accordingly, Lawrence Mead and Nathan Glazer through academic books and presentations, Charles Murray through popular books and frequent television appearances, and black conservatives through books (Thomas Sowell, Glenn Loury, and Shelby Steele), nationally syndicated columns (Thomas Sowell), and television appearances (Shelby Steele and Robert Woodson) have given new visibility and legitimacy to the old cultural explanations of black poverty that were all but discredited in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Four major threads connect this group of analysts. First, the idea that black culture is flawed. Second, the belief that discrimination has all but disappeared as a factor in U.S. society and, thus, that it is irrelevant to explain the problems of racial minorities today. Third, the view that the free market approach to social problems is the best way of solving societal ills. And fourth, their belief that blacks’ problems (few of them, except for Sowell and recently Murray, speak or write about other racial minorities) are a consequence of the perverse incentives created by the “welfare state,” “the war on poverty,” or “the civil rights movement.” Therefore neoconservatives18 believe that the policies and politics of the 1960s are the cause of blacks’ lack of “personal responsibility” and their “welfare mentality” and hence they support policies ranging from Murray’s libertarian 19 “benign neglect” to Lawrence Mead’s civilizing “carrot-and-stick” approach to teach minorities the “right” values. An example of the work of these neoconservatives is Charles Murray’s 1984 book, Losing Ground. The book can be summarized as follows: Whites’ popular wisdom about why blacks are poor is right. Murray suggests that welfare makes “people” (despite Murray’s caveats, the obvious target group of his book is blacks) lazy and encourages promiscuity, that lenient courts and penalties encourage crime, that spending money in reforming segregated schools and universities—e.g., busing and affirmative action—is wasteful and discriminatory against whites, and that minority setasides in jobs are a detrimental practice for blacks and whites alike.

Introduction

5

Hence, Murray’s solution to blacks’ problems is “to repeal every bit of legislation and reverse every court decision that in any way requires, recommends, or awards differential treatment according to race, and thereby put us back onto the track that we left in 1965.”20 However, it is worth pointing out that Murray has apparently changed his mind about why blacks are behind whites in the United States. In his controversial book The Bell Curve, Murray suggests that the status of blacks and Latinos is primarily due to their lower cognitive ability. Yet his policy recommendations have not changed since he still believes that the government should not to do anything to help racial minorities or, in his words, “Trying to eradicate inequality with artificially manufactured outcomes has led to disaster.”21 (Murray’s new position, as well as that of his fellow colleague Dinesh D’Souza, at the American Enterprise Institute, has angered a few black conservatives. Robert Woodson, for instance, has publicly distanced himself from Murray and D’Souza and even left the American Enterprise Institute.22) Neoconservatives’ cultural explanation of blacks’ (and other minorities’) situation is not new. William Ryan labeled it a long time ago as “blaming the victim” or “justifying inequality by finding defects in the victims of inequality.”23 As a perspective, explaining poverty as a result of the moral, cultural, and psychological defects of the poor is a very old tradition in Western democracies. Historian Michael B. Katz, for instance, has documented the continuity of U.S. elite thought on welfare and the poor even among radicals for over a century.24 For example, in 1904 socialist Robert Hunter wrote in his widely read book Poverty that paupers are not, as a rule, unhappy. They are not ashamed. . . . They have been passed over the line which separates poverty from pauperism . . . the poverty which punishes the vicious and the sinful is good and necessary. . . . There is unquestionably a poverty which men deserve.25

Since the limitations and biases associated with this cultural perspective have been addressed by critics of Oscar Lewis’s and Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s “culture of poverty thesis,” I will not regurgitate them here.26 I will simply point out that the spin of modern-day victim-blamers is attributing blacks’ cultural deficits to the policies of the 1960s. Eliminate the policies of the 1960s (Murray’s argument before The Bell Curve) or pass legislation to teach blacks how to be

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responsible citizens (Mead’s policy suggestion) and blacks will reach their full potential. In essence, neoconservatives want the United States to return to the 1950s, a period in which they believe much racial progress was, without the need of state intervention or social protest, accomplished due to the invisible hand of the market. Therefore, present-day victim-blamers, as their older cousins, believe (1) that government intervention on behalf of minorities is a waste of time and money (Mead claims it is “paternalistic”) and (2) that racial and class-based stratification is an irrelevant factor in understanding black-white inequality.27 A third group of analysts supports a class-based explanation of blacks’ and minorities’ status. Some of these analysts are liberals (Todd Gitlin), others Social Democrats (William Julius Wilson), and yet others Marxists (Cornel West), but all believe that contemporary racial matters in America have more to do with class rather than race. The most widely acclaimed of these writers is unquestionably black sociologist William Julius Wilson. In his widely popular book The Declining Significance of Race, Wilson argues that “class has become more important than race in determining black life chances in the modern industrial period.” 28 He also criticizes affirmative action policies because, presumably, they do not help truly disadvantaged blacks.29 For Wilson, as for most of these authors, the problems of black America are the problems of poor blacks. For example, in The Truly Disadvantaged, a book that followed The Declining Significance of Race, Wilson asserts that the black “underclass”30 lives in a “tangle of pathology”—an argument that Wilson drew from “liberal” authors such as Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Oscar Lewis. Furthermore, he chastises liberals and radicals for not wanting to acknowledge the facts of life in underclass communities and for arguing that racism is the central factor shaping the status of poor as well as nonpoor blacks in America (see particularly chapters 7 and 8 in the 1980 edition of The Declining Significance of Race and chapter 1 in The Truly Disadvantaged). For Wilson, the underclass is the product of (1) the historical—not contemporary—effects of racism, (2) social policy that was blind to the needs of poor blacks, and (3) the effects of economic restructuring and plant relocations—processes viewed by Wilson as “impersonal” or race-neutral.31 Thus, consistent with his arguments, Wilson advocates for universal policies that will have “the hidden agenda” of improving “the life chances of groups such as the ghetto underclass by emphasizing programs in

Introduction

7

which the more advantaged groups of all races can positively relate.”32 (I will not offer a systematic critique of Wilson’s theses here as I offer in Chapter 4 an alternative explanation of blacks’ status in the post-1960s United States, but see Herbert Gans, The Underclass and Antipoverty Policy.) Nevertheless, as Robin G. Kelley points out, despite the disagreements of these progressive authors (Wilson included) with conservatives and neoconservatives, they share with them the belief that a “debased culture is what defines the ‘underclass,’ what makes it a threat to the future.”33 Politically, Wilson’s arguments resonate in mainstream America since most whites, as survey data reveal, believe that race is no longer the central reason why blacks and other minorities are not doing as well as they.34 Furthermore, authors such as Wilson have argued that poor blacks do not have the “soft skills” to be hired by industries and that they engage in all sorts of pathological behaviors, arguments that are kindred to the culture of poverty thesis. Wilson’s critique of affirmative action—that it supposedly benefits the black elite and does little for the “truly disadvantaged”— his view that poor blacks live in a “tangle of pathology,” his advocacy for color-blind class-based social policy, and his understanding of industrial and social policy in the post–World War II period as raceless fit quite well the way whites (liberal and conservatives alike) view racial matters in the contemporary United States.35 Not surprisingly, then, his books have sold extremely well and are used in many universities as textbooks to discuss the black experience in the United States.36 Wilson’s well-known arguments have been popularized beyond academic and policy circles by Cornel West in his Race Matters. Although West has a long academic history of claiming that racial and class subordination is the central factor shaping blacks’ social standing, in this book he makes arguments that are remarkably similar to those of Wilson.37 For example, West, with words and arguments that resemble those used by Wilson in chapter 1 of The Truly Disadvantaged, criticizes both “liberal-structuralists” and “conservative behaviorists”: The liberal/conservative discussion conceals the most basic issue now facing black America: the nihilistic threat to its very existence. This threat is not simply a matter of relative economic deprivation and political powerlessness—though economic well-being and political clout are requisites for meaningful black progress. It

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is primarily a question of speaking to the profound sense of psychological depression, personal worthlessness, and social despair so widespread in black America.38

West’s policy prescriptions include, as Wilson’s, full employment, health, education, and child care. And, as in Wilson’s work, West exhibits a concern for blacks’ “cultural” problems. In what I regard as a major overstatement West goes so far as to suggest that “the major enemy of black survival in America is neither oppression nor exploitation but rather the nihilistic threat—that is, loss of hope and absence of meaning.”39 If nihilism is the “major enemy” of blacks, what is the solution, or more precisely, what is blacks’ way out? In West’s estimation, “Nihilism is not overcome by arguments or analyses; it is tamed by love and care.”40 Wilson’s and West’s works show how the arguments of liberals and conservatives converge. Although the conservative camp believes that state policies cannot help minorities unless they are geared toward reforming their morals and culture and the liberal camp advocates for broad class-based social policies that presumably will help everybody—but minorities in particular—both groups believe that (1) social policy cannot cure all social ills, (2) blacks’ deviant culture is a fundamental reason for their status in America, and (3) racism is not the central factor behind blacks’ contemporary status. This convergence explains why under Clinton’s “liberal” administration conservatives and liberals agreed on all sorts of (universal) policy initiatives that will have a disproportionate negative impact on blacks—from so-called welfare reform to mending affirmative action. This may also explain why West and Wilson have become “respectable” liberals in the opinions of ultraconservative analysts and social commentators such as Glen Loury and William F. Buckley. The latter has even invited West as a guest to Firing Line, his television show on PBS. A fourth popular explanation for the status of racial minorities is the “pesoptimist” position on racial matters, that is, that racial matters are neither great nor terrible.41 This is a popular view among Democrats such as former president Bill Clinton, former vice president Al Gore, and former New Jersey senator Bill Bradley, as well as academicians such as Theda Skocpol and Reynolds Farley. 42 For illustration purposes, I will use the work of Professor Reynolds Farley as he is probably the best representative of the pesoptimist

Introduction

9

position.43 Farley’s claim throughout his work has been that blacks and whites have a common destiny. Throughout his distinguished career at the University of Michigan, Farley, a demographer by training, has painstakingly recorded changes in the black family structure and their impact on blacks’ status, in blacks’ levels of occupational and residential segregation, and in earning differentials between whites and nonwhites. He has even shown how racial attitudes affect blacks’ life chances in America. Farley has maintained that there has been major progress in some areas but limited or no progress at all in other areas.44 His halffull, half-empty view of racial matters is evident in Blacks and Whites: Narrowing the Gap?45 Using a demographic approach, he investigates whether things have improved (the optimist view), worsened (the pessimist view), or improved for some but not for all blacks (the polarization thesis). After reviewing the data, Farley provides a scorecard on blacks’ progress. He asserts that there has been a significant improvement in blacks’ educational attainment, occupational standing, and earnings. In terms of unemployment, he concludes that blacks have not improved at all since they are still twice as likely as whites to be unemployed. Finally, in terms of school integration, family welfare, and poverty, Farley asserts that there is a mixed record. Notwithstanding that Farley’s analysis seems very reasonable and balanced, his eternal optimism, lack of a sophisticated understanding of how racism operates in the contemporary United States, and exclusive analytical reliance on demographic methods keep him from correctly assessing the status of racial minorities in the United States. For example, Farley’s analysis of occupational convergence between blacks and whites is based on the index of occupational dissimilarity that measures whether whites and nonwhites work at similar jobs—100 is apartheid and 0 means that skin color has absolutely no bearing in determining individuals’ occupations. Since he finds that the index declined from 37 in 1960 to 23 in 1982, he concludes, “It is clear that racial progress has been made on the occupational front.”46 The problem with this claim is that it relies on the index of occupational dissimilarity, an index that is not a robust indicator of occupational racial inequality today. This index was a good measure of occupational race-typing before 1940, when blacks were totally excluded from certain jobs. However, as blacks were progressively incorporated into jobs from which they were formerly

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excluded as a consequence of the civil rights movement—and the needs of industrialists—new segregation strategies within jobs have emerged to maintain “white privilege”47 (for details of the process and strategies, see Chapter 4). Because this index is not sensitive to matters such as changes in job quality, occupational sedimentation, earning differences within occupation, and racial practices that still make many of these new jobs for blacks “nigger jobs,” the index exaggerates the real extent of occupational improvement that blacks have experienced and thus produces an inflated sense of black progress.48 Similar methodological limitations are present in Farley’s analysis of education, residential segregation, and racial attitudes.49 Part of the problem, as I will argue in Chapter 4, is that Farley relies on demographic indexes and attitudinal data developed to assess racial matters in the Jim Crow era. As the social arrangements responsible for the reproduction of white privilege changed in the 1960s, many of these indexes and many of the questions used to measure racial tolerance have become less reliable instruments to estimate contemporary racial inequality or modern-day racial attitudes. The fifth and final group of analysts is comprised by radical scholars who explain the status of blacks in America as fundamentally shaped by racial dynamics.50 My project is inspired by their work, their intellectual honesty, and their combative spirit. Yet I believe that some of their work is theoretically unsophisticated and that most are unduly pessimistic about blacks’ history and future. For instance, Derrick Bell, a living monument of blacks’ resistance to racial caste in America, writes in his book Faces at the Bottom of the Well that “Blacks will never gain full equality in this country” because, in his words: Even those Herculean efforts we hail as successful will produce no more than temporary “peaks of progress,” short-lived victories that slide into irrelevance as racial patterns adapt in ways that maintain white dominance. This is a hard-to-accept fact that all history verifies. We must acknowledge it, not as a sign of submission, but as an act of ultimate defiance.51

What is extraordinary about Bell’s argument is that despite his claim to the contrary (“not as a sign of submission, but as an act of ultimate defiance”), his view is a profoundly disempowering one. Although in

Introduction

11

the “stories” (the book is written as a series of stories) Bell artfully deflates our collective fictional self-image on civil rights, the end of racism, and color-blindness, by failing to adequately appreciate the progressive role of racial minorities’ struggles for changing the racial status quo and their impact on reshaping racial structures and practices, he ultimately betrays his advocacy for resistance. Why would anyone join the struggle for racial equality if “our actions are not likely to lead to transcendent change and may indeed, despite our best efforts, be of more help to the system we despise than to the victims of that system whom we are trying to help”? 52 Why would blacks choose the path toward “meaningfulness” through “engagement and commitment” if, according to Bell, “racism is permanent no matter what [blacks] do”?53 In contrast to liberals and conservatives of all shades, as well as many progressives and radicals, I contend that blacks and other minorities are at “the bottom of the well,” to use Derrick Bell’s apt metaphor, due to race. Specifically, I argue in this book that white supremacy (racially based political regimes that emerged post–fifteenth century) and racial ideology are the most important sociological variables to explain the status of racial minorities.54 Yet, this is not a data-driven book wherein the primary goal is convincing readers about the empirical accuracy of my argument. My goals are both theoretical and substantive. Theoretically, I want to advance a new formulation of what “racism” and “prejudice”—ill-defined but widely used concepts—are all about. My basic contention is that racism should be conceptualized in structural terms. I argue that actors in racialized societies,55 which I formally label racialized social systems, participate in race relations as either beneficiaries (members of the dominant race) or subordinates (members of the dominated race or races). Furthermore, I contend that since the races in any racialized social system receive different social rewards (one receives benefits and the other disadvantages), they develop different material interests. Whereas the collective interests of the dominant race (whites in the contemporary United States) lie in preserving the racial status quo, the interests of the subordinate race or races (blacks and other minorities) lie in attempting to change their position in the system; one group tends to fight to maintain the social, political, economic, and even psychological arrangements that provide them privileges and the other tends to struggle to alter them. I reserve the term

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racial ideology for the racially based frameworks used by actors to explain and justify (dominant race) or challenge (subordinate race or races) the racial status quo. Substantively, I argue that the U.S. racial structure (the specific set of social arrangements and practices that produce and reproduce a racial order) was reorganized in a fundamental way from the Jim Crow period to the post–civil rights era. Whereas white privilege was achieved through overt and usually explicitly racial practices, today, as various authors have noted,56 it is accomplished through institutional, subtle, and apparently nonracial means. In consonance with this post–civil rights racial structure, a new racial ideology has emerged. Some analysts have labeled this racial ideology as “competitive racism” or “laissez faire racism.”57 I prefer to label the new, post–civil rights racial ideology color-blind racism because this term fits better the actual language used by whites to defend their racial views. I will show that color-blind racism does what all ideologies do: It helps sustain relations of domination or, in this case, the post–civil rights racial status quo. I do not intend to eschew either the thorny matter of “the declining significance of race” or the issue of black progress. My answer to the former is simple. Arguing that race has declined in significance is like saying that because many workers today work forty hours per week and some even work in air-conditioned environments, they are no longer exploited; or that because over 60 percent of women work in the paid labor force, gender has declined in significance. (I believe that Wilson’s historical account of how race and class have shaped the black experience is flawed on both ends. Class as well as race have been significant for blacks since the seventeenth century.) The task of the race analyst—comparable to that of the class and gender analyst—is to decipher how it is that race matters in a racially stratified society at a particular historical juncture. Specifically, analysts of racial orders must study the practices, institutions, and ideologies that help sustain white privilege. Although racial stratification is as American as apple pie, I contend that the social arrangements (racial structure) responsible for the reproduction of white privilege have changed substantially throughout history. Hence, the way in which race shapes the life chances of whites and nonwhites today is fundamentally different than in the Jim Crow period. Rather than the declining significance of race, I document the changed but enduring significance of race in the post-1960 United States.

Introduction

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The second issue—the matter of racial progress—has generated a cottage industry of books on all sides of the matter (progress, no progress, progress and continuity). Part of the debate stems from a lack of argumentative clarity. If by progress analysts mean that racial stratification, racial prejudice, and discrimination are over, then there has not been any progress at all. Blacks and other racial minorities are still well behind whites according to most relevant social and economic indicators. In contrast, if by progress we mean that racial minorities have been able to improve their standing—the extent of the improvements is a subject of debate—in the U.S. racial order and have forced changes in the racial structure, then there can be no doubt that there has been progress. Saying otherwise is akin to saying that the status of blacks today is not much different than their status in 1619, a position that is nonsensical and which trivializes 400 years of black resistance to racial oppression. Thus, it is not contradictory to hold the view that blacks and other minorities are still at the bottom (racial stratification inequality is not over), but that the bottom that they experience and struggle about today is better than that peculiar to the slavery and Jim Crow periods. This is the reason why although I value Derrick Bell’s opinions and some of his analyses, I disagree with his larger claim. Like Bell, I believe that racial stratification has become a permanent feature of the United States. But unlike him, I contend that the form and content of racial stratification have changed throughout history in meaningful ways. Like Bell, I believe that all whites participate in racial stratification and receive, using the term coined by David R. Roediger, the multiple and material “wages of whiteness.”58 But unlike him, I believe that change has transpired; that through struggle and by building coalitions we can accomplish systemic changes in racial stratification.59 Like Bell, I believe that neither education, nor racial dialogues à la Clinton, nor enlightened social policy as proposed by liberal academicians60 will do much to change the racial status quo. But unlike him, I believe that progressive politics pursuing specific goals for the benefit of racial minorities has accomplished much in the past (the end of slavery and Jim Crow legislation) and that this work will continue to pay dividends (the new civil rights struggle to achieve substantive—rather than formal—equality). In short, whereas Bell sees no way out of our racial mess, my theorization and analysis lead to political mobilization and practical resistance to contemporary forms of racial stratification.

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In Chapter 2, I survey and criticize various theories of racism (e.g., internal colonialism, Marxist views, and the institutional perspective) and provide my own alternative theory, the racialized social systems framework. In Chapter 3, I criticize the attitudinal school on racism on methodological and substantive grounds. I also introduce a formal theory of the notion of racial ideology and provide a practical illustration of how my theory can be used to study racial ideology in racialized social systems. In Chapter 4, I explore the nature of the contemporary racial structure in the United States. Specifically, I examine the evidence of how black-white racial inequality is perpetuated at the social, political, economic, and social control levels. In Chapter 5, I examine color-blind racism—the dominant post–civil rights racial ideology—with data from the 1998 Detroit Area Study on White Racial Ideology (DAS). In Chapter 6, I examine how colorblind racism has affected blacks. Finally, in Chapter 7 I summarize my findings and outline a political agenda for fighting the contemporary U.S. racial structure and its accompanying ideology. Notes 1. Ben J. Wattenberg, The Real America: A Surprising Examination of the State of the Union (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1974), p. 124. 2. This loose view of the middle class has an income-based correlate. For instance, the head of the Congressional Budget Office defined the middle class in 1992 as any family of four with an annual income between $19,000 and $78,000. This definition would have made over 70 percent of Americans members of the middle class. See Lillian M. Rubin, Families on the Fault Lines (New York: HarperPerennial, 1995). 3. Wattenberg, The Real America, 54. 4. Wattenberg suggested that being middle-class was an “amorphous condition” and thus suggested a duck-like methodology. In his own words, “If it looks like middle class, walks middle class and quacks middle class— the chances are good it’s middle class.” The Real America, 68. 5. Reynolds Farley (ed.), The New American Reality: Who We Are, How We Got Here, Where We Are Going (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1996), p. 253. 6. For examples of Marxist analyses of the middle class, see Erik Olin Wright’s books Class, Crisis, and the State (London: Verso, 1979) and Classes (London: Verso, 1984). For Weberian-inspired analyses of the middle class, see Anthony Giddens’s The Class Structure of Advanced Capitalism (London: Hutchinson, 1981 [1973]) or Frank Parkin’s Marxism and Class Theory: A Bourgeois Critique (New York: Columbia University Press, 1979).

Introduction

15

7. Stephan Thernstrom and Abigail Thernstrom, America in Black and White: One Nation Indivisible: Race in Modern America (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1997). 8. Stephan Thernstrom and Abigail Thernstrom, “Black Progress: How Far We’ve Come—and How Far We Have to Go,” The Brookings Review 16, no. 2 (spring 1998): 12–16. 9. Thernstrom and Thernstrom, America in Black and White, 534. 10. For an excellent analysis of the Bradley Foundation and other conservative funding agencies, see Phil Wilayto, The Feeding Through: The Bradley Foundation, “The Bell Curve,” and the Real Story Behind W-2, Wisconsin’s National Model for Welfare Reform (Milwaukee: A Job Is Right Campaign, 1997). 11. Thernstrom and Thernstrom, “Black Progress.” 12. For data on the status of black women in the labor force, see Andrew Hacker, Two Nations: Black and White, Separate, Hostile, and Unequal (New York: Ballantine Books, 1995); see also Alphonso Pinkney, Black Americans (New York: McGraw Hill, 2000). 13. See Howard Schuman et al., Racial Attitudes in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997); see also Teun van Dijk, Elite Discourse and Racism (Newbury Park, CA: Sage, 1993). 14. See Reynolds Farley et al., “Stereotypes and Segregation: Neighborhoods in the Detroit Area,” American Journal of Sociology 100, no. 3 (November 1994): 750–780. 15. See Mary R. Jackman and Michael Crane, “‘Some of My Best Friends Are Black. . . .’: Interracial Friendship and Whites’ Racial Attitudes.” Public Opinion Quarterly 50 (1986): 459–496; see also Tom W. Smith, “Measuring Inter-Racial Friendships: Experimental Comparisons,” paper presented at American Sociological Association Meeting (Chicago, IL: 1999). 16. Alphonso Pinkney, The Myth of Black Progress (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1984). 17. Ronald Reagan, for instance, boasted that Murray’s book Losing Ground (New York: Basic Books, 1984) helped him think through the problems with our welfare system. And, although Reagan was not too fond of blacks, he invited many black conservatives to the White House and appointed a few to middle-level government positions and one, Samuel Pierce, as secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development. For details, see Manning Marable’s book How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America (Boston: South End Press, 2000) and Race, Reform, and Rebellion (Jackson, MS, and London: University Press of Mississippi, 1991). 18. This term has been applied to these analysts by Michael Omi and Howard Winant, Racial Formation in the United States (New York and London: Routledge, 1994). 19. Charles Murray, Losing Ground; Lawrence Mead, Beyond Entitlement: The Social Obligations of Citizenship (New York: Free Press, 1986).

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20. Murray, Losing Ground, 223. 21. Charles Murray and Richard J. Herrnstein, The Bell Curve (New York: Free Press, 1994), p. 551. 22. Dinesh D’Souza has become the most vicious exponent of the modern version of the culture of poverty perspective. In his book The End of Racism (New York: Free Press, 1995), D’Souza claims that blacks have developed an “oppositional culture” (in opposition to the white man’s worldview), which has become “the obstacle that prevents blacks from taking advantage of rights and opportunities that have multiplied in a new social environment” (56). What about racism? According to D’Souza, blacks use racism as an excuse or, in his own words, blacks have a “reflexive tendency to blame racism for every failure, even those that are intensely personal” (56). For en excellent critique, see “The Ideology and Discourse of Modern Racism,” in Teun A. van Dijk, Ideology (London: Sage, 1999). 23. William A. Ryan, Blaming the Victim (New York: Random House, 1976), p. xiii. 24. Michael B. Katz, In the Shadow of the Poorhouse (New York: Basic Books, 1986); see also Katz’s book The Undeserving Poor: From the War on Poverty to the War on Welfare (New York: Pantheon, 1990). 25. As cited by Michael B. Katz, “The Urban ‘Underclass’ as Metaphor of Social Transformation,” in Michael B. Katz, The Undeserving Poor, 15. 26. See, however, Ryan’s Blaming the Victim; Charles A. Valentine, Culture and Poverty: Critique and Counter-Proposals (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1968); and Eleanor Burke Leacock, The Culture of Poverty: A Critique (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1971). 27. For two excellent analyses on why the observed progress of blacks in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s stopped in the mid-1970s, see Reynolds Farley, “Racial Issues Thirty Years After the Civil Rights Decade,” in The New American Reality: Who We Are, How We Got Here, Where We Are Going; Martin Carnoy, Faded Dreams: The Politics of Race and Economics in America (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994). 28. William. J. Wilson, The Declining Significance of Race (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980 [1978]), p. 150. 29. In fairness, Wilson changed his view on this matter. In his recent book When Work Disappears (New York: Vintage Books, 1996), Wilson argues that a race-based affirmative action program is important for all blacks and that class and racial considerations must be part of a universalistic program to help all poor people have a chance for a decent education and a job. 30. Wilson defines this so-called class as a deviant group united by their common residential location and social isolation. For Wilson, the underclass is “a heterogeneous grouping of inner-city families and individuals whose behavior contrasts sharply with that of mainstream America.” The Truly Disadvantaged: The Inner City, the Underclass, and Public Policy (University of Chicago Press, 1987), 7. The ghettos of today, unlike the ghettos of the past, are populated by “the most disadvantaged segments of

Introduction

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the black urban community” and include “individuals who lack training and skills and either experience long-term unemployment or are not members of the labor force, individuals who are engaged in street crime and other forms of aberrant behavior, and families that experience long-term spells of poverty and/or welfare dependency.” Ibid., 8. Although Wilson acknowledges that welfare-dependent families and criminals are different social types, he maintains that they belong to the same “social class” because they interact in the same neighborhood and have become “increasingly isolated socially from mainstream patterns and norms of behavior.” Ibid., 8. For a critique of this reincarnation of the culture of poverty thesis, see Herbert J. Gans, The War Against the Poor (New York: Basic Books, 1995). 31. For an excellent critique of Wilson’s simplistic view of U.S. racial history, see Michael B. Katz, The “Underclass” Debate (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993). 32. Wilson, The Truly Disadvantaged, 127. 33. Robin G. Kelley, Yo’ Mama’s DisFUNKtional: Fighting the Culture Wars in Urban America (Boston: Beacon Press, 1997), 15. 34. This argument was raised by Aldon Morris in his analysis of why Wilson’s The Declining Significance of Race became such an influential book. See Aldon Morris, “What’s Race Got to Do with It?” Contemporary Sociology 25, no. 3 (May 1996): 309–313. For surveys on whites’ views, see, for example, Jennifer Hochschild, Facing Up to the American Dream (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995); see also Schuman et al., Racial Attitudes in America. 35. As I stated above, Wilson changed his views on many of these matters. However, even in his recent When Work Disappears, Wilson’s lack of political vision clouds his analysis and, more importantly, his policy recommendations. For example, although Wilson used to argue that the state has been pro-black since the 1940s, he changed his view in his recent book and now claims, much like what Massey and Denton claimed in their American Apartheid (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), that the state was a racialized organization that participated in various ways in keeping blacks at bay. Nevertheless, most of his policy suggestions betray his analysis since they are still predicated as policies to be carried on by the state. 36. According to data gathered by Herbert J. Gans, Wilson’s Declining Significance of Race has sold between 50,000 and 59,000 copies and The Truly Disadvantaged between 75,000 and 99,000 copies. See Herbert J. Gans, “Best-Sellers by Sociologists: An Exploratory Study,” Contemporary Sociology 25 (March 1997): 131–135. 37. I recognize that West, unlike Wilson, has argued quite forcefully that racism plays a central role in American society and is a central factor shaping the life chances of racial minorities. However, the discursive and argumentative convergence in the writings of Wilson and West’s Race Matters (Boston: Beacon Press, 1994) is astounding. Chapter 1 in Race Matters and chapter 1 in The Truly Disadvantaged make essentially the same argument. Furthermore, their convergence has increased since now

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Wilson believes that racism does play a central role in explaining the status of poor blacks (see his 1996 book When Work Disappears). 38. West, Race Matters, 14–15. 39. Ibid., 15. 40. Ibid., my emphasis, 19. 41. I borrow the term pesoptimist from Palestinian writer Emile Habibi, The Secret Life of Saeed, the Ill-Fated Pesoptimist: A Palestinian Who Became a Citizen of Israel (New York: Vintage Books, 1982). Saeed, the main character in Habibi’s novel, is a pesoptimist because he never gets happy or sad about anything since everything is neither great nor terrible. 42. Orlando Patterson, The Ordeal of Integration: Progress and Resentment in America’s “Racial” Crisis (Washington, D.C.: Civitas/ Counterpoint, distributed by Publishers Group West, 1997). 43. For disclosure purposes, I taught a course with Professor Farley at the University of Michigan and regard him as an excellent and generous scholar. 44. An example of Farley’s pesoptimist view on racial matters is his article “The Common Destiny of Blacks and Whites: Observations About the Social and Economic Status of the Races,” pp. 197–233 in Race in America: The Struggle for Equality, edited by Herbert Hill and James E. Jones, Jr. (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1993). After carefully pointing out with demographic data that black progress had all but stopped in the mid-1970s, Farley concludes his article with the following puzzling statement: “Black power is gradually increasing in this country” (229). Obviously, by black power he does not mean that blacks have achieved political control over their destiny. Instead, he means that blacks are better off economically speaking today than at any point in the past. 45. Reynolds Farley, Black and Whites: Narrowing the Gap? (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984). 46. Ibid., 49. 47. I borrow the term white privilege from Peggy McIntosh, “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack,” pp. 209–212 in Experiencing Race, Class, and Gender in the United States, edited by Virginia Cyrus (London: Mayfield Publishing Company, 1993). 48. My point here is not to negate the changes in blacks’ occupational standing in America. Instead, my point is to adequately assess the progress and examine if new practices have emerged to maintain what Peggy McIntosh labels as “white privilege.” For a more nuanced interpretation of blacks’ post–civil rights economic status, see Cedric Herring, “African Americans in Contemporary America: Progress and Retrenchment,” pp. 181–229 in The Minority Report: An Introduction to Racial, Ethnic, and Gender Relations, edited by Anthony Gary Dworkin and Rosalind J. Dworkin (Fort Worth, TX: Harcourt Brace College Publishers, 1999). See also Stanley Lieberson, A Piece of the Pie: Blacks and White Immigrants Since 1880 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980). 49. Farley, Black and Whites: Narrowing the Gap? and The New

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19

American Reality; see also Reynolds Farley and William H. Frey, “Changes in the Segregation of Whites from Blacks During the 1980s: Small Steps Toward a More Integrated Society,” American Sociological Review 59, no. 1 (February 1996): 23–45. 50. Some preeminent exponents of this radical tradition are Derrick Bell, Faces at the Bottom of the Well: The Permanence of Racism (New York: Basic Books, 1992); Stokely Carmichael and Charles V. Hamilton, Black Power and the Politics of Liberation in America (New York: Random House, 1967); Joe R. Feagin and Hernán Vera, White Racism: The Basics (New York: Routledge, 1995); and Alphonso Pinkney, The Myth of Black Progress (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984). It is worthwhile to point out that Charles Hamilton, who mentored Kwame Ture (formerly Stokely Carmichael) and cowrote with him the powerful book Black Power, has become another ex–black radical. In the 1980s, Hamilton along with Tony Brown, Reverend Abernathy, and later Eldridge Cleaver, supported Reaganomics and criticized what they labeled as “the black civil rights establishment.” 51. Bell, Faces at the Bottom of the Well, 12. 52. Ibid., 198–199. 53. Ibid., 199. 54. I use the term white supremacy fully cognizant that it raises some questions. However, I am persuaded by Charles Mills’s arguments in Blackness Visible (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1998). Racial theory needs a concept—akin to patriarchy and capitalism—that encompasses the general aspects of the political racial regimes that emerged post–fifteenth century. For more on this, see chapter 4, “Dark Ontologies,” in Mills’s book and Chapter 2 in this book. 55. Omi and Winant, Racial Formation in the United States. 56. Roy L. Brooks, Rethinking the American Race Problem (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1990); Robert C. Smith, Racism in the Post–Civil Rights Era: Now You See It, Now You Don’t (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995). 57. Philomena Essed coined the term competitive racism to describe post–civil rights racial ideology in her Diversity: Gender, Color, and Culture (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1996). Lawrence Bobo, James Kluegel, and Ryan Smith used the term laissez faire racism to refer to the same phenomenon in their article “Laissez-Faire Racism: The Crystallization of a Kinder, Gentler, Antiblack Ideology,” pp. 15–42 in Racial Attitudes in the 1990s, edited by Steven A. Tuch and Jack K. Martin (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1997). 58. David R. Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness (London: Verso, 1991). I am extending the notion of “wages of whiteness” beyond Roediger’s psychological realm. 59. See Kelley, Yo’ Mama’s DisFUNKtional; and James W. Button, Blacks and Social Change: Impact of the Civil Rights Movement in Southern Communities (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989).

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60. A few examples of such scholars are William Julius Wilson, Theda Skocpol, Stanley Greenberg, Margaret Weir, Douglas Massey, and Nancy Denton. What unites all these scholars is that their enlightened policy suggestions do not include the actions of the masses as central to social change. Hence, they basically rely on the goodwill and technical proficiency of policymakers and politicians as the main forces of social change.

2 What Is Racism? The Racialized Social System Framework

W

hat is racism? For most people, the answer to this question is very simple. Racism is prejudice, ignorance, or a disease that afflicts some individuals and causes them to discriminate against others just because of the way they look. This commonsense view on racism is not much different than the definitions developed by social scientists. For example, anthropologist Ruth F. Benedict, one of the first scholars to formally use the notion of racism, defined it as “the dogma that one ethnic group is condemned by nature to congenital inferiority and another group is destined to congenital superiority.”1 Similarly, Pierre van den Berghe defined racism in his classic 1967 study as “any set of beliefs that organic, genetically transmitted differences (whether real or imagined) between human groups are intrinsically associated with the presence or the absence of certain socially relevant abilities or characteristics, hence that such differences are a legitimate basis of invidious distinctions between groups socially defined as races.”2 Despite some refinements, current use of the concept in the social sciences is similar to Benedict’s and van den Berghe’s. Richard T. Schaefer in his popular textbook on race and ethnicity defines racism as “a doctrine of racial supremacy, that one race is superior.”3 Hence, analysts as well as laypeople regard racism as a phenomenon fundamentally rooted at the level of ideas. I label this dominant perspective as idealist because, as idealist philosophy, it assumes that ideas are the root of social action. From 21

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the outset, however, I want to stress that my point is not that the ideas that individuals hold on racial matters are irrelevant. Indeed, I devote one chapter (Chapter 3) to a theoretical discussion of how ideas help shape social action and another (Chapter 5) to the elucidation of the ideology that helps shape racial dynamics in the contemporary United States. My argument instead is that the narrow focus on ideas has reduced the study of racism mostly to psychology, which has produced a simplistic schematic view of the way racism operates in society. First, racism is defined as a set of ideas or beliefs. Second, those beliefs are regarded as having the potential of leading individuals to develop prejudice, defined as attitudes toward an entire group of people. Finally, these prejudiced attitudes may induce individuals to real actions or discrimination against racial minorities. This conceptual framework, graphically illustrated in Table 1.1, prevails in the social sciences. Table 1.1

Mainstream Conceptual Framework on Racism

Components

Examples

Racism: beliefs about “races” Prejudice: attitudes toward “races” Discrimination: actions against “races”

Believing that blacks are oversexed Fearing black men as sexually crazed Lynching a black male

In contrast to this idealist view, I advance in this chapter a materialist interpretation of racism rooted in the fact that races in racialized societies receive substantially different rewards. This material reality is at the core of the phenomenon labeled as racism. Actors in superordinate positions (dominant race) develop a set of social practices (a racial praxis if you will) and an ideology to maintain the advantages they receive based on their racial classification, that is, they develop a structure to reproduce their systemic advantages. Therefore, the foundation of racism is not the ideas that individuals may have about others, but the social edifice erected over racial inequality. Eliminate racial inequality and the practices that maintain it and racism and even the division of people into racial categories will disappear. Before elaborating my theory, however, I review a few of the most significant critical perspectives on racism developed by U.S.

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social scientists.4 Because of the analytical relevance of these interpretations, I offer below a short formal review of each of these perspectives.

Review of Critical Frameworks Used to Interpret Racism

The Marxist Perspective For Marxists class is the central explanatory variable of social life and class struggle is viewed as the main societal dynamic. Hence, Marxists regard other social divisions and possible sources of collective action (e.g., gender- or race-based struggles) as “secondary contradictions” or as derivations of the class structure.5 Not surprisingly then, the orthodox6 Marxist position on race is simple and straightforward: Racism is an ideology used by the bourgeoisie to divide workers. For instance, Albert Szymanski defines racism as [A] legitimating ideology for an exploitative structure. Racist ideology propagated in the media, educational system, and other institutions, together with the actual distribution of relative petty advantage within the working class, serves to disorganize the entire working class including the ethnic majority, thereby allowing capital to more effectively exploit most majority group workers.7

One of the first Marxist-inspired analysts on racial matters was black sociologist Oliver C. Cox. In his impressive Caste, Class, and Race,8 Cox defined racism or race prejudice as “a social attitude propagated among the public by an exploiting class for the purpose of stigmatizing some group as inferior so that the exploitation of either the group itself or its resources or both may be justified.”9 This social attitude or ideology emerged in the fifteenth century as a practical consequence of the labor needs of European imperialists. In Cox’s words, The socioeconomic matrix of racial antagonism involved the commercialization of human labor in the West Indies, the East Indies, and in America, the intense competition among businessmen of different western European cities for the capitalist exploitation of the resources of this area, the development of nationalism and the consolidation of European nations, and the decline of the influence

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of the Roman Catholic Church with its mystical inhibitions to the free exploitation of economic resources. Racial antagonism attained full maturity during the latter half of the nineteenth century, when the sun no longer set on British soil and the great nationalistic powers of Europe began to justify their economic designs upon weaker European peoples with subtle theories of racial superiority and masterhood.10

Cox labels the antagonisms that emerged out of European imperialism as “racial,” but does he view them as based in race? Does he recognize that certain aspects of social structure are racial in nature? Cox, as all Marxists, argues that race relations are not truly racial. Thus, for Cox, European imperialists justified their exploitation of the people and resources of the New World in racial terms but essentially established “labor-capital profit relationships” or “proletarian bourgeois relations.” 11 Racial exploitation is viewed as a special form of class exploitation. According to Cox, the racial component of these class-based relations stems from the fact that blacks were proletarianized in their entirety (as a people) in contrast to whites who experienced a partial proletarianization. Given that the racial aspect of societies is not deemed as real, Cox concludes Caste, Class, and Race by suggesting that racial minorities should strive toward assimilation, follow white working-class leadership, and ultimately struggle for socialism alongside white workers. The lack of any critical race viewpoint is amazing considering that Cox, a black writer, wrote this book at a time of great white working-class hostility toward black and minority workers and that he himself suffered the effects of racial caste in academia. Another popular Marxist view on racism is Edna Bonacich’s split labor market interpretation.12 The twist in Bonacich’s approach is that instead of regarding race relations and racism as fundamentally orchestrated by the bourgeoisie, she suggests they are the product of intra–working-class frictions resulting from a labor market split along racial lines. Bonacich argues that a split labor market exists when there is “a difference in the price of labor between two or more groups of workers holding constant their efficiency and productivity.”13 According to Bonacich, the United States has had a split labor market since slavery with blacks as the cheaply priced labor segment. After the abolition of slavery, Bonacich claims that black laborers remained at the bottom of the labor market due to a “difference in labor militance” compared to white workers. For Bonacich,

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white workers—whether old stock or immigrants—had greater levels of class consciousness than blacks. Although she is aware of the fact “that a number of ‘white’ unions openly excluded blacks while many others discriminated more covertly,” she insists that the lesser degree of black involvement in labor unions was the reason for their utilization as cheap laborers by capitalists in the post–World War I period.14 What about the well-documented history of white working-class racism? Bonacich reinterprets this history as white workers’ resistance to the “threats” (e.g., strike-breaking, displacement, and lowering the wage rate) posed by blacks. In her view, this “resistance”15 involved the total exclusion of blacks from unions and caste-like occupational divisions. Significantly, Bonacich has little to say about the labor threats posed by the millions of European immigrants to white U.S. workers. Although she believes that black and white workers coalesced between 1940 and 1960, she argues that the counteroffensive launched by the bourgeoisie (plant relocation and automation in the past and downsizing today) extended the life of the split labor market. And because blacks were very vulnerable at the outset of the coalition period, the policies of the capitalists disproportionally hurt blacks and contributed to the creation of a “class of hard-core unemployed in the ghettos.”16 The orthodox Marxist view on racial matters has many limitations.17 First, orthodox Marxists regard racism and racial antagonism as products of class dynamics. Regardless of whether the antagonism is viewed as fostered by the bourgeoisie (as Cox and Szymanski would argue) or as the product of intra–working-class strife (as Bonacich maintains), racial strife is viewed as not having a real racial foundation. Second, racial strife is conceived as emanating from false interests. Because the unity of the working class and the impending socialist revolution are a priori Marxist axioms, racial (or gender-based) struggle is not viewed as having its own material basis, that is, as based on the different material interests of the actors involved. Consequently racism is regarded as “ideological” or “irrational” and the racial struggles of blacks as divisive. (Although Bonacich views the conflict between black and white workers as “rational,” she interprets the conflict as rational in class terms.) Finally, given that racial phenomena are not deemed as independent, most Marxists shy away from performing an in-depth analysis of the politics and ideologies of race.18

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The Institutionalist Perspective The institutionalist perspective emerged out of the struggle of racial minorities in the United States in the 1960s.19 In contrast to the liberal view on race relations, which blames the ills of racism on poor whites, proponents of this viewpoint argue that racism is societal and that it implicates all white Americans. According to Kwame Ture (formerly known as Stokely Carmichael) and Charles Hamilton in their book Black Power, racism is “the predications of decisions and policies on considerations of race for the purpose of subordinating a racial group and maintaining control over that group.”20 Furthermore, they suggest that a distinction should be made between individual racism, or the overtly racist acts committed by individuals, and institutional racism, or the racial outcomes that result from the normal operations of American institutions. Mark Chesler developed the most succinct definition of racism produced by any author in this tradition: the prejudice plus power definition. In Chesler’s words, racism is “an ideology of explicit or implicit superiority or advantage of one racial group over another, plus the institutional power to implement that ideology in social operations.”21 In its most radical version (for example Ture and Hamilton’s work), institutionalists see racism as an outgrowth of colonialism and institutional racism as the contemporary expression of this historical event. Therefore, since radical institutionalists argue that blacks are politically, economically, and socially subordinated to whites, they advocate for blacks’ national liberation. The institutionalist perspective has helped to dispel some of the myths perpetuated by the dominant paradigm on racism. Researchers inspired by this perspective have gathered data to show the systematic disadvantages that blacks suffer in the economic, educational, judicial, political, and even health systems. Their findings have forcefully served as clear and convincing evidence of the pervasiveness of racism.22 Moreover, their assertion that all whites receive advantages from the racial order and their forceful advocacy for challenging all institutions politicized more than one generation of activists and academicians to fight racism wherever it may be and in whichever form it operates. This perspective, therefore, helped to move the discussion about race in academic and nonacademic circles from the realm of people’s attitudes to the realm of institutions and organizations.

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Nevertheless, despite its valuable political contributions, this perspective does not pose a serious theoretical challenge to the dominant conception of racism held in the social sciences. Theoretically this perspective is just a mélange in which everything can be interpreted as “racist.”23 More significantly, despite its institutional label, this perspective still grounds racism at the ideological level, thus failing to challenge the root problem of the dominant perspective. This ideological grounding of racism is evident in the following quotation from Ture and Hamilton’s book: Institutional racism relies on the active and pervasive operation of anti-black attitudes and practices. A sense of superior group position prevails: whites are “better” than blacks; therefore blacks should be subordinated to whites. This is a racist attitude and it permeates the society, on both the individual and institutional level, covertly and overtly.24

Although Ture and Hamilton argue that racism is an outgrowth of colonial domination and suggest that its contemporary expression has been institutionalized or embedded in the fabric of all institutions, they do not develop an analysis of how this happens or how this colonial relationship operates in practice, nor do they identify the mechanisms whereby racism is produced and reproduced. Thus, they are left with a mysterious almighty notion of racism as “a racist attitude” that “permeates the society, on both the individual and institutional level.” Robert Miles has pointed out other limitations of this approach. First, this perspective is intrinsically linked to a naive view of social stratification wherein race is the sole basis of social division. Second, its definition of racism is so inclusive that it loses its theoretical usefulness.25 Third, its basic black-white division excludes “white” groups (e.g., Irish26 and Jews) as plausible racial actors who have shared racialized experiences. Furthermore, this binary view minimizes the racialized experiences endured by racial minority groups, notably Native Americans, Puerto Ricans, and Chicanos. In this vein, the cry for “black power,” although understandable in the struggle for civil rights, is an unnecessarily restrictive political concept that excludes the most likely political allies of blacks in the struggle for full racial citizenship. Fourth, and as in the case of the dominant perspective on racism, this perspective is ensnared in circularity. Racism, which is or can be almost everything, is proven by

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anything done (or not done) by whites. The analyst identifies the existence of racism because any action done by whites is labeled as racist. Finally, for institutionalists such as Ture and Hamilton, all whites are “racist” and thus there is little room for coalition-building with white progressives.27 If they truly believe this to be the case, then the logical political option for blacks is (1) waiting until racial minorities become the numerical majority in the United States or (2) emigrating back to Africa. The nationalist uprisings or electoral politics they advocate, given the demography and the nature of social power in this country, would then be untenable and unwise.28

The Internal Colonialism Perspective Another group of analysts, inspired by the civil rights movement, postulates that racism is structured by the colonial status of racial minorities in the United States.29 As in the case of the institutionalist perspective, proponents of the internal colonial framework argue that racism30 is institutionalized and based on a system in which the white majority “raises its social position by exploiting, controlling, and keeping down others who are categorized in racial or ethnic terms.”31 Blauner, the foremost exponent of this perspective, explains the emergence of modern racism in this way: The association of race consciousness with social relations based on the oppression of one group by another is the logical prerequisite for the emergence of racism. The conquest of people of color by white Westerners, the establishment of slavery as an institution along color lines, and the consolidation of the racial principle of economic exploitation in colonial societies led to the elaboration and solidification of the racist potential of earlier modes of thought.32

After different third world peoples were forcefully moved to the United States, a racial order was established with its own dynamics. Central to the operation of such order is the maintenance of white privilege. Although the racial order and the particular form of racial oppression are viewed as changing throughout history, white privilege is considered a constant systemic fact. Blauner argues that whites receive advantages at all levels but, unlike institutionalists, he gives primacy to “the special advantage of the white population in

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the labor market” since in “industrial capitalism economic institutions are central, and occupational role is the major determinant of social status and life style.”33 This framework takes head-on many of the limitations of mainstream approaches to race relations. While most of the perspectives developed by social scientists are ahistorical and postulate the existence of “race cycles” or common “ethnic patterns,”34 the internal colonial model is historically contingent (as Mario Barrera argues) and informed by the differences between the experiences of white ethnics and racial minorities. Moreover, the internal colonial perspective challenges the purely psychological view of racism. First and foremost, it challenges the dogma of conceiving of racism as the virulent prejudice of some individuals by suggesting that prejudiced individuals are not necessary for the existence of a racial order. Racism, in Blauner’s view, has an objective reality “located in the actual existence of domination and hierarchy.”35 As with the institutionalist perspective, this tradition regards racism or racial-colonial oppression as systemic, comprehensive (all actors involved), and rational (based on the interests of whites). Furthermore, by conceiving racism as rational and material (as a social structure organized to benefit whites), this tradition challenges the simplistic assertion of social scientists and most whites that the cure for racism is education. Instead, Blauner and writers in this tradition believe that the abolition of racism, as is the case with other systems of exploitation, requires social mobilization.36 Although this perspective offers a clear improvement over the institutionalist perspective and provides new insights for the study of race relations, it still has some serious limitations. First, because it is centered on the colonial nature of racial subordination, it assumes unity among both the dominant and the subordinated “races” and thus neglects the class-, and gender-, based divisions among them.37 Second, by stressing the centrality of economic oppression as the foundation for understanding white privilege, this approach misses the process of economic marginalization and exclusion that some races may experience at some historical junctures. For instance, how would an analyst in this theoretical tradition interpret the contemporary status of “underclass” African Americans or the almost complete exclusion of American Indians to reservations?38 Finally, neither Blauner nor other writers in this tradition formulate the con-

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ceptual tools or analysis needed for a truly structural understanding of racism. Despite asserting that racism is systemic, Blauner does not develop the theoretical apparatus to study how racism is systematized and reproduced in societies. Notwithstanding these limitations, I incorporate many of the insights developed by authors in this tradition in the alternative framework that I develop in this chapter.

The Racial Formation Perspective The recent work of Howard Winant and Michael Omi represents a theoretical breakthrough in the area of race relations. In their Racial Formation in the United States, these authors provide a thorough critique of previous theoretical approaches and suggest a new approach for the study of racial phenomena: the racial formation perspective. They define racial formation as the “process by which social, economic, and political forces determine the content and importance of racial categories, and by which they are in turn shaped by racial meanings.”39 The essence of this approach is the idea that race “is a phenomenon whose meaning is contested throughout social life.”40 The very existence of the category race is viewed as the outcome of racialization, or “the extension of racial meaning to a previously unclassified relationship, social practice, or group. . . . [It] is an ideological process, an historically specific one.”41 In their view, race should be regarded as an organizing principle of social relationships that, at the micro level, shapes the identity of individual actors and, at the macro level, shapes all spheres of social life. Although racialization affects all social spheres, Omi and Winant assign a primary role to the political level,42 particularly to the “racial state,” which they regard as the factor of cohesion of any racial order. Hence, racial conflict, particularly in the post–civil rights era, is viewed as playing itself out at the state level. Equipped with these categories, Omi and Winant review the recent history of racial formation in the United States. Of theoretical interest is their claim that racial dynamics have been reframed in recent times through the racial project (the active process of reorganization of racial dynamics by a fraction of the dominant race) of neoconservatives and the New Right. These groups have pushed an anti-statist, moral, and individual-rights agenda that, in fact, suggests that the ills of America are deeply connected to liberal racial policies

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going awry. Thus programs such as affirmative action have been redefined as “reverse discrimination” and welfare as a system that entraps people (many of them minorities) in poverty. Most radical writing on race in the 1990s has been inspired by Omi and Winant. 43 My own theory owes heavily to their work. Nonetheless, the racial formation perspective still has some significant limitations. First, Omi and Winant’s concepts of racial formation and racialization give undue emphasis to ideological processes. Although both concepts are helpful in grasping how racial meanings are formed and reorganized, they do not help analysts understand how it is that racial orders are structured. Arguing that racial classifications are permanently contested and malleable is a reaffirmation of the old idea in the social sciences that race is a socially constructed category.44 However, this affirmation does not make clear whether or not they believe that race is or can become an independent basis of group association and action.45 Second, although in their book there are hints of a conception of races as social collectivities with different interests (e.g., “race is a concept which signifies and symbolizes social conflicts and interests by referring to different types of human bodies”46), Omi and Winant stop short of making such a claim. By failing to regard races as collectivities with different interests, their analysis of political contestation over racial projects seems to be quarrels over meanings rather than positions in the racial order. Thus, it is unclear why people fight over racial matters and why they endorse or contest racial projects (see chapters 4 and 7 in 1994 edition).47 Third, Omi and Winant’s analysis of the most recent rearticulation of racial ideology in the United States leaves out a comprehensive or systemic view of the process. The change is described as singularly carried out by the right wing and neoconservatives instead of reflecting a general change in the nature of U.S. racial structure. In order to make the latter claim, Omi and Winant would have to include the agency of all the members of the dominant race—rather than privileging some actors—and conceive the change as affecting all the levels of the social formation—rather than privileging the political level. Finally, although I share with Omi and Winant the idea that race is “a fundamental organizing principle of social relationships,”48 their theoretical framework comes close to race-reductionism in many areas. For instance, their conceptualization of the state as the “racial state” leaves out the capitalist—as well as the patriarchal—character of the state.49

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Racism as Societal Waste The last theory I review here is that of Joe R. Feagin and Hernán Vera in their celebrated book White Racism: The Basics. These authors argue that racism is a “socially organized set of attitudes, ideas, and practices that deny African Americans and other people of color the dignity, opportunities, freedoms, and rewards that this nation offers white Americans.” 50 Feagin and Vera suggest that racism wastes human talent and energy and, hence, that broadly viewed, it can be conceived as societal waste. Feagin and Vera operationalize racism as rituals (the rites that accompany many racial practices), discrimination, mythology (i.e., ideological constructions taken on faith), a subjective component of “sincere fictions” developed by the dominant race to feel good about themselves, and an emotive component that they label as the “madness of racism.” Joe R. Feagin has recently refined this view in his Racist America: Roots, Current Realities, and Future Reparations. In this book Feagin concentrates on making the case that racism is systemic and rooted in real race relations. In language that fits nicely my own theorization, Feagin writes, Indeed, systematic racism is perpetuated by a broad social reproduction process that generates not only recurring patterns of discrimination within institutions and by individuals but also an alienating racist relationship—on the one hand, the racially oppressed, and on the other hand, the racial oppressors. These two groups are created by the racist system, and thus have different group interests. The former seeks to overthrow the system, while the latter seeks to maintain it.51

Feagin’s and Vera’s conceptualization of racism includes the core arguments of the theorization I advance here. First, they emphasize, as do the institutional and colonial positions, the systematic nature of racism. Second, they focus on the relational or group nature of the phenomenon. Finally, they point to the material (group interest) foundation of racism. The only limitation I find in their theorization is their claim that racism produces “societal waste,” a claim that Feagin seems to have dropped in his recent work. Although they are right in claiming that societies would be collectively better off (less wasteful) if the energy they spent to maintain racial hierarchy was used to increase the welfare of humanity, the notion of waste conveys the idea that racism is

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not “rational” (in the utilitarian sense of the word) for whites. In fact, in the conclusion of White Racism, Feagin and Vera contend that racism involves substantial material, moral, and psychological costs to whites. These claims are problematic. Materially, racism provided the foundation for the expansion of the world-system and accumulation at a global scale for the West.52 Although economists debate today whether racism increases or decreases the rate of capital accumulation and the welfare of white workers, I am persuaded by the analysis of Steven Shulman,53 who claims that racial stratification benefits both capitalists and white workers. It is precisely this material foundation that I contend helps keep racial stratification in place. Their claim that whites behave immorally when they participate in racist structures and experience a moral dilemma is important as a political tool but not as an analytical one. Whites do not experience moral dilemmas54 precisely because they develop what Feagin and Vera label as “sincere fictions” that allow them to ignore the inhumanity of racial stratification (see Chapters 3 and 5 in this book). Finally, the psychological costs of racism to whites have not been well documented or measured. Nevertheless, social psychologist Tony R. Brown suggests in his recent work that if anything, whites either benefit somewhat from racial stratification or at least do not lose from it.55 Hence, from a world perspective racism is wasteful (the population of the world would be better off if racism did not exist), but at the micro level (whites in the world-system), it is and has been highly profitable. Despite this limitation, the work of Feagin and Vera is theoretically sophisticated, advances the core arguments of a structural or systemic understanding of racism, and provides an impressive documentation of contemporary racist practices in a variety of social spaces. Limitations of Mainstream and Critical Frameworks on Racism

I list below the main limitations of the idealist conception of racism. Because not all limitations apply to the critical perspectives I review above, I point out the ones that do apply and to what extent. 1. Racism is excluded from the foundation or structure of the social system. When racism is regarded as a baseless ideology ulti-

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mately dependent on other, “real” forces in society, the structure of the society itself is not classified as racist. The Marxist perspective is particularly guilty of this shortcoming. Although Marxists have addressed the question of the historical origin of racism, they explain its reproduction in an idealist fashion. Racism, in their account, is an ideology that emerged with chattel slavery and other forms of class oppression to justify the exploitation of people of color and survives as residue of the past. Although the institutionalist, internal colonialism, and racial formation perspectives regard racism as a structural phenomenon and provide some useful ideas and concepts, none developed the theoretical apparatus necessary to describe how this structure operates. 2. Racism is ultimately viewed as a psychological phenomenon to be examined at the individual level. The research agenda that follows from this conceptualization is the examination of individuals’ attitudes to determine levels of racism in society.56 Given that the constructs used to measure racism are static—that is, that there are a number of standard questions that do not change significantly over time—this research usually finds that racism is declining in society.57 This psychological understanding of racism is related to the limitation I cited above. If racism is not regarded as society-wide but as a property of individuals who are “racist” or “prejudiced,” then (1) social institutions cannot be racist and (2) studying racism is simply a matter of clinically surveying populations to assess the proportion of “good” and “bad” individuals (those who do not hold racist beliefs and those who do). Orthodox Marxists and many neo-Marxists conceive of racism as an ideology that affects many members of the working class. Although the authors associated with the institutionalist, internal colonialist, and racial formation perspectives focus on the ideological character of racism, they all emphasize how this ideology becomes embedded or institutionalized in organizations and social practices. 3. Racism is treated as a static phenomenon. Racism is viewed as unchanging; that is, racism yesterday is like racism today. Thus, when a society’s racial structure and its customary racial practices are rearticulated, this rearticulation is characterized as a decline in racism (as in Wilson’s works), a natural process in a cycle (as Robert Park sees it), an example of increased assimilation,58 or effective “norm changes.” 59 This limitation, which applies particularly to

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mainstream survey researchers on race and Marxist scholars, derives from not conceiving racism as having an independent structural foundation. If racism is merely a matter of ideas that have no material basis in contemporary society, then those ideas should be similar to their original configuration, whatever that was. The ideas may be articulated in a different context, but most analysts essentially believe that racist ideas remain the same. For this reason, with notable exceptions,60 attitudinal research is still based on responses to questions developed in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s. 4. Analysts defining racism in an idealist manner view racism as “incorrect” or “irrational thinking”; thus they label “racists” as irrational and rigid. Because racism is conceived of as a belief with no real social basis, it follows that those who hold racist views must be irrational or stupid.61 This view allows for a tactical distinction between individuals with the “pathology” and social actors who are “rational” and free of racism. The problem with this rationalistic view is twofold. First, it misses the rational, material elements on which racialized systems originally were built. Second, and more important, it neglects the possibility that contemporary racism still has a rational foundation. In this account, contemporary racists are perceived as Archie Bunkers. Among the critical frameworks reviewed here, only orthodox Marxism insists on the irrational and imposed character of racism. Neo-Marxists and authors associated with the institutionalist, internal colonialist, and racial formation perspectives insist, to varying degrees, on the rationality of racism. NeoMarxists (e.g., Bonacich, Harold Wolpe, Stuart Hall) and Omi and Winant acknowledge the short-term advantages that workers gain from racism; the institutionalist and internal colonial paradigms emphasize the systematic and long-term character of these advantages. 5. Racism is understood as overt behavior. Because the idealist approach regards racism as “irrational” and “rigid,” its manifestations should be quite evident, usually involving some degree of hostility. This does not present serious analytical problems for the study of certain periods in racialized societies when racial practices were overt (e.g., slavery and apartheid), but does pose difficulty for the analysis of racism in periods wherein racial practices are subtle, indirect, or fluid. For instance, many analysts have suggested that in the contemporary United States racial practices are manifested covertly62 and racial attitudes tend to be symbolic.63 Therefore, it is a waste of

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time to attempt to detect “racism” by asking questions such as “How strongly would you object if a member of your family wanted to bring a Black friend home to dinner?”64 Also, many such questions were developed to measure the extent of racist attitudes in the population during the Jim Crow era of race relations; they are not suitable for the post-1960s period. Furthermore, this emphasis on overt behavior limits the possibility of analyzing racial phenomena in Latin American societies such as Brazil, Cuba, and Puerto Rico where race relations do not have a clear, overt character. The form of race relations—overt or covert— depends on the pattern of racialization that structured a particular society65 and on how the process of racial contestation and other social dynamics affected that pattern. 6. Contemporary racism is viewed as an expression of “original sin”—as a remnant of past historical racial situations. In the case of the United States, some analysts argue that racism preceded slavery and capitalism.66 Others, such as Nathan Glazer and Moynihan, view it as the result of slavery. 67 Even in promising new avenues of research, such as that presented by Roediger in The Wages of Whiteness, contemporary racism is viewed as one of the “legacies of white workerism.”68 By considering racism as a legacy all these analysts downplay the significance of its contemporary material foundation and structure. Again the Marxist perspective shares this limitation. Marxists believe that racism developed in the fifteenth century and has been used since then by capitalists or white workers to further their own class interests. All other approaches recognize the historic significance of this “discovery” but associate contemporary racial ideology with contemporary racially based inequalities. 7. Racism is analyzed in a circular manner. “If racism is defined as the behavior that results from the belief, its discovery becomes ensnared in a circularity—racism is a belief that produces behavior, which is itself racism.”69 Racism is established by racist behavior, which itself is proved by the existence of racism. This circularity results from not grounding racism in social relations among the races. If racism, viewed as an ideology, were seen as possessing a structural 70 foundation, its examination could be associated with racial practices rather than with mere ideas and the problem of circularity would be avoided.

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Racialized Social System Approach to Racism

In order to capture the society-wide, organized, and institutional character of racism I build my alternative theory around the notion of racialized social systems.71 This term refers to societies in which economic, political, social, and ideological levels are partially structured by the placement of actors in racial categories or races. Races typically are identified by their phenotype, but (as we see later) the selection of some human traits to designate a racial group is always socially rather than biologically based. These systems are structured partially by race because modern social systems incorporate two or more forms of hierarchical patterns. Although processes of racialization are always embedded in other forms of hierarchy, they acquire autonomy and have independent social effects. This implies that the phenomenon that has been conceived as a free-floating ideology in fact has its own structural foundation. In all racialized social systems the placement of actors in racial categories involves some form of hierarchy72 that produces definite social relations among the races. The race placed in the superior position tends to receive greater economic remuneration and access to better occupations and prospects in the labor market, occupies a primary position in the political system, is granted higher social estimation (e.g., is viewed as “smarter” or “better looking”), often has the license to draw physical (segregation) as well as social (racial etiquette) boundaries between itself and other races, and receives what W.E.B. Du Bois called a “psychological wage.” 73 The totality of these racialized social relations and practices constitutes the racial structure of a society. Although all racialized social systems are hierarchical, the particular character of the hierarchy, and, thus, of the racial structure, is variable. For example, the domination of blacks in the United States was achieved through dictatorial means during slavery, but in the post–civil rights period this domination has been hegemonic, that is in the Gramscian sense of the term, achieved through consent rather than coercion. 74 Similarly, the form of securing domination and white privilege is variable too. For instance, the racial practices and mechanisms that kept blacks subordinated changed from overt and eminently racist in the Jim Crow era to covert and indirectly racist in

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the contemporary period (see Chapter 3). The unchanging element of these systems is racial inequality—that the subordinated races’ life chances are significantly lower than those of the dominant race. This is the feature that ultimately distinguishes this form of hierarchical social organization. Generally, the higher the level of racial inequality, the more racialized the social system, and vice versa. Because the races receive different social rewards at all levels, they develop different interests, which can be detected in their struggles to either transform or maintain a particular racial order. These interests are collective rather than individual, are based on relations among races rather than on particular group needs, and are practical; that is, they are related to concrete struggles. Although one race’s general interests may ultimately lie in the complete elimination of a society’s racial structure, its array of alternatives may not include that possibility. For instance, the historical struggle against chattel slavery led not to the development of race-free societies but to the establishment of social systems with a different kind of racialization. Race-free societies were not among the available alternatives because the nonslave populations had the capacity to preserve some type of racial privilege. The historical “exceptions” occurred in racialized societies in which the nonslaves’ power was almost completely superseded by that of the slave population.75 A simple criticism of the argument I have advanced so far is that it ignores the internal divisions of the races along class and gender lines. Such criticism, however, does not deal squarely with the issue at hand. The fact that not all members of the dominant race receive the same level of rewards and (conversely) that not all members of the subordinate race or races are at the bottom of the social order does not negate the fact that races, as social groups, are in either a superordinate or a subordinate position in a social system. Historically the racialization of social systems did not imply the exclusion of other forms of oppression. In fact, racialization occurred in social formations also structured by class and gender. Hence, in these societies, the racialization of subjects is fragmented along class and gender lines. The important question—Which interests move actors to struggle?—is historically contingent and cannot be ascertained a priori.76 Depending on the character of racialization in a social order, class interests may take precedence over racial interests as in contemporary Brazil, Cuba, and Puerto Rico. In other situations, racial

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interests may take precedence over class interests as in the case of blacks throughout most of U.S. history. In general, the systemic salience of class in relation to race increases when the economic, political, and social inequality among the races decreases substantially. Yet this broad argument generates at least one warning: The narrowing of within-class differences among racial actors usually causes more rather than less racial conflict, at least in the short run, as the competition for resources increases. 77 More significantly, even when class-based conflict becomes more salient in a social order, this cannot be interpreted as prima facie evidence that race has subsided as a social factor. For instance, because of the way in which Latin American racial formations rearticulated race and racial discourse in the nineteenthcentury–post-emancipation era,78 these societies silenced from above the political space for public racial contestation. Yet more than 100 years after these societies developed the myth of racial democracy, they have more rather than less racial inequality than countries such as the United States.79 Because racial actors are also classed and gendered (that is, they belong to class and gender groups), analysts must control for class and gender to ascertain the material advantages enjoyed by a dominant race. In a racialized society such as the United States, the independent effects of race are assessed by analysts who (1) compare data between whites and nonwhites in the same class and gender positions, (2) evaluate the proportion as well as the general character of the races’ participation in some domain of life, and (3) examine racial data at all levels—social, political, economic, and ideological—to ascertain the general position of racial groups in a social system. The first of these procedures has become standard practice in sociology. No serious sociologist would present racial statistics without controlling for gender and class (or at least the class of persons’ socioeconomic status). By doing this, analysts assume they can measure the unadulterated effects of “discrimination” manifested in unexplained “residuals.” Despite its usefulness, however, this technique provides only a partial account of the “race effect” because (1) a significant amount of racial data cannot be retrieved through surveys and (2) the technique of “controlling for” a variable neglects the obvious—why a group is over- or underrepresented in certain cate-

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gories of the control variables in the first place.80 Moreover, these analysts presume that it is possible to analyze the amount of discrimination in one domain (e.g., income, occupational status) “without analyzing the extent to which discrimination also affects the factors they hold constant.” 81 Hence to evaluate “race effects” in any domain, analysts must attempt to make sense of their findings in relation to a race’s standing in other domains. But what is the nature of races or, more properly, of racialized social groups? Omi and Winant state that races are the outcome of the racialization process, which they define as “the extension of racial meaning to a previously racially unclassified relationship, social practice, or group.”82 Historically the classification of a people in racial terms has been a highly political act associated with practices such as conquest and colonization, enslavement, peonage, indentured servitude, and, more recently, colonial and neocolonial labor immigration. Categories such as “Indians” and “Negroes” were invented in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to justify the conquest and exploitation of various peoples.83 The invention of such categories entails a dialectical process of construction; that is, the creation of the category “Other” involves the creation of a category “Same.” If “Indians” are depicted as “savages,” Europeans are characterized as “civilized”; if “blacks” are defined as natural candidates for slavery, “whites” are defined as free subjects.84 Yet although the racialization of peoples was socially invented and did not override previous forms of social distinction based on class or gender, it did not lead to imaginary relations but generated new forms of human association with definite status differences. After the process of attaching meaning to a “people” is instituted, race becomes a real category of group association and identity.85 Because racial classifications partially organize and limit actors’ life chances, racial practices of opposition emerge. Regardless of the form of racial interaction (overt, covert, or inert), races can be recognized in the realm of racial relations and positions. Viewed in this light, races are the effect of racial practices of opposition (“we” versus “them”) at the economic, political, social, and ideological levels.86 Races, as most social scientists acknowledge, are not biologically but socially determined categories of identity and group association. In this regard, they are analogous to class and gender.87 Actors in racial positions do not occupy those positions because they are of

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X or Y race, but because X or Y has been socially defined as a race. Actors’ phenotypic (i.e., biologically inherited) characteristics, such as skin tone and hair color and texture, are usually, although not always, used to denote racial distinctions.88 For example, Jews in many European nations and the Irish in England have been treated as racial groups.89 Also, Indians in the United States have been viewed as one race despite the tremendous phenotypic and cultural variation among nations. Because races are socially constructed, both the meaning and the position assigned to races in the racial structure are always contested. Who is to be black or white or Indian reflects and affects the social, political, ideological, and economic struggles among the races. The global effects of these struggles can change the meaning of the racial categories as well as the position of a racialized group in a social formation. This latter point is illustrated clearly by the historical struggles of several “white ethnic” groups in the United States in their efforts to become accepted as legitimate whites or “Americans.”90 Neither light-skinned nor, for that matter, dark-skinned immigrants necessarily came to this country as members of X or Y race. Light-skinned Europeans, after brief periods of “not-yet white,” became “white” but did not lose their “ethnic” character.91 Their struggle for inclusion had specific implications: racial inclusion as members of the white community allowed Americanization and class mobility. On the other hand, among dark-skinned immigrants from Africa, Latin America, and the Caribbean, the struggle was to avoid classification as “black.” These immigrants challenged the reclassification of their identity for a simple reason: In the United States “black” signified a subordinate status in society. Hence many of these groups struggled to keep their own ethnic or cultural identity, as denoted in expressions such as “I am not black; I am Jamaican,” or “I am not black; I am Senegalese.”92 Yet eventually many of these groups resolved this contradictory situation by accepting the duality of their situation: In the United States, they were classified socially as black yet they retained and nourished their own cultural or ethnic heritage—a heritage deeply influenced by African traditions. Although the content of racial categories changes over time through manifold processes and struggles, race is not a secondary category of group association. The meaning of black and white, the “racial formation,” changes within the larger racial structure. This does not mean that the racial structure is immutable and completely

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independent of the action of racialized actors. It means only that the social relations among the races become institutionalized (form a structure as well as a culture) and affect social life whether or not individual members of the races want it to. In Frederick Barth’s words, “Ethnic identity implies a series of constraints on the kinds of roles an individual is allowed to play [and] is similar to sex and rank, in that it constrains the incumbent in all his activities.” 93 For instance, free blacks during the slavery period struggled to change the meaning of “blackness,” specifically to dissociate it from slavery. Yet they could not escape the larger racial structure that restricted their life chances and their freedom.94 The placement of a group of people in a racial category stemmed initially95 from the interests of powerful actors in the social system (e.g., the capitalist class, the planter class, and colonizers). After racial categories were employed to organize social relations in societies, however, race became an independent element of the operation of the social system. Here I depart from analysts such as Winthrop Jordan, Cedric Robinson, and Robert Miles, who take the mere existence of a racial discourse as manifesting the presence of a racial order.96 Such a position allows them to speak of racism in medieval times (Jordan) and to classify the antipeasant views of French urbanites (Miles) or the prejudices of the aristocracy against peasants in the Middle Ages (Robinson) as expressions of racism. In my view, we can speak of racialized orders only when a racial discourse is accompanied by social relations of subordination and superordination among the races. The available evidence suggests that the racialization of the world-system emerged after the imperialist expansion of Europe to the New World and Africa.97 Furthermore, this racialization led to the development of what Charles W. Mills calls global white supremacy (racial orders structured along the axis of “white,” or European, and “nonwhite,” or non-European) in the world-system. What are the dynamics of racial issues in racialized systems? Most important, after a social formation is racialized, its “normal” dynamics always include a racial component. Societal struggles based on class or gender contain a racial component because both of these social categories are also racialized; that is, both class and gender are constructed along racial lines. In 1922, for example, white South African workers in the middle of a strike inspired by the Russian revolution rallied under the slogan “Workers of the world unite for a white South Africa.” One of the state’s “concessions” to

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this “class” struggle was the passage of the Apprenticeship Act of 1922, “which prevented Black workers acquiring apprenticeships.”98 In another example, the struggle of women in the United States to attain their civil and human rights has always been plagued by deep racial tensions.99 Nonetheless, some of the strife that exists in a racialized social formation has a distinct racial character; I call such strife racial contestation—the struggle of racial groups for systemic changes regarding their position at one or more levels. Such a struggle may be social (Who can be here? Who belongs here?), political (Who can vote? How much power should they have? Should they be citizens?), economic (Who should work, and what should they do? They are taking our jobs!), or ideological (Black is beautiful!). Although much of this contestation is expressed at the individual level and is disjointed, sometimes it becomes collective and general and can effect meaningful systemic changes in a society’s racial organization. The form of contestation may be relatively passive and subtle (e.g., in situations of fundamental overt racial domination such as slavery and apartheid) or more active and overt (e.g., in quasidemocratic situations such as the contemporary United States). As a rule, however, fundamental changes in racialized social systems are accompanied by struggles that reach the point of overt protest.100 This does not mean that a violent racially based revolution is the only way of accomplishing effective changes in the relative position of racial groups. It is simply an extension of the argument that social systems and their supporters must be “shaken” if fundamental transformations are to take place.101 On this structural foundation rests the phenomenon labeled racism by social scientists. I reserve the term racial ideology for the segment of the ideological structure of a social system that crystallizes racial notions and stereotypes. Racial ideology provides the rationalization for social, political, and economic interactions among the races. Depending on the particular character of a racialized social system and on the struggles of the subordinated races, racial ideology may be developed highly (as in apartheid) or loosely (as in slavery) and its content expressed in overt or covert terms. Although racial ideology originates in race relations, it acquires relative autonomy in the social system and performs practical functions.102 In Paul Gilroy’s words, racial ideology “mediates the world of agents and the structures which are created by their social prax-

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is.”103 Racism crystallizes the changing “dogma” on which actors in the social system operate and becomes “common sense”; it provides the rules for perceiving and dealing with the Other in a racialized society. In the United States, for instance, because racial notions about what blacks and whites are or ought to be pervade their encounters, whites still have difficulty in dealing with black bankers, lawyers, professors, and doctors.104 Thus, although racist ideology is ultimately false, it fulfills a practical role in racialized societies. (Because of the centrality of racial ideology in the maintenance of white supremacy, I dedicate Chapter 3 to a detailed discussion on this matter.) At this point it is possible to sketch the framework of the racialized social system. First, racialized social systems are societies that allocate differential economic, political, social, and even psychological rewards to groups along racial lines, lines that are socially constructed. After a society becomes racialized, a set of social relations and practices based on racial distinctions develops at all societal levels. I designate the aggregate of those relations and practices as the racial structure of a society. Second, races historically are constituted according to the process of racialization; they become the effect of relations of opposition among racialized groups at all levels of a social formation. Third, on the basis of this structure, a racial ideology develops. This ideology is not simply a “superstructural” phenomenon (a mere reflection of the racialized system) but becomes the organizational map that guides actions of racial actors in society. It becomes as real as the racial relations it organizes. Fourth, most struggles in a racialized social system contain a racial component, but sometimes they acquire or exhibit a distinct racial character. Racial contestation is the logical outcome of a society with a racial hierarchy. A social formation that includes some form of racialization will always exhibit some form of racial contestation. Finally, the process of racial contestation reveals the different objective interests of the races in a racialized social system. Conclusion

My central argument in this chapter is that the commonsense understanding of racism, which is not much different than the definition

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developed by mainstream social scientists or even by many critical analysts, does not provide an adequate theoretical foundation for understanding racial phenomena. With notable exceptions,105 analysts in academia are still entangled in ungrounded ideological interpretations of racism. Lacking a structural view, they tend to reduce racial phenomena to a derivation of the class structure (as Marxist interpreters do) or the result of an irrational ideology (as mainstream social scientists do). In the racialized social system framework, I suggest, as do Omi and Winant, that racism should be studied from the viewpoint of racialization. I contend that after a society becomes racialized, racialization develops a life of its own.106 Although racism interacts with class and gender structurations in society, it becomes an organizing principle of social relations in itself. Race, as most analysts suggest, is a social construct, but that construct, like class and gender, has independent effects in social life. After racial stratification is established, race becomes an independent criterion for vertical hierarchy in society. Therefore different races experience positions of subordination and superordination in society and develop different interests. This framework has the following advantages over traditional views of racism: Racial phenomena are regarded as the “normal” outcome of the racial structure of a society. Thus we can account for all racial manifestations. Instead of explaining racial phenomena as deriving from other structures or from racism (conceived of as a free-floating ideology), we can trace cultural, political, economic, social, and even psychological racial phenomena to the racial organization of that society. The changing nature of what analysts label “racism” is explained as the normal outcome of racial contestation in a racialized social system. In this framework, changes in racism are explained rather than described. Changes are due to specific struggles at different levels among the races, resulting from differences in interests. Such changes may transform the nature of racialization and the global character of racial relations in the system (the racial structure). Therefore, change is viewed as a normal component of the racialized system. The racialized social system framework allows analysts to

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explain overt as well as covert racial behavior. The covert or overt nature of racial contacts depends on how the process of racialization is manifested; this in turns depends on how race originally was articulated in a social formation and on the process of racial contestation. This point implies that rather than conceiving of racism as a universal and uniformly orchestrated phenomenon, analysts should study “historically-specific racisms.”107 This insight is not new: Robert Park, Oliver Cox, Pierre van den Bergue, and Marvin Harris described varieties of “situations of race relations” with distinct forms of racial interaction. Racially motivated behavior, whether or not the actors are conscious of it, is regarded as “rational”—that is, based on the given race’s individual interests.108 This framework accounts for Archie Bunker–type racial behavior as well as for more “sophisticated” varieties of racial conduct. Racial phenomena are viewed as systemic; therefore all actors in the system participate in racial affairs. Some members of the dominant racial group tend to exhibit less virulence toward members of the subordinated races because they have greater control over the form and outcome of their racial interactions. When they cannot control that interaction—as in the case of revolts or blacks moving into “their” neighborhood—they behave much like other members of the dominant race. The reproduction of racial phenomena in contemporary societies is explained in this framework not by reference to a long-distant past but in relation to its contemporary structure. Because racism is viewed as systemic (possessing a racial structure) and as organized around the races’ different interests, racial aspects of social systems today are viewed as fundamentally related to hierarchical relations among the races in those systems. Elimination of the racialized character of a social system entails the end of racialization, and hence of races altogether. This argument clashes with social scientists’ most popular policy prescription for “curing” racism, namely education. This “solution” is the logical outcome of defining racism as a belief. Most analysts regard racism as a matter of individuals subscribing to an irrational view, thus the cure is educating them to realize that racism is wrong. Education is also the choice pill prescribed by Marxists for healing workers from racism. The alternative theory offered here implies that because the phenomenon has structural consequences for the races, the only way to cure society of racism is by

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eliminating its systemic roots. Whether this can be accomplished democratically or only through revolutionary means is an open question, and one that depends on the particular racial structure of the society in question. A racialization framework accounts for the ways in which racial and ethnic stereotypes emerge, are transformed, and disappear. Racial stereotypes are crystallized at the ideological level of a social system. These images ultimately indicate—although in distorted ways—and justify the stereotyped group’s position in a society. Stereotypes may originate out of (1) material realities or conditions endured by the group, (2) genuine ignorance about the group, or (3) rigid, distorted views on the group’s physical, cultural, or moral nature. Once they emerge, however, stereotypes must relate— although not necessarily fit perfectly—to the group’s true social position in the racialized system if they are to perform their ideological function. Stereotypes that do not tend to reflect a group’s situation do not work and are bound to disappear. For example, notions of the Irish as stupid or of Jews as athletically talented have all but vanished since the 1940s, as the Irish moved up the educational ladder and Jews gained access to multiple routes of social mobility. Generally, then, stereotypes are reproduced because they reflect a group’s distinct position and status in society. As a corollary, racial or ethnic notions about a group disappear only when the group’s status mirrors that of the dominant racial or ethnic group in the society. The framework of the racialized social system is not a universal theory explaining racial phenomena in societies. It is intended to trigger a serious discussion of how race shapes social systems. Moreover, the important question of how race interacts and intersects with class and gender has not yet been addressed satisfactorily. Provisionally I maintain that a nonfunctionalist reading of the concept of social system may give us clues for comprehending societies structured in dominance, to use Stuart Hall’s term. If societies are viewed as systems that articulate different structures (organizing principles on which sets of social relations are systematically patterned), it is possible to claim that race—as well as gender—has both individual and combined (interactive) effects in society. To test the usefulness of the racialized social system framework as a theoretical basis for research, we must perform comparative

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work on racialization in various societies. One of the main objectives of this comparative work should be to determine the specific mechanisms, practices, and social relations that produce and reproduce racial inequality at all levels—that is, uncover the society’s racial structure. Although this systematic comparative analysis is beyond the scope of this book, I perform some of it in Chapter 4. In that chapter, for example, I compare the racial structure of the Jim Crow period with the one we have today. Unlike analysts who believe that “racism” has withered away, I argue that the persistent inequality experienced by blacks and other racial minorities in the United States today is due to the continued albeit changed existence of a racial structure. In contrast to race relations in the Jim Crow period, however, racial practices that reproduce racial inequality in contemporary America are (1) increasingly covert, (2) embedded in normal operations of institutions, (3) void of direct racial terminology, and (4) invisible to most whites. In the next chapter I criticize the survey-based study of racial matters, a perspective that is central to the analysis and understanding of contemporary racial matters. Specifically, I argue that this tradition is wedded to an individualistic view of racial actors and thus cannot see the collective nature of racial ideas. I elaborate on the notion of racial ideology and provide practical guidance on how it can be used in research. Notes 1. Ruth F. Benedict, Race and Racism (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1945), p. 85. 2. Pierre van den Berghe, Race and Racism: A Comparative Perspective (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1967), p. 11. 3. Richard T. Schaefer, Racial and Ethnic Minorities (Glencoe, IL: Scott/Foresman/Little Brown Higher Education, 1990), p. 16. 4. A review such as this one is necessarily incomplete. I leave out the important work of European writers such as Paul Gilroy and Pierre A. Taguieff as well as the work of Latin American writers such as Florestan Fernandes, Carlos Hansenbalg, and Nelson do Valle Silva. 5. Stanley Aronowitz, The Politics of Identity: Class, Culture, Social Movements (New York: Routledge, 1992). 6. One of the best representatives of the orthodox Marxist view on race and racism is Victor Perlo, Economics of Racism U.S.A.: Roots of Black

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Inequality (New York: International Publishers, 1975). But alongside this orthodox view, some African American Marxists like W.E.B. Du Bois, C.L.R. James, and, more recently, Manning Marable and Robin G. Kelley have questioned the simplistic analysis of racism of their white counterparts. For particularly biting criticisms of the traditional Marxist view on racial matters see James Boggs, Racism and the Class Struggle (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1970); Robert L. Allen, Reluctant Reformers (Washington, D.C.: Howard University Press, 1974); and Harold Cruse, Rebellion or Revolution (New York: William Morrow & Company, 1968). 7. Albert Szymanski, Class Structure: A Critical Perspective (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1983), p. 402. 8. Despite my multiple disagreements with Cox’s approach to race, I regard his oeuvre as phenomenal, particularly considering that he did most of his work under Jim Crow. In his Caste, Class, and Race (New York: Doubleday, 1948), Cox developed a competent class analysis of post–World War II class matters in the United States and elsewhere. Although I disagree with the essence of his racial analysis in this book, I agree with much of his critique of Myrdal’s work, the caste-school of race relations, and think that his analysis of lynching is brilliant. I also believe that he should receive more credit for his world-system analysis. On this latter matter, see his The Foundations of Capitalism (New York: Philosophical Library, 1959). 9. Cox, Caste, Class, and Race, 393. 10. Ibid., 330. 11. Ibid., 336. 12. Edna Bonacich, “A Theory of Ethnic Antagonism: The Split Labor Market Approach,” American Sociological Review 37 (1980): 547–559. See also her “Advanced Capitalism and Black/White Relations in the United States: A Split Labor Market Interpretation,” in The Sociology of Race Relations: Reflection and Reform, edited by T. Pettigrew (New York: Free Press, 1980). 13. Bonacich, “A Theory of Ethnic Antagonism,” 343–344. 14. Ibid., 347. This argument strikes me as blaming the victim in disguise. For two excellent alternative Marxist readings of why blacks did not join unions with their “brothers and sisters,” see Philip Foner’s excellent Organized Labor and the Black Worker, 1619–1981 (New York: International Publishers, 1981) and David Roediger’s The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (London and New York: Verso, 1991). For a more recent book showing the racialized character of working-class politics, see Michael Goldfield’s The Color of Politics: Race and the Mainsprings of American Politics (New York: The New Press, 1997). 15. Bonacich downplays interpretations of this “resistance” based on racial prejudice against blacks. Therefore, she explains the race riots that occurred in the 1919–1940 period as expressions of class protectionism from whites facing “threats” from black workers. This interpretation naturalizes the racist white view symbolized in the statement “they are taking our

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jobs” and ignores the racial aspect of class formation (see Roediger’s The Wages of Whiteness, 1992). On this point, black historian Carter G. Woodson, The Negro in Our History (Washington, D.C.: The Associated Publishers, 1947), commented a long time ago that as Negroes in the North and West, therefore, were pitted against the trades unions, they engendered much feeling between the races by allying themselves with the capitalists to serve as strikebreakers. In this case, however, the trades unions themselves were to be blamed. The only time the Negroes could work under such circumstance was when the whites were striking, and it is not surprising that some of them easily yielded then to the temptation. In those unions in which the Negroes were recognized, they stood with their white co-workers in every instance of making a reasonable demand of their employers. Some of these unions, however, accepted Negroes merely as a subterfuge to prevent them from engaging in strikebreaking. When the Negroes appealed for work, identifying themselves as members of the union in control, they were turned away with the subterfuge that no vacancies existed, while at the same time white men were gladly received. (My emphasis, 439) 16. Bonacich, “A Theory of Ethnic Antagonism,” 358. For a more nuanced Marxist analysis of race post-1930s, see Jill Quadagno’s The Color of Welfare: How Racism Undermined the War on Poverty (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994). 17. A few European Marxists (e.g., John Solomos, Harold Wolpe, Robert Miles, and Paul Gilroy), following the pivotal work of Stuart Hall, have attempted to overcome the limitation of orthodox Marxism as it pertains to racial matters. Yet, despite providing some honest indictments of the class-reductionist reading of racial phenomena, these analysts share many of the limitations of orthodox Marxists. For example, they still give primacy to the class structure by conceiving the context of racialization as purely capitalist. They also stress a priori class as the central organizing principle of societies and, hence, regard race as a secondary element that fractures or stratifies classes. Finally, they still interpret racism as a fundamentally ideological phenomenon. 18. On this point, see Michael Omi and Howard Winant’s biting critique in Racial Formation in the United States (New York and London: Routledge, 1994). 19. Some of the premier authors in this tradition are Stokely Carmichael and Charles Hamilton, Black Power: The Politics of Liberation in America (New York: Vintage Books, 1967); Louis Knowles and Kenneth Prewitt, Institutional Racism in America (Patterson, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1969); Mark Chesler, “Contemporary Sociological Theories of Racism,” pp. 21–71 in Towards the Elimination of Racism, edited by Phyllis A. Katz (New York: Pergamon, 1976); David Wellman, Portraits of White Racism (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1977); Rodolfo Alvarez,

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Kenneth G. Lutterman, and Associates, Discrimination in Organizations: Using Social Indicators to Manage Social Change (San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass, 1979). 20. Carmichael and Hamilton, Black Power, 3. 21. Chesler, “Contemporary Sociological Theories of Racism,” 22. 22. See, particularly, Knowles and Prewitt, Institutional Racism in America. 23. This point has been raised by Miles, Racism (London and New York: Routledge, 1989). 24. My emphasis. Ture and Hamilton, Black Power, 5. 25. If everything is or can be conceived as “racist,” then the term has no boundaries; phenomena of clearly class, gender, or pertaining to any other form of social association are reduced to race. In political terms, the assumption that all whites are racists led to a suicidal political strategy, particularly for blacks in the United States, where coalition politics were basically dismissed (see chapter 3 in Carmichael and Hamilton, 1967). Yet, Miles goes too far here. This view did help blacks to mobilize, organize, and rally behind the (ill-defined) notion of black power. 26. For an example of the negative racialization experienced by the Irish in Ireland, see Theodore W. Allen, The Invention of the White Race (London and New York: Verso, 1994). 27. This point has been raised by Omi and Winant, Racial Formation in the United States. 28. Despite the radicalism of Carmichael and Hamilton’s approach, their book is written within the pluralist view of power so popular among political scientists. That is why they seem content with advocating for a power-sharing nationalist electoral strategy as if this were possible in a social formation where power is structurally based and organized around racial, class, and gender group-level domination. For a fascinating critique of myopic nationalist perspectives (whether Afrocentric, Islam-centered, or elite-based), see Rod Bush, We Are Not What We Seem: Black Nationalism and Class Struggle in the American Century (New York: New York University Press, 1999). See also Wahneema Lubiano, “Black Nationalism and Black Common Sense,” pp. 232–252 in The House That Race Built, edited by Wahneeman Lubiano (New York: Pantheon Books, 1997). 29. Joan W. Moore, “Colonialism: The Case of the MexicanAmericans,” Social Problems 17 (1970): 463–472; Mario Barrera, Race and Class in the Southwest: A Theory of Racial Inequality (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1979); Robert Blauner, Racial Oppression in America (New York: Harper and Row, 1972). 30. Blauner advanced several definitions of racism in his book. The most comprehensive regarded racism as “a principle of social domination by which a group seen as inferior in alleged biological characteristics is exploited, controlled, and oppressed socially and psychically by a superordinate group.” Racial Oppression in America, 84. 31. Blauner, Racial Oppression in America, 22. 32. Ibid., 21.

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33. Ibid., 23. 34. On race cycles, see Robert E. Park, Race and Culture (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1950). On ethnic patterns, see Nathan Glazer and Daniel P. Moynihan, Beyond the Melting Pot (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1970). 35. Blauner, Racial Oppression in America, 10. 36. On this matter Blauner stated, The liberal-humanist value that violence is the worst sin cannot be defended today if one is committed squarely against racism and for self-determination. Some violence is almost inevitable in the decolonization process; unfortunately racism in America has been so effective that the greatest power Afro-Americans wield today is the power to disrupt. (Racial Oppression in America, 104) 37. Blauner was very aware of this limitation and said so in the introduction to his book. What was needed was a “new theoretical model ... based on the combined existence of historical interaction and mutual interpenetration of the colonial-racial and the capitalist class realities” given that “America is clearly a mixed society that might be termed colonial capitalist or racial capitalist.” Racial Oppression in America, 13. Barrera attempted to deal with this limitation by suggesting that there is an interactive class and race structure and that racial minorities constitute subordinated segments or fractions of all the classes in the structure. Race and Class in the Southwest. 38. Omi and Winant, Racial Formation in the United States; Wilson, The Truly Disadvantaged: The Inner City, the Underclass, and Public Policy (University of Chicago Press, 1987), and When Work Disappears (New York: Vintage Books, 1996). 39. Omi and Winant, Racial Formation in the United States, 61. 40. Ibid., 23. 41. Ibid., 64. 42. In Winant’s recent book, Racial Conditions, the fundamentally political character of racialization is attributed to the fact that “elites, popular movements, state agencies, cultural and religious organizations, and intellectuals of all types develop racial projects, which interpret and reinterpret the meaning of race. . . . These projects are often explicitly, but always implicitly, political” (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), p. 24. 43. The other important theoretical spring of radical writings on race in this period has been Stuart Hall. 44. One of the earliest statements on the constructionist character of race is found in Max Weber, “Ethnic Groups,” in Economy and Society, edited by Herbert Roth and Claus Wittich (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1978). 45. In Racial Conditions (1994), Winant comes close to enunciating a structural conception of race. He criticizes the purely ideological conception of race because it fails to (1) appreciate the significance that a construct can acquire over a thousand years of existence and (2) recognize that race

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shapes our identity and everyday experiences (16). However, Winant eschews a truly structural reading of race because he thinks such a reading would reify the category. As I argue in this chapter, an objective understanding of race (similar to the case of class or gender) based upon the notion that these social groups have different interests does not necessarily entail freezing the content or meaning of the category itself. 46. Omi and Winant, Racial Formation in the United States, 55. 47. Omi and Winant define racial projects as “simultaneously an interpretation, representation, or explanation of racial dynamics, and an effort to reorganize and redistribute resources along particular racial lines.” Racial Formation in the United States, 56. 48. Ibid., 66. 49. This problem is partially addressed in Howard Winant’s Racial Conditions through the Gramscian concept of hegemony, which he defines as “a form of rule that operates by constructing its subjects and incorporating contestation” (113). According to Winant, this form of rule prevails in most “modern” societies and organizes, among other things, cleavages based on class, race, and gender. 50. Joe R. Feagin and Hernán Vera, White Racism (New York and London: Routledge, 1995), p. 7. Feagin and Vera’s emphasis. 51. Joe R. Feagin, Racist America (London: Routledge, 2000), p. 6. 52. This is the argument of authors in the dependency and world-system tradition. It is also the argument of Cedric Robinson in Black Marxism (London: Zed Press, 1983) and of Charles Mills. 53. See his work in Steven Shulman and William Darity, Jr., The Question of Discrimination: Racial Inequality in the U.S. Labor Market (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1989). For the opposite argument, see Michael Reich, Racial Inequality: A Political-Economic Analysis (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981). 54. For a critique of the moral interpretation of racial matters, see Lawrence Bobo, James Kluegel, and Ryan Smith, “Laissez-Faire Racism: The Crystallization of a Kinder, Gentler, Antiblack Ideology,” pp. 15–42 in Racial Attitudes in the 1990s, edited by Steven A. Tuch and Jack K. Martin (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1997). 55. See Tony Brown, “‘Being Black and Feeling Blue’: The Mental Health Consequences of Racial Discrimination,” Race & Society 2, no. 2 (2000): 117–131. 56. Examples of this approach are Howard Schuman et al., Racial Attitudes in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997); Paul Sniderman and Thomas Piazza, The Scare of Race (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993). 57. This is the finding of analysts such as Sniderman in his various books as well as that of Glenn Firebaugh and Kenneth E. Davis, “Trends in Antiblack Prejudice, 1972–1984,” American Journal of Sociology 94 (1988): 251–274. 58. See John Rex, Race, Colonialism, and the City (London: Routledge, 1973) and Race Relations in Sociological Theory (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1986).

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59. This has been Howard Schuman’s argument for a long time. For statements of this argument, see any of the editions of Racial Attitudes in America. 60. There is now an explosion of survey-based authors fighting this individualistic tradition. See, for example, Donald R. Kinder and Lynn Sanders, Divided by Color (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996) and most of the authors in Racialized Politics, edited by David O. Sears, Jim Sidanius, and Lawrence Bobo (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000). 61. This tradition is very old but was clearly stated in Theodore W. Adorno et al., The Authoritarian Personality (New York: Harper and Row, 1950). See also Gordon W. Allport, The Nature of Prejudice (New York: Doubleday, 1958). For excellent critiques, see Blauner, Racial Oppression in America, and David Wellman, Portrait of White Racism. 62. Roy Brooks, Rethinking the American Race Problem (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and Oxford: University of California Press, 1990); Robert C. Smith, Racism in the Post–Civil Rights Era (New York: State University of New York Press, 1995). 63. For early statements of this view, see David O. Sears and Donald R. Kinder, “Racial Tensions and Voting in Los Angeles,” pp. 51–88 in Los Angeles: Viability and Prospects for Metropolitan Leadership, edited by Werner Z. Hirsch (New York: Praeger, 1971). For a mature review of the symbolic racism tradition, see David O. Sears, “Symbolic Racism,” pp. 53–84 in Eliminating Racism: Profiles in Controversy, edited by P. A. Katz and D. A. Taylor (New York: Plenum, 1988). See also Pettigrew, The Sociology of Race Relations. 64. This question is used by the National Opinion Research Center (NORC) and has been employed by Schuman et al., Racial Attitudes in America, 66. 65. This point has been made by Oliver Cox, Caste, Class, and Race; Marvin Harris, Patterns of Race Relations in the Americas (New York: Walker, 1964); John Rex, Race Relations in Sociological Theory; and Pierre van den Berghe, Race and Racism: A Comparative Perspective (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1967). 66. Winthrop Jordan, White over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro (New York: W. W. Norton, 1968); Manning Marable, How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America (Boston: South End Press, 2000 [1983]); Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (London: Zed, 1983). 67. Glazer and Moynihan, Beyond the Melting Pot. 68. Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness, 176. 69. This quote comes from Yehudi O. Webster’s book The Racialization of America (New York: St. Martin’s, 1992), p. 84. 70. By structure I mean, following Joseph Whitmeyer, “the networks of (interactional) relationships among actors as well as the distributions of socially meaningful characteristics of actors and aggregates of actors.” “Why Actors Are Integral to Structural Analysis,” Sociological Theory 12

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(1994): 153–165. For similar but more complex conceptions of the term, which are relational and that incorporate the agency of actors, see Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984); and William H. Sewell, Jr., “A Theory of Structure: Duality, Agency, and Transformation,” American Journal of Sociology 98 (1992): 1–29. I reserve the term material to refer to the economic, social, political, or ideological rewards or penalties received by social actors for their participation (whether willing, unwilling, or indifferent) in social structural arrangements. 71. All racialized social systems operate along white supremacist lines. See Mills, Blackness Visible (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998). 72. I make a distinction between race and ethnicity. Ethnicity has a primarily sociocultural foundation, and ethnic groups have exhibited tremendous malleability in terms of who belongs. In contrast, racial ascriptions (initially) are imposed externally to justify the collective exploitation of a people and are maintained to preserve status differences. The distinction I make was part of a debate that appeared recently in the American Sociological Review. For specialists interested in this matter, see Bonilla-Silva, “The Essential Social Fact of Race,” American Sociological Review 64, no. 6 (1999): 899–906. 73. Herbert Blumer was one of the first analysts to make this argument about systematic rewards received by the races ascribed the primary position in a racial order. See Herbert Blumer, “Reflections on Theory of Race Relations,” pp. 3–21 in Race Relations in World Perspective, edited by A. W. Lind (Honolulu, HI: University of Hawaii Press, 1955). Du Bois’s argument about the psychological wages of whiteness has been used recently by Manning Marable, How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America; and by David Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness. 74. This point has been made by Omi and Winant, Racial Formation in the United States; Winant, Racial Conditions. 75. I am referring to cases such as Haiti. Nonetheless, recent research has suggested that even in such places, the abolition of slavery did not end the racialized character of the social formation. See Michel-Rolph Troillot, Haiti, State Against Nation: Origins and Legacy of Duvalierism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1990). 76. For a similar argument, see Floya Anthias and Nira Yuval-Davis, Racialized Boundaries: Race, Nation, Gender, Colour, and the Anti-Racist Struggle (London, England: Tavistock, 1992). 77. For an early statement on this matter, see Hubert M. Blalock, Jr., Toward a Theory of Minority-Majority Group Relations (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1967). For a more recent statement, see Susan Olzack, The Dynamics of Ethnic Competition and Conflict (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1992). 78. Nineteenth-century nation-building processes throughout Latin America included the myth of racial democracy and color- or race-blindness. This facilitated the struggles for independence and the maintenance of white supremacy in societies wherein white elites were demographically insignificant. For discussions pertinent to this argument see the excellent

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collection edited by Michael Hanchard, Racial Politics in Contemporary Brazil (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1999). 79. See my “The Essential Social Fact of Race,” American Sociological Review 64, no. 6 (December 1999): 899–906. 80. On this point, see Warren Whatley and Gavin Wright, Race, Human Capital, and Labor Markets in American History, Working Paper #7 (Ann Arbor, MI: Center for Afroamerican and African Studies, University of Michigan, 1994). For an incisive discussion, see Samuel L. Myers, Jr., “Measuring and Detecting Discrimination in the Post–Civil Rights Era,” pp. 172–197 in Race and Ethnicity in Research Methods, edited by John H. Stanfield II and Rutledge M. Dennis (London: Sage Publications, 1993). 81. Michael Reich, “The Economics of Racism,” in Racial Conflict, Discrimination, and Power: Historical and Contemporary Studies, edited by William Barclay, Krsihma Kumar, and Ruth P. Simms (New York: AMS Press, 1976), p. 224. 82. Omi and Winant, Racial Formation in the United States, 64. 83. On the invention of the white race, see Theodore W. Allen, The Invention of the White Race, Vol. I (London: Verso, 1994). On the invention of the “Indian” race, see Robert E. Berkhoffer, The White Man’s Indian (New York: Vintage, 1978). On the invention of the black and white races, see Winthrop Jordan, White over Black. 84. A classic book on the ideological binary construction of the races in the United States is Thomas Gossett, Race: The History of an Idea in America (Dallas, TX: Southern Methodist University Press, 1963). For an analysis of the earlier period in the Americas, see Tzevetan Todorov, The Conquest of America: The Question of the Other (New York: Harper Colophon, 1984). 85. On this matter, I stated in my recent debate in the pages of the American Sociological Review with Mara Loveman that “‘race,’ like ‘class’ or ‘gender,’ is always contingent but is also socially real. Race operates ‘as a shuttle between socially constructed meanings and practices, between subjective and lived, material reality’ (Hanchard 1994: 4).” (901). Michael G. Hanchard, Orpheus and Power (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994). 86. This last point is an extension of Poulantzas’s view on class. Races—as classes—are not an “empirical thing”; they denote racialized social relations or racial practices at all levels. Poulantzas, Political Power and Social Classes (London: Verso, 1982), p. 67. 87. For a full discussion, see my “The Essential Social Fact of Race.” For a similar argument, see Teresa Amott and Julie Matthaei, Race, Gender, and Work: A Multicultural Economic History of Women in the United States (Boston, MA: South End Press, 1996). 88. Frederick Barth, “Introduction,” pp. 9–38 in Ethnic Groups and Boundaries: The Social Organization of Culture Difference, edited by F. Barth (Bergen, Norway: Universitetsforlaget, 1969). 89. For the case of the Jews, see Miles, Racism and Racism After “Race Relations” (London: Routledge, 1993). For the case of the Irish, see Allen, The Invention of the White Race.

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90. For a recent excellent discussion on ethnicity with many examples from the United States, see Stephen Cornell and Douglas Hartmann, Ethnicity and Race: Making Identities in a Changing World (London: Pine Forge Press, 1998). 91. Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness. See also Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White (New York: Routledge, 1995). 92. For identity issues among Caribbean immigrants, see the excellent edited collection by Constance R. Sutton and E. M. Chaney, Caribbean Life in New York City: Sociocultural Dimensions (New York: Center for Migration Studies of New York, 1987). 93. Barth, “Introduction,” 17. 94. A few notable discussions on this matter are Ira Berlin, Slaves Without Masters: The Free Negro in Antebellum South (New York: Pantheon, 1975); John Hope Franklin, From Slavery to Freedom: A History of the Negro Americans (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1974); August Meir and Elliot Rudwick, From Plantation to Ghetto (New York: Hill and Wang, 1970). 95. The motivation for racializing human relations may have originated in the interests of powerful actors, but after social systems are racialized, all members of the dominant race participate in defending and reproducing the racial structure. This is the crucial reason why Marxist analysts (e.g., Cox, Reich) have not succeeded in successfully analyzing racism. They have not been able to accept the fact that after the phenomenon originated with the expansion of European capitalism into the New World, it acquired a life of its own. The subjects who were racialized as belonging to the superior race, whether or not they were members of the dominant class, became zealous defenders of the racial order. For an interesting Marxist-inspired treatment, see Bush, We Are Not What We Seem. 96. Jordan, White over Black; Robinson, Black Marxism; Miles, Racism After “Race Relations.” 97. Bernard M. Magubane, The Political Economy of Race and Class in South America (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1990); Richard Williams, Hierarchical Structures and Social Value (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1990). For two recent valuable contributions, see Robin Blackburn, The Making of New World Slavery: From the Baroque to the Modern, 1492–1800 (London: Verso, 1997); and Ian Hannaford, Race: The History of an Idea in the West (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996). 98. Hillel Ticktin, The Politics of Race: Discrimination in South Africa (London: Pluto, 1991), p. 26. 99. The classic book on this is Paula Giddings, When and Where I Enter: The Impact of Black Women on Race and Sex in America (New York: Bantam, 1984). See also Nancy Caraway, Segregated Sisterhood: Racism and the Politics of American Feminism (Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Press, 1991). 100. This argument is not new. Analysts of the racial history of the United States have always pointed out that most of the significant historical changes in this country’s race relations were accompanied by some degree

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of overt violence. See Harold Cruse, Rebellion or Revolution (New York: William Morrow, 1968); Franklin, From Slavery to Freedom; and James W. Button, Blacks and Social Change: Impact of the Civil Rights Movement in Southern Communities (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989). 101. This point is important in literature on revolutions and democracy. On the role of violence in the establishment of bourgeois democracies, see Barrington Moore, Jr., Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1966). On the pivotal role of violence in social movements, see Frances Fox Piven and Richard A. Cloward, Poor People’s Movements: Why They Succeed, How They Fail (New York: Vintage, 1979). 102. The notion of relative autonomy comes from the work of Poulantzas (Power and Social Classes) and implies that the ideological and political levels in a society are partially autonomous in relation to the economic level; that is, they are not merely expressions of the economic level. 103. Paul Gilroy, “There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack”: The Cultural Politics of Race and Nation (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1991), p. 17. 104. See Ellis Cose, The Rage of a Privileged Class: Why Are Black Middle ClassAngry? Why Should America Care? (New York: HarperCollins, 1993); Lawrence Otis-Graham, Member of the Club: Reflections on Life in a Racially Polarized World (New York: HarperCollins, 1995). 105. In addition to the work by Joe R. Feagin and Hernán Vera already cited, see Lawrence Bobo, J. Kluegel, and R. Smith, “Laissez Faire Racism: The Crystallization of a Kinder, Gentler, Antiblack Ideology,” and, particularly, Mary R. Jackman, Velvet Glove: Paternalism and Conflict in Gender, Class, and Race Relations (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1994). 106. Curiously, historian Eugene Genovese made a similar argument in his book Red and Black. Although he still regarded racism as an ideology, he stated that once it “arises it alters profoundly the material reality and in fact becomes a partially autonomous feature of that reality.” Red and Black: Marxian Explorations in Southern and Afroamerican History (New York: Pantheon, 1971), p. 340. 107. Hall, “Race Articulation and Societies Structured in Dominance,” in Sociological Theories: Race and Colonialism, edited by UNESCO (Paris: UNESCO, 1980), p. 336. 108. Actions by the Ku Klux Klan have an unmistakably racial tone, but many other actions (choosing to live in a suburban neighborhood, sending one’s children to a private school, and opposing government intervention in hiring policies) also have racial undertones.

3 Racial Attitudes or Racial Ideology? An Alternative Paradigm for Examining Actors’ Racial Views

All social life is essentially practical. All mysteries which lead theory to mysticism find their rational solution in human practice and in the comprehension of this practice. —Karl Marx, Eight Theses on Feuerbach

Our understanding of whites’ racial views in the post–civil rights era is marred with confusion. Some researchers, for instance, portray whites as having very tolerant views,1 others as having a “paradoxical” or “ambivalent” stand, 2 others as exhibiting “symbolic” or “modern” racism,3 and yet others as having a new “sense of group position” or expressing “social dominance.” 4 Survey researchers seem only to agree that whites and blacks have significantly different views on central racial issues.5 In contrast, qualitative researchers have rendered a more consistent interpretation of whites’ (and blacks’) views since the 1960s. These researchers contend that whites display significantly higher levels of race-based views on issues as diverse as immigration, affirmative action, welfare, crime, housing, and school integration. 6 Furthermore, they report not only higher levels of racism (as traditionally defined) but also more consistent levels of its extent among whites as opposed to blacks. Whereas most survey researchers claim that few whites are “racist” (10 to 30 percent),7 these qualitative

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studies suggest that most whites hold race-based views about minorities. The different state of these bodies of research is fundamentally based on their respective conceptual and methodological approaches to examining actors’ racial views. Traditional survey research (I exclude survey researchers in the “sense of group position” and “social dominance” traditions) is bounded by methodological individualism and, as such, is fundamentally concerned with individuals’ response variation to survey questions that presumably indicate individuals’ attitudes.8 Thus, from the premier work of Theodore Adorno and Gordon Allport onward,9 social psychologists have relied on surveys as the chief instrument for assessing individuals’ racial attitudes. The conceptual framework that orients most of their work is rather simple: Prejudice –> attitudes –> discrimination (for a critique, see Chapter 2). However, the most salient element missing in their conceptual scheme is the issue of power, that is, these researchers do not connect racial beliefs to a system of racial domination. Although Allport, unlike many of his contemporary followers, attempted to explain prejudicial attitudes as the product of multiple forces, his analysis was still essentially wedded to methodological individualism and not connected to a system of racial domination. These conceptual and methodological limitations have led many survey researchers to a “clinical approach” racial attitudes (e.g., the search for prejudiced and tolerant individuals in societies).10 Because of these limitations, traditional survey research systematically underestimates the extent of racially based beliefs among whites in the contemporary United States. This underestimation results from two related problems. First, if the nature of post–civil rights racial dynamics and dilemmas has changed as many analysts claim (see Chapter 4), researchers using questions developed to measure racial attitudes in the Jim Crow era systematically overestimate the level of tolerance among whites. Second, because most surveys provide a limited analytical context—check marks on restricted questions and items often have an ambiguous meaning, and researchers assume the meaning of an “agree” or “disagree,” an “approve” or “disapprove”—the interpretation of their findings is not straightforward. Although surveys, particularly those that rely on questions that fit new social developments (for instance modern and symbolic racism), are excellent instruments for uncovering the broad

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parameters of racial debates, only through qualitative studies or multimethod studies can analysts understand the way in which ideas about race are articulated and the discursive circumstances in which actors invoke those ideas. In sharp contrast and despite significant degrees of variation, most qualitative researchers conceive of “racism” as having a structural foundation. Whether the product of colonized class dynamics (as Blauner views it, for example) or racial dynamics (as Feagin and Vera, Omi and Winant theorize), these authors contend that racial ideology has a collective nature and thus affects the consciousness of all actors in society. Therefore, for these authors racism is not a freefloating ideology but intrinsically connected to the field of racialized social relations. Accordingly, these analysts are more concerned with extracting larger common themes from their data than with individual attitudinal variation. Furthermore, whereas most surveys rely on “yes” and “no” (or similar answers) to make sense of respondents’ positions on very complex racial matters, qualitative researchers use extended conversations, ethnographies, interviews, discourse analysis, and focus groups, which allow them to make more informed decisions. Qualitative researchers have been joined recently by a growing number of survey analysts who, following the central work of Herbert Blumer,11 analyze racial views from a broader perspective. Their analysis, which is compatible with the theory I develop in this chapter, has uncovered many of the basic contours of post–civil rights racial ideology. However, because these analysts rely heavily on survey data, they have not been able to uncover important segments of the ideological building blocks that help justify racial inequality. For example, because of the very nature of survey data, it is difficult to extract racetalk (specific linguistic ways of articulating racial views), the various rationalizations for racial inequality, deep cognitive connections among race-related issues, and storylines to explain the racial status quo.12 Although the conceptual framework used by most qualitative researchers and some survey researchers is more productive for the analysis of actors’ racial views, it has not been properly spelled out or used in a systematic manner. Hence my primary goal in this chapter is to explicitly define the racial ideology paradigm. First, I develop a conceptual sketch of racial ideology. Second, I describe the primary social functions of racial ideology. I illustrate my theory with

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historical examples as well as with examples of color-blind racism,13 the dominant racial ideology of the post–civil rights era, from the 1998 Detroit Area Study (DAS).14 The Racial Ideology Paradigm Ideas, to repeat a commonplace, do not exist in a vacuum. They are expressions of social forces, and explanations or rationalizations of observed phenomena. —Iclus A. Newby

What social forces are expressed through individuals’ racial views? I contend that they fundamentally express the dynamics of real race relations. Races, like other social categories such as class and gender, are socially constructed and thus permanently unstable categories of human identity and action. Yet after they emerge in any society, they organize a hierarchical order with definite social relations of domination and subordination. Thus, as Michael Hanchard has argued,15 race operates “as a shuttle between socially constructed meanings and practices, between subjective and lived, material reality.” The engine that makes races—and race relations—socially real is that in racialized social systems the race ascribed the superior position receives economic, political, social, and even psychological (“I may be poor, but at least I am not black”) advantages. Not surprisingly, these constructed groups become social collectivities with different interests: The dominant race tends to defend, justify, accept, or not care about the racial order, whereas the other race—or other races— attempts to change its position in various ways (for a theoretical discussion of these matters, see Chapter 2). Because the dominant race has a privileged strategic location in a racialized social system, its views, fears, and rationalizations take a central position in the overall “ideological ensemble” of a society.16 But what is ideology per se? Even though volumes have been written attempting to define this fuzzy concept, for the purposes of this chapter, a rather simple definition will suffice. Ideology consists of the broad mental and moral frameworks, or “grids,” that social groups use to make sense of the world, to decide what is right and wrong, true or false, important or unimportant.17 Although ideologies do not

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provide individuals, as group members, with an explicit road map of how to act, what to believe, and what to say, they furnish the basic principles individuals use to sift through contested and often contradictory information in order to make sense of social reality. This definition eschews a number of debates on the nature of ideology—Is ideology true or false? Is it cognitive, normative, affective, or programmatic? Is science different from ideology?—but has the advantage of being neutral (all groups can have ideologies), applying to various forms of domination (ideologies are not just about class domination), and avoiding the formulaic character of most definitions (an ideology is not a wholly coherent set of beliefs). However, my approach to ideology does not eschew its fundamentally political nature. Ideologies are about meanings that express “relations of domination.”18 Dominant social groups, by virtue of their sociopolitical position, have better chances of crystallizing their beliefs and diffusing them in society as “common sense.” Their frameworks, hence, become more generalized and cohesive than the ideologies of dominated groups, which tend to be fragmentary. Based on the preceding arguments, I suggest that a more fruitful approach for examining individual racial views is the notion of racial ideology, or the racially based frameworks used by actors to explain and justify (dominant race) or challenge (subordinate race or races) the racial status quo. Although all the races in a racialized social system have the capacity to develop these frameworks, the frameworks of the dominant race become the master frameworks against which all racial actors compare (positively or negatively) their ideological positions. Why is this the case? Adapting Marx’s argument about how class ideology works to situations of racial domination, an approach that has been suggested by some Marxist scholars,19 helps explain why the ideas of the dominant race tend to be the dominant ideas in society: The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e., the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force. The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production, so that thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject to it. The ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relationships,

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the dominant material relationships grasped as ideas; hence of the relationships which make the one class the ruling one, therefore, the ideas of its domination.20

But what is the foundation of these frameworks, whether dominant or subordinate? From the standpoint of the ideology paradigm, they are rooted in the group-based conditions of life experienced by each race. These frameworks are the social representations of the races, that is, the conscious and unconscious sum of ideas, prejudices, and myths that crystallize the victories and defeats of the races regarding how the world is and ought to be organized.21 According to Jeffrey Prager, these frameworks embody the cultural material of “dead generations” and operate as “public world-view, capable of being articulated, collectively arrived at, negotiated, and systematically organized through public channels.”22 Despite the fact that the dominant racial ideology of a society crystallizes the interests of the dominant race, that ideology is not fixed but highly interactive. This flexibility of the dominant racial ideology enhances its legitimating role because it allows for accommodation of contradictions, exceptions, and new information. As Mary Jackman points out, “Indeed, the strength of an ideology lies in its loose-jointed, flexible application. An ideology is a political instrument, not an exercise in personal logic: consistency is rigidity, the only pragmatic effect of which is to box oneself in.”23 The interactivity of the dominant racial ideology stems from interracial contestation as well as from divisions among segments within the dominant race. For instance, elite whites, because of their special location in the complex matrix of domination typical of modern societies, exert an inordinate influence on the ideas of the white masses. However, it is a mistake to interpret whites’ racial views as the direct effect of the ideological work of elite whites. Poor whites are not passive repositories of some objective interest or supraconsciousness that tells them what to believe, say, feel, or do when in the presence of racial minorities. Instead, they have real agency, that is, they participate in the construction, development, and transformation of racial ideology as, after all, it is in their racial interest to maintain white supremacy. Albeit elites attempt to sell their particular racial projects to the masses, the masses themselves are agents in the production and refinement of these projects.24 For example, although the present racial crisis in the United States is partly the result of how neoconservatives, the far right, the Reagan revolution, and Clinton’s

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neoliberal policies have played out in a context of economic decline,25 the efforts of these groups have worked through the longstanding racial divisions in this country. When white workers express views such as “They don’t want to work, because if they did, there wouldn’t be so many of them selling drugs and getting in all kinds of problems,”26 they are not just repeating elite views but expressing their own race-based resentment toward minorities based on their own “racial situations.”27 Indeed, many of the racial mythologies developed by white workers and even white supremacist groups since the 1960s have been taken up by elites “in their campaigns and legislative programmes,” albeit they “invariably [hide] their whiteness beneath a gloss of universalism.”28 Blaming the current “racial crisis” on the Republican Party or on the failure of the Democratic Party to articulate inclusive, universally appealing policies based on class assumes that racial groups have similar interests, that elites rightly have the last word in determining the consciousness of the masses, and that elites themselves are not racialized as they are viewed as having the power to organize racially based politics ultimately to advance purely class-based projects. 29 Thus, although racial groups do not “have minds or mental structures of their own,” their shared position and cognitions bring them together in very practical ways “as group members in group-based interactions and communicative events.”30 Likewise, elite members of the dominant race may be in strategically influential positions, but the masses do not adopt their views and projects by osmosis. The agency of the masses also implies that individual members of the dominant race can become ideological dissidents, or “race traitors.”31 For example, intellectual, moral, or political concerns have led many individual whites to challenge racial inequality throughout history.32 Yet, the William Lloyd Garrisons and John Browns have always been a minority since committing racial treason involves going against your collective interests. In practice, members of the subordinate race(s) are more likely to commit racial treason since individuals who do so can improve their standing (e.g., in the post–civil rights era, antiblack blacks such as Ward Connerly or Clarence Thomas are handsomely compensated). Furthermore, the interactivity of the dominant racial ideology also evinces the process of racial contestation (see Chapter 2) among the races at all levels. Although as I stated above, the ideas of the dominant race tend to be the dominant ideas in society, ideological

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rule over the subordinate race(s) is never absolute, is always at best partial, and is always contested. For example, if we have a new set of dominant racial frames in the United States, it is because struggles in the past (the civil rights movement, race-based rebellions in ghettos, etc.) led to a change in the racial structure—the aggregate of social, political, and economic practices that help reproduce racial domination (see Chapter 4). However, post–civil rights racial ideology incorporates many of the ideas endorsed by racial minorities in the 1960s (equal opportunity for all, eradication of racist statements as legitimate in public discourse, censorship of racist views on the general biological-moral character of blacks, etc.) in a hegemonic way,33 that is, it incorporates elements of the views of racial minorities while at the same time safeguarding systemic white privilege. To facilitate using the racial ideology paradigm in research, I propose conceiving racial ideology as an interpretive repertoire34 consisting of the following elements: common frames; style, or racetalk; and storylines. Individual actors employ these elements as “building blocks ... for manufacturing versions on actions, self, and social structures” in communicative situations.35 The looseness of the elements allows users to maneuver various contexts (e.g., responding to a race-related survey, discussing racial issues with family, or arguing about affirmative action in a college classroom) and produce various accounts and presentations of self (e.g., appearing ambivalent, tolerant, or strong-minded). Although individual members of races may exhibit considerable rhetorical, stylistic, and even affective variations, analysts can determine whether they are breaking with the dominant repertoire, that is, if they are using a different repertoire altogether.36 The first and most important element of an interpretive repertoire is a set of common frames, or topics, central to the maintenance (or challenge) of a racial order. I label these topics “frames” because once they emerge they mold or circumscribe actors’ views on racerelated matters. Although many dominant frames have a long and deep history—e.g., the racially based fear of the Other, the association of blackness with criminality, etc.—most are directly related to specific needs associated with the reproduction of a particular racial order. These frames embody folk theories that individuals use to explain all sorts of race-related matters. For example, during the Jim Crow era, the ideology of the color line, in contrast to the ideology of the slavery period, which emphasized blacks’ subhumanity and ser-

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vility,37 emphasized keeping blacks “in their place.” This new ideology expressed blacks’ post-emancipation reality as “free” subjects incorporated into the economy—as subordinate workers—and into society—as second-class citizens. The various, well-known frames (e.g., the depiction of blacks as lazy, only good for manual labor, childlike, stupid, and thus inferior to whites) associated with this ideology were expressed in an overt manner and still based on the notion of white superiority.38 However, the civil rights rebellion, in conjunction with other social, economic, and demographic changes that transpired in the 1960s, dramatically altered the nature of racial structure in the United States. I have argued that a new racism has replaced the old structure and that today “white supremacy” (see Chapter 4) is reproduced in a mostly institutional and apparently nonracial manner that relies on the token inclusion—rather than on the systematic exclusion—of racial minorities from certain jobs and places and does not depend on overt expressions of racial hostility. Accordingly, post– civil rights racial ideology reflects the character of the new racial order. This ideology, which I label color-blind racism because this term fits the actual rhetoric used by whites to explain racial matters, is anchored on the abstract extension of egalitarian values to racial minorities and the notion that racial minorities are culturally deficient.39 The most important frame of this new ideology is the notion of abstract liberalism, the extension of the principles of liberalism to racial matters in an abstract and decontextualized manner (for a full discussion of the frames of color-blind racism, see Chapter 5). This peculiar articulation of the tenets of liberalism allows whites to hold racially illiberal positions on issues as diverse as affirmative action, school and residential segregation, and interracial marriage and still sound “reasonable” and “pragmatic.”40 For example, Lynn, a human resource manager in her early fifties, answered a question on the limited integration of schools in the United States in a style that Jody Armour has labeled “reasonable racism.”41 I do not believe in busing. The reason I don’t believe in busing, you know, I said I don’t. I didn’t encourage my children to play with the neighborhood kids. I still felt that going to school in your community was the key to developing a child’s sense of community and I still believe that. One of the reasons, another reason I moved from where I was, was I didn’t want my children to be

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bused. I didn’t want to have them got on a bus, especially me working. So I don’t think that is an answer. I think the answer is education and helping people learn to make a life for themselves and, you know, any type of social program that interacts, that provides interaction between races I think is excellent. But ah . . . I’m just not a busing person.42

Lynn wants equal opportunity in education but also community schools, a position that sounds perfectly reasonable. However, one would expect that Lynn would support doing something to make sure that communities throughout the United States are diverse, a policy that, other things being equal, would guarantee school integration. Yet Lynn takes a very strong laissez faire antigovernment intervention stance on this issue. For example, in response to the question “America has lots of all white and all black neighborhoods. What do you think of this situation?” Lynn said, I don’t have a problem with all white and all black neighborhoods. Ah . . . if that’s the choice of the people, the individuals. But, if it’s forced either way, if I’m a black person and I’ve come into the neighborhood and I want to live here and, I mean, selectively denied that option, that’s wrong. But ah . . . and again, but there still has to be some type of social interaction for growth and if, if the social interaction takes place then, the cross-integration will take place, I think.

When pressed about what can be done specifically to increase the mixing of the races in neighborhoods, Lynn restated that it ought to be “through educating and encouraging businesses.” As I will show in Chapter 5, the majority of whites endorse numerous liberal positions on racial matters (“I am all for equal opportunity” or “I think that mixed schools are great for the children”) but solely as ideals. As the issues in question become practical (“In order to guarantee equal opportunity, we need affirmative action” or “In order to achieve school integration, we need to bus kids”), they oppose almost every policy to close the racial gap. The second component of interpretive repertoires is style, or racetalk—the idiosyncratic linguistic manners and rhetorical strategies used to articulate racial viewpoints. For example, whites’ racetalk during the Jim Crow era, in consonance with the color-line ideology, was direct and quite blunt; therefore, few whites hesitated to

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express their racial views directly in public or in private situations. For instance, even as late as 1940, a white newspaper editor in Durham, North Carolina, stated that a Negro is different from other people in that he’s an unfortunate branch of the human family who hasn’t been able to make out of himself all he is capable of. He is not capable of being rushed because of the background of the jungle. Part of his human nature can’t be rushed; it gets him off his balance. . . . You can’t wipe inbred character in one year or a hundred years. It must be nursed along. We look upon him for his lack of culture, as being less reliable, in business and unsafe socially. His passions are aroused easily.43

In contrast, the three major stylistic elements of color-blind racism are (1) avoidance of racist terminology, (2) a variety of rhetorical shields to avoid being labeled racist (contemporary racetalk), and (3) rhetorical incoherence. As a complete analysis of the various rhetorical strategies typical of color blindness is beyond the scope of this chapter (but see Chapter 5), I will showcase just one of the central rhetorical shields, or “semantic moves,”44 typical of whites’ post–civil rights racetalk. Rhetorical shields such as “I am not a racist” or “Some of my best friends are black” have become standard fare of post–civil rights racial discourse. Therefore, it was not surprising to find that most white Detroiters used these phrases in their responses. For example, Rhonda, a part-time jewelry store employee in her sixties, used the “I am not a racist” move to safely express her highly racial views on why she thinks blacks have a worse overall status than whites: Well, I’m gonna be, I’m gonna be, you understand I’m, I’m [not] prejudice or racial or whatever. Ah, they’ve always given the ah, slut . . . smut jobs . . . because they would do it. Then they stopped, they stopped doing. Ah, welfare system got to be very, very easy. And I’m not saying all, there’s many, many white people on welfare that shouldn’t be. But if you take the percentage in the tri-city country area, you will find that the majority are white, but all you see is the black people on welfare, but it’s a graduation up. . . . Thirty years ago they started it and they continued it, and they continued it, and they continued it. And it was easier to collect wel . . . , ah ah, you now, welfare from the state rather than go out and get a job. Why work if, if they gonna, if the government’s gonna take care of you?

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In this example, Rhonda used the phrase “I’m not prejudice” as a buffer to her belief that blacks are lazy and have become welfare dependent. The third element of an interpretive repertoire is storylines, which are narratives that appear over and over in the justifications (or criticisms) used to maintain (or challenge) racial privilege. All racialized societies produce dominant common stories or storylines that become part of the racial folklore and thus are shared, used, and believed by members of the dominant race. They are storylines because the words, phrases, and ideas used in these stories are very similar and seem scripted. Because of the similarity among individual expressions of these storylines, it is relatively easy to extract them from interview material. Benjamin DeMott describes their role in preserving racial hierarchy: These stories are no minor elements in the structure of caste: they are narrative rationales determining attitudes, motivations, habits, skills, and values. And, because bottom-caste and mainstream stories differ vastly from each other, they (in combination with the differences in work, property, and schooling that they “explain”) effectively locate most of the bottom-caste and most of the mainstream psychocultural worlds.45

Thus these narratives provide powerful emotional, almost visceral, accounts of why the world is the way it is or, in some cases, reasons why the world ought to be different. During Jim Crow, for example, the storyline of the black rapist served as a justification for maintaining the racial and gender order. The post–civil rights era has produced to date four primary storylines: (1) “The past is the past” (a related storyline is “Present generations are not responsible for the mistakes of the past”); (2) “I didn’t own slaves”; (3) “My [friend or relative] didn’t get a [job or promotion] because a black [usually ‘man’] got it”; and (4) “If [Jews, Irish, Asians] have made it, how come blacks have not?”46 The Social Functions of Racial Ideology

Racial ideology expresses the fact that societies are divided along racial lines. As such, racial ideology has inscribed in it the indelible marks of racial domination and contestation. As I suggested previ-

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ously, although the frameworks of the dominant race loom large in the ideational world of subordinate races, the dominant racial ideology is not almighty since it incorporates ideas from subordinate races (albeit in a hegemonic way) and thus has contradictory elements in it. But racial ideology is more than the mere expression of a society divided along racial lines. Racial ideology is the medium through which racial life is apprehended, through which individuals perceive themselves as Same and others as Others. In Althusserian terms,47 racial ideology interpolates individuals as racial subjects. This medium thus expresses racial relations but becomes, for actors interpolated as racial subjects, indistinguishable from lived experience. In short, we create racial ideology and racial ideology creates us. Since racial ideology is the medium through which actors live their (racial) lives, racial ideology helps “structurate,” in the Giddensian sense of word, their lives in at least five ways.48 The first and most important way in which racial ideology structures the racial order is by providing arguments to account for racial inequality. In the case of the dominant ideology, the arguments tend to rationalize the racial status quo. Gunnar Myrdal addressed this issue as follows: When analyzing the actual beliefs, we must take account of much more specific needs for rationalization. Specific beliefs seem to have specific rationalization purposes besides the general one of justifying the caste order as a whole. Practically every type of White-Negro relation, every type of discrimination behavior, every type of interracial policy, raises its own peculiar demands for justification.49

Racial ideology, again borrowing from Althusser,50 accomplishes this rationalizing task by representing not the real but the imaginary relations among the races. For instance, slave masters proclaimed that blacks’ status was due to their subhumanity and thus stipulated that whites had to “care” for them.51 Thus, John Calhoun, a South Carolinian politician and slaveholder, said in 1845 that freedom for the “negro or African race . . . would be . . . a curse instead of a blessing” because, as he had stated five years before, “the African is incapable of self-care and sinks into lunacy under the burden of freedom.” Accordingly, Calhoun added, “It is a mercy to him to give him the guardianship and protection from mental death.”52 In the Jim Crow era, as blacks became free subjects, an explicit and highly elaborate racial ideology became imperative to specify their new

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place in the social order. The central issue was justifying blacks’ inferior social place or, in the southern parlance of the time, “how to keep them in their place.” This task was accomplished by an ideology that justified racial inequality by naturalizing the position of blacks and whites in society in biological and moral terms.53 Nevertheless, rationalizations of inequality need not be based on overtly negative views about the Other in order to be effective. As Mary Jackman observes, “Groups who dominate social relationships strive to keep hostility out of those relationships, not in order to foster equality, but rather to deepen and secure the inequality. They have learned that persuasion is better than force.”54 Thus, for example, the arguments used by whites today to justify the racial status quo are seemingly nonracial, rely on cultural rather than biological explanations, and are centrally based on the principles of liberalism and individualism (see Chapter 5). Furthermore, the racial character of ideology and ideological practices is, as David Theo Goldberg argues, “normal to our culture, manifest not only in extreme epithets but in insinuations and suggestions, in reasoning and representations, in short, in the microexpressions of daily life.”55 Finally, in some racialized societies, racial ideology is present even without the formal recognition of the existence of race relations as is the case in numerous countries such as Brazil, Mexico, Cuba, Haiti, and Puerto Rico. Despite the centrality of the dominant frameworks in the ideological ensemble of a society, they do not rule completely the intellectual and moral life of subordinate races. Because the objective social, economic, and political conditions experienced by subordinate races are substantially different from those of the dominant race, they develop alternative frameworks to explain their position in society. For example, during slavery, facilitated by their relative independence in the slave quarters, enslaved Africans created their own spiritual, linguistic, familial, and musical world. Not surprisingly, they developed counterviews on slavery and strategies to resist it that ranged from slowdowns to the roughly 250 rebellions and conspiracies carried out during the period.56 Similarly, in the Jim Crow era, blacks built a culture that represented “at least a partial rejection of the dominant ideology.”57 However, dominant racial ideologies muddy the ideological waters of subordinate races, limiting their likelihood of developing fully coherent utopias and, at times, making resistance unimaginable.58 For instance, Tyrone, an unemployed black man in his early

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forties interviewed in the 1998 DAS, exhibited this ideological confusion. Tyrone, who had counterviews on most issues, floundered on the policies to accomplish integration. He supported the idea of residential integration, a choice supported by 62 percent of the blacks in the survey, in the following way: I think all the neighborhoods should be mixed. Then every, then there wouldn’t be no concept of how different people are. They would know how each race would be.

Yet Tyrone opposed government intervention to guarantee residential integration: Well, you can’t tell people where [to] live. They got to pay for their own house, so people are going to live where they want to live. So you can’t do that.

Tyrone uses the topics of abstract liberalism (“you can’t tell people where to live”) and the free market rationale (“They got to pay for their own house, so . . .”) to oppose government intervention in one of the central social processes behind blacks’ contemporary plight in the United States. 59 Interpreting Tyrone’s stance on government intervention as a political preference does not square with the fact that he was a strong supporter of affirmative action, government programs for blacks, and even of reparations. For example, he voiced his support for reparations with the following strong words: They should get something, they should get something. They was suppose to give the black man forty acres and a mule. . . . Where’s my forty acres of land at or my money that you going to pay me for these forty acres I was supposed to get? You know, give me a tractor, give me some money, give me something!

The second way in which racial ideology structures racial orders is by providing the basic rules of engagement for actors (the racial etiquette) as well as the racial episteme to make decisions about Other and Same based on the racialized readings of bodies. Charles Johnson pointed out a long time ago that racial dogmas “constitute something more than folklore or a creed of faith; they form a charter for social conduct.”60 At the time that Johnson was writing, racial dogmas prescribed very specific rules for interracial contact in all sorts of situations, ranging from blacks having to use the back door

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when entering a house owned by a white to forbidding direct eye contact between whites and blacks in public spaces. Today, in the period of hegemonic racial domination, new racial dogmas have become almost second nature. As Howard Winant points out, the meaning of race, the racial interpretation of everyday life and of the larger culture, polity, and economy, has been so finely tuned for so long, and has become so ingrained, that it is now “second nature,” a “common sense” that rarely requires acknowledgment. . . . As our racial antennae are tuned and retuned, race becomes “naturalized.”61

The racial dogmas of the post–civil rights era allow, for example, whites to claim that it is legitimate to fear all blacks; whites to raise a self-defense legal strategy when they kill innocent blacks in a variety of situations in which they perceive them as threatening; a white woman to demand workers’ compensation by claiming that she could not continue working in a majority-minority environment after being attacked by a black man; and a university department chair to assume that a black professor can teach an introductory course on AfricanAmerican thought even though she does not have any background in the area.62 Third, racial ideology provides the basic script for actors’ racial subjectivity. In a racialized society, all actors develop a racial identity (are racialized) as part of their sense of self. This happens whether actors are “aware” of it or not and whether they want it or not. Individuals’ cognitions are always embedded in the social world and, thus, their individual acts of self-recognition are always racialized. As Wetherell and Potter suggest: Categorization and similar cognitive events can be seen as entirely mental events but they are also, very obviously, forms of social action established through discourse. The process of categorization, and thus the psychology of categorization, reside, not just in the mind, but, we would suggest, within discourse as part of a collective domain of negotiation, debate, argumentative and ideological struggle.63

The “normal” way in which this happens, reinforced by numerous personal practices (e.g., residential and school segregation, limited interracial marriage and friendship, etc.) and institutional practices (e.g., racial rules for political access, immigration policies, census

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taking, etc.), allows dominant racial actors, unlike racial minorities, to develop their racial identity in an almost imperceptible manner.64 Although whiteness as a form of group identity in this society was historically shaped in reference to subordinate Others, whether Indians, Chicanos, or blacks, or by the real struggle of phenotypically light ethnic groups to be recognized as whites (for details and references, see Chapter 2), racial subjectivity does not need to be elaborated in clear and overt terms. After it is initially constructed, whiteness becomes normalized despite the fact that it is continuously being rebuilt. Racial subjectivity even emerges in societies without formally recognized race relations, as the history of Latin America and the Caribbean shows, or, as in the United States today, by denying the very existence and significance of race.65 One of the most potent attributes of contemporary whiteness in the United States is precisely its invisibility.66 Since the abolition of the formal statutes of Jim Crow, whites contend that racism is in retreat. Yet, informal personal as well as formal institutional practices and racially based behaviors have maintained high levels of residential, school, and social segregation. Whites today, despite the virtual elimination of Jim Crow, live fundamentally “white lives” characterized by (1) neighborhoods that are almost completely white; (2) schools that are primarily white; (3) associational practices of friendship, church attendance, and social clubs that are virtually white except for the incorporation of Asians and some Latinos as “honorary whites;” and (4) various practices that preserve the white character of their lives even in socalled integrated jobs, schools, and neighborhoods.67 Furthermore, cultural representations of blacks, whites, and other racial groups in television, print media, and movies consumed daily as entertainment or “news” allow whites to be “racial tourists, distant observers to the racist images and narratives” or to foster racial liberalism in which racism “has little or nothing to do with promoting power, racial privilege, and a sense of moral agency in the lives of Whites.” 68 As Warren Montag argues, The secret of whiteness . . . is that it is empty, defined only negatively by what is not, a rule or norm established only after the phenomena that it came to define as inadequate or abnormal. Accordingly, in its most historically effective forms, whiteness does not speak its own name.69

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Fourth, racial ideology is systemic or global; that is, all members of a racial order are affected by it.70 In racialized social systems it is impossible for individuals to be nonracial and, as such, not to be shaped by racial ideology. Whereas all actors are interpolated as racial subjects, they acquire, through the racialized socialization process, the frameworks to explain their position in society. In systems of racial subjugation where force is central to their reproduction (e.g., slavery, Jim Crow, apartheid, fascist regimes), the frameworks of the dominant race are less central in shaping the views of the subordinate race(s). For example, as I suggested above, the influence of whites’ frameworks on blacks during slavery and Jim Crow was minimal largely because the social, economic, and political relations between the races was based on force and, thus, the dominant race did not attempt to rule blacks’ civil society. As domination through coercion became costly, unstable, and ineffective, the form of racial domination grew hegemonic. In most contemporary racialized societies, the dominant race seeks to maintain its power through consent, that is, by actively seeking to convince oppressed groups to accept their norms, views, and practices as “this is the way the world is,” as the “normal” framework of reference.71 A few poignant examples of how the dominant ideology permeates blacks’ views today suffice to illustrate this point. First, blacks have historically internalized white supremacist standards of beauty and even re-created a color-based caste structure.72 Second, blacks have historically accepted many of the stereotypes developed by whites about blacks.73 For example, in my1998 DAS, between 30 and 70 percent of blacks agreed that the words or phrases violent (32 percent), musical (63 percent), lazy (32 percent), athletic (70 percent), sexually well-endowed (44 percent), flashy (68 percent), and welfare-dependent (30 percent) are “more descriptive of blacks.” Lastly, blacks endorse views on the significance of individualism in the United States that are inconsistent with their social status and collective experience.74 Nevertheless, groups subordinated along racial, class, or gender lines develop oppositional views, “good sense,” and even countercultures.75 In the DAS survey, whereas 53 percent of whites stated that they prefer to live in neighborhoods that are “all white” or “mostly white,” 62 percent of blacks stated that they prefer to live in neigh-

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borhoods that are “half and half.” In fact, over 70 percent of white respondents stated that they lived in neighborhoods that had fewer than 10 percent blacks at the time of the interview. In terms of busing, 69 percent of whites opposed it, but 74 percent of blacks supported it. While 56 percent of whites believe that this country has experienced lots of racial progress, only 29 percent of blacks agree with that view. Since whites believe that discrimination is no longer a salient feature of the United States, only 32 percent believe that blacks have any reason to be angry. In contrast, 76 percent of blacks believe that blacks have reasons to be angry. Finally, on the hot issue of affirmative action, whereas 50 percent of white respondents stated that they would support a proposal similar to that passed in California to eliminate affirmative action if it were put on the ballot in Michigan, 89 percent of blacks said they would oppose such a proposal.76 The divergent views of whites and blacks in the United States signify that their social representations are fundamentally shaped by their different group position and experience in the racial order. Analogously, other subordinate social groups such as workers, peasants, and women have always had alternative ways of “making sense.”77 When the counterviews of oppressed groups match periods of deep sociopolitical crisis and social upheaval, they can produce fundamental breaks and even revolutionary transformations in the social structure (see Chapter 2). Fifth, the dominant racial ideology helps normalize racial inequality by portraying the particular interests of the dominant race as universal, and thus by claiming social and moral authority over all social actors. 78 During slavery, for example, slave masters proclaimed that slavery was an extension of family life. Others claimed that enslaved Africans were “happy” with their predicament. For instance, a white northerner who resided in Mississippi observed, “They find themselves first existing in this state and pass throughout life without questioning the justice of their allotment, which, if they think at all, they suppose a natural one.”79 According to this observer, blacks acquiesced to slavery because of the “genius of African temperament,” because they are “instinctively . . . contented” and “quick to respond to the stimulus of joy, quick to forget [their] grief.”80 Most enslaved Africans, however, did not share these views. For instance, John Little, a former slave, wrote,

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They say that slaves are happy, because they laugh, and are merry. I myself and three or four others, have received two hundred lashes in the day, and had our feet in fetters; yet, at night, we would sing and dance, and make each other laugh at the rattling of our chains. Happy men we must have been! We did keep down trouble, and to keep our hearts from being completely broken: that is true as the gospel! Just look at it, must not they have been very happy? Yet I have done it myself—I have cut capers in chains.81

Even though during the slavery and Jim Crow periods, because of the coercive character of racial domination, blacks accommodated their public views and even behavior to “fit” the desires of the dominant race—Goldfield labels this the “stage Negro” 82—few really believed the master frameworks of slavery and Jim Crow. Most were like Marie Pendleton, a black, southern, trustworthy, uneducated domestic who revealed her real sentiments about Jim Crow and her white employers in an interview with Charles Johnson: Now I know that White folks like to talk about how much they loves you, how much they care about you. Mrs. Emmons used to say she loved me as much as she did anybody in the world. But she wasn’t fooling me. She didn’t love me, Marie, she loved the work I done for her. I knowed when she was doing all that talk if anything ever happen she’d turn on me just as quick as she would on any other colored person. But as long as she pretended to like me and went on, I went on too. . . . These White folks say they love you, but it ain’t you they’s love with, it’s your work—what you can do that they love. If you don’t believe me just stop work and see how long they love you.83

Today, in the post–civil rights era, when racial domination has become hegemonic, the normalization of racial inequality is achieved by explaining racial matters and even whites’ racially based choices (e.g., residential or mate choices) as the product of (nonracial) market dynamics. This hegemonic strategy has been relatively successful in confusing blacks and blunting the oppositional character of their counterviews (see Chapter 6). A third of black Detroiters interviewed believe that blacks are more likely than whites to be lazy (see statistics earlier in this chapter). By buying into this view, many blacks blame themselves for their standing in the United States in spite of their recognition of the centrality of discrimination. For example, Regina, a homemaker in her fifties, believes that discrimi-

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nation is important and stated, without hesitation and with emphasis, that being white in the United States is still an “advantage.” When she was asked, “Why?” Regina replied, “Because of they color.” Yet she answered a question dealing with whether blacks are worse than whites because they are lazy in a self-defeating manner: Well I don’t think they . . . [have] the proper things to succeed in and ah, but the ones that want to have, they can have. But it’s just some people don’t want to have anything. They can’t blame it on the other person, which I don’t. I don’t blame anyone ’cause I don’t have anything. I blame it on myself ’cause I think I should have did better when I was coming up and got a better education. If I had a chance, I would of.

Conclusion

In this chapter I make a case for examining actors’ racial views not in the individualistic framework of the prejudice paradigm but rather in the group-based framework of the racial ideology paradigm. The two approaches originate at two different conceptual and methodological springs. Traditional survey research is rooted in methodological individualism and assumes that racial beliefs are pathological (i.e., that “racists” are ignorant, irrational, or crazy people). As such, this paradigm cannot adequately address—at least in its present form—contemporary ideological constructions, which tend to be subtle, couched in universalistic language, and protected by the mantle of racelessness. In contrast, the racial ideology paradigm is rooted in the notion that the races constitute different social groups with distinct interests, and thus the ideas, views, and affects that actors exhibit on racial matters are better understood as social representations of how the world is and how it ought to be. Based on the preceding arguments, it is clear that analysts using the racial ideology paradigm must do more than just add up individuals’ attitudes toward racial Others or count how many individuals support or oppose particular policies. Instead, the primary task is to extricate from textual evidence (e.g., interviews, participant observation, ethnography, and films) as well as survey data the common themes, storylines, and racetalk used by racial groups in a racialized social system through various analytical techniques (e.g., content

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analysis and discourse analysis). Although surveys are useful tools for examining actors’ racial views, they do not permit the full exploration of all components of a racial ideology. Furthermore, surveys do not reveal how actors construct accounts and use the building blocks of an ideology in practical situations. This does not mean that qualitative research is a panacea. First, most qualitative research on racial matters is unsystematic, which limits the possibility of generalizing its findings. Second, qualitative research can constrain respondents as much as surveys. For example, in interview-based research the questions can be so narrowly constructed that they leave little space for respondents to articulate accurately their own views. Finally, qualitative researchers can overinterpret data as much as survey researchers. Because of the limitations of these two approaches, I suggest that investigators interested in examining racial ideology design multimethod studies. One example of this multimethod research design is my 1998 DAS, from which I used data to illustrate some of the components and social functions of racial ideology. Based on these data, as well as the work of researchers such as Lawrence Bobo, Jim Sidanius, Philomena Essed, and Mary Jackman, I suggested that a new dominant racial ideology has emerged in the post–civil rights era: the ideology of color-blind racism. In general, color-blind racism articulates elements from the free market ideology and culturally based arguments to justify the contemporary racial order. Although color blindness sounds progressive, its themes, style, and storylines are used to explain and justify racial inequality. By supporting equality, fairness, and meritocracy as abstract principles but denying the existence of systematic discrimination and disregarding the enormous and multifarious implications of the massive existing racial inequality (particularly between blacks and whites), whites can appear “not racist.” They can criticize safely any institutional approach to ameliorate racial inequality. And they can blame minorities for their situation. The political beauty of color blindness as an ideology is that it allows whites to state their racial views as if they were principled, even moral, positions. In the next chapter, I examine the social, economic, and political practices as well as the techniques of social control responsible for the maintenance of white supremacy in the post–civil rights era. I contend that the conglomerate of these practices amounts to a new racial structure, which I label the new racism.

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Notes 1. Authors who hold this view are many. Recent examples are Glenn Firebaugh and Kenneth E. Davis, “Trends in Antiblack Prejudice, 1972–1984,” American Sociological Review 94 (1998): 251–272; Seymour Lipset, American Exceptionalism (New York: W. W. Norton, 1996); and Thomas Piazza, Paul M. Sniderman, and Edward G. Carmines, Reaching Beyond Race (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997). 2. Two authors in this tradition are Jennifer Hochschild, Facing Up to the American Dream (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995) and Howard Schuman et al., Racial Attitudes in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997). 3. Authors in this tradition have labeled post–civil rights racism as modern, symbolic, and aversive. For examples, see David O. Sears, “Symbolic Racism,” pp. 53–84 in Eliminating Racism, edited by P. Katz and D. Taylor (New York: Plenum Press, 1988); Donald Kinder and Lynn M. Sanders, Divided by Color (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996); and John F. Dovidio, J. F. Mann, and Samuel L. Gaertner, “Resistance to Affirmative Action: The Implications of Aversive Racism,” pp. 81–102 in Affirmative Action in Perspective, edited by F. Blanchard and F. Crosby (New York: Springer-Verlag, 1989). 4. Larry Bobo, James Kluegel, and Ryan Smith, “Laissez Faire Racism: The Crystallization of a Kinder, Gentler, Antiblack Ideology,” pp. 15–42 in Racial Attitudes in the 1990s, edited by Steven A. Tuch and Jack K. Martin (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1997);” Mary Jackman, The Velvet Glove: Paternalism and Conflict in Gender, Class, and Race Relations (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1994); James Kluegel, “Trends in Whites’ Explanations of the Black-White Gap in Socioeconomic Status, 1977–1989,” American Sociological Review 55 (1990): 512–525; Jim Sidanius et al., “It’s Not Affirmative Action, It’s the Blacks: The Continuing Relevance of Race in American Politics,” pp. 191–235 in Racialized Politics, edited by David O. Sears, J. Sidanius, and L. Bobo (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000). 5. Michael Dawson, Behind the Mule: Race and Class in African American Politics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994); D. Kinder and L. M. Sanders, Divided by Color; J. Kluegel, “Trends in Whites’ Beliefs of the Gap: Black-White Socioeconomic Status, 1977–1989”; S. Lipset, American Exceptionalism; H. Schuman et al., Racial Attitudes in America. 6. The literature here is abundant. Notable works include Robert Blauner, Black Lives, White Lives (Berkeley and L.A.: University of Los Angeles Press, 1989); Jonathan Rieder, Carnasarie: The Jews and Italians of Brooklyn Against Liberalism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985); Joe R. Feagin and Hernán Vera, White Racism: The Basics (New York: Routledge, 1995); Michelle Fine and Lois Weis, The Unknown City (Boston: Beacon Press, 1998). 7. This number is based on estimates presented by Paul Sniderman and his various coauthors.

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8. Please note that I am making a distinction between traditional survey researchers and the new, relatively small group of survey researchers (Bobo, Jackman, and Kluegel) who follow Herbert Blumer’s ideas and interpret whites’ racial attitudes more broadly as a “sense of group position.” Second, although most survey researchers operate as if attitudes are unquestionable “social facts,” the truth is that the notion of “attitude” is an unclear one. Most social psychologists argue that attitudes have three components: cognitive, evaluative or affective, and disposition to act. Yet the problem with this concept is, as Blumer points out, that (1) attitudes are inferred from responses to surveys and thus are empirically ambiguous; (2) attitudes are hard to distinguish analytically from concepts such as impulses, habits, ideas, and opinions; (3) there is no body of literature examining what an attitude is. See Herbert Blumer, Symbolic Interactionism: Perspective and Model (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1969). 9. Adorno et al., The Authoritarian Personality (New York: Harper and Row, 1950); Allport, The Nature of Prejudice (New York: Doubleday, 1958). 10. This idea comes from Jonathan Potter and Margaret Wetherell, Discourse and Social Psychology: Beyond Attitudes and Behaviour (London: Sage, 1987). 11. The work in question is Herbert Blumer, “Race Prejudice as a Sense of Group Position,” The Pacific Sociological Review, 1, no. 1 (1958): 3–7. The authors who use his theory include Lawrence Bobo, James Kluegel, and Mary Jackman. Jim Sidanius also regards racism as an ideology but has developed his own full-fledged theorization. See Jim Sidanius, “The Psychology of Group Conflict and the Dynamics of Oppression: A Social Dominance Perspective,” pp. 183–219 in Explorations in Political Psychology, edited by S. Iyengar and W. J. McGuire (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993). 12. Analysts working on racial discourse and ideology are deeply indebted to the work of Teun A. van Dijk. For a few examples of his extensive work, see Prejudice in Discourse (Philadelphia, PA: John Benjamins Publishing, 1984); Communicating Racism (Beverly Hills, CA: Sage, 1987); and Ideology (London: Sage, 1998). 13. Various authors have used the term color-blindness (e.g., Ellis Cose, Color-Blind: Seeing Beyond Race in a Race-Obsessed World [New York: Harper Collins, 1997]) and color-blind racism (Leslie G. Carr, “Color-Blind” Racism [Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1997]). However, I want to distinguish my use of the concept from theirs. In Cose’s inspired book, color-blindness is described as a modern fable that the author wishes to disprove to move race relations forward. Carr uses color-blind racism to refer to post–civil rights ideology. Although Carr’s book is loaded with valuable insights and analyses, his notion of racial ideology is class-based. However, Carr’s analysis is more subtle than most traditional Marxist analysis of ideology since he acknowledges that whites and blacks form two “nations” and thus believes that “real race interests are what is at the heart of the racism of the White working class” (39).

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14. The 1998 DAS is a random sample of 400 white and black Detroit metropolitan-area residents. However, most of the data that I present in this chapter come from face-to-face structured interviews conducted with a randomly selected sample (21 percent sample) of the respondents who participated in the survey. 15. Hanchard, Orpheus and Power (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), p. 4. 16. Modern societies articulate various forms of hierarchy and thus societal ideology encompasses themes from gender, racial, class, and other forms of hierarchical structurations. In this chapter I focus exclusively on the racial aspects of the “ideological ensemble.” Poulantzas, Power and Social Classes (London: Verso, 1982). 17. This definition is inspired by van Dijk, Ideology. 18. John B. Thompson, Studies in Theory and Ideology (Cambridge, England: Polity Press, 1984), p. 4. 19. See Jorge Larrain, Ideology and Cultural Identity (Cambridge, MA: Polity Press, 1994). 20. Karl Marx, The German Ideology (New York: International Publishers, 1985), p. 64. 21. Moscovici has provided numerous definitions of social representations. His most recent definition is “a ‘network’ of ideas, metaphors and images, more or less loosely tied together, and therefore more mobile and fluid than theories” (“The History and Actuality of Social Representations,” pp. 209–247 in The Psychology of the Social, edited by Uwe Flick [Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1998], 244). Although Moscovici is clearly indebted to Durkheim’s notion of “collective representations,” his concept—and work—is influenced by Marx as well as Weber and is based on the conflictual group-based nature of society. 22. Jeffrey Prager, “American Racial Ideology as Collective Representation,” Ethnic and Racial Studies, 5 (1982): 99–119, 101–102. 23. My emphasis; Jackman, The Velvet Glove, 69. 24. Omi and Winant, Racial Formation in the United States (New York and London: Routledge, 1994). 25. Martin Carnoy, Faded Dreams: The Politics of Race and Economics in America (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994); Omi and Winant, Racial Formation in the United States. 26. My emphasis; Lillian Rubin, Families on the Fault Lines (New York: HarperCollins, 1994), p. 188. 27. See John Hartigan, Jr., Racial Situations: Class Predicaments of Whiteness in Detroit (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999). 28. John Gabriel, Whitewash (London and New York: Routledge, 1998), p. 182. See also Jesse Daniels, White Lies: Race, Class, Gender, and Sexuality in White Supremacist Discourse (New York and London: Routledge, 1997). 29. This problem is patently evident in the popular book by Thomas B. Edsall and Mary D. Edsall, Chain Reaction (New York: W.W. Norton, 1992).

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30. Van Dijk, Ideology, 27. 31. Ibid. The notion of “race traitors” comes from Noel Ignatiev and John Garvey, “Introduction: A Beginning,” Race Traitor (New York: Routledge, 1996). 32. See Herbert Aptheker, Anti-Racism in U.S. History: The First Two Hundred Years (New York: Greenwood Press, 1992). 33. Hegemony means that domination is achieved primarily through consent rather than through coercion. For a discussion on the notion of hegemony, see Christine Buci-Glucksman, “Hegemony and Consent,” pp. 116–126 in Approaches to Gramsci, edited by A. Showstack Sassoon (London: Writers and Readers, 1982). 34. Margaret Wetherell and Jonathan Potter define interpretive repertoires as “systems of signification” composed of “clusters of terms, descriptions, and figures of speech often assembled around metaphors or vivid images.” They are “resources for making evaluations, constructing factual versions and performing particular actions.” These repertoires, the textual foundation of any ideology, allow users to achieve political goals in communicative situations. Mapping the Language of Racism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), pp. 90–91. 35. Wetherell and Potter, Mapping the Language of Racism, 90. 36. The fact that individuals may offer various accounts on an issue does not mean that they do not hold positions on those issues. Variations on expressions are due to contexts, fragmentary application of themes, and conflation of ideologies since people belong to more than one social group. Although variability and ambivalence on issues are real, most members of racial groups exhibit remarkably similar positions on racial issues in different contexts and communicative situations. 37. For examples, see Paul Gordon Lauren, Power and Prejudice: The Politics and Diplomacy of Racial Discrimination (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1996). 38. Excellent examples on this can be found in Charles Johnson, Patterns of Negro Segregation (New York: Harper Publishers, 1943) and Myrdal, An American Dilemma (New York and London: Harper and Brothers Publishers, 1944). 39. I am not claiming originality here. Many of the central features of the dominant post–civil rights racial ideology have been identified by Joel Kovel, White Racism: A Psychohistory (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985 [1970]), William Ryan, Blaming the Victim (New York: Random House, 1976 [1971]); and Philomena Essed, Diversity: Gender, Color, and Culture (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1996). Most recently, Bobo and his associates have elaborated the notion of “laissez faire racism,” which is substantively similar to my notion of color blind racism. 40. See my paper with Tyrone A. Forman, “‘I Am Not a Racist but ...’: Mapping White College Students’ Racial Ideology in the USA,” Discourse and Society 11, no. 1 (2000): 51–86. 41. See Jody D. Armour, Negrophobia and Reasonable Racism: The Hidden Costs of Being Black in America (New York: New York University Press, 1997).

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42. I have placed the interviewer’s interjections in these interviews in brackets. 43. Johnson, Patterns of Negro Segregation, 153. 44. Van Dijk defines semantic moves as “strategically managed relations between propositions.” These are verbal interjections used to save face, that is, to avoid appearing “racist.” Communicating Racism, 86. 45. My emphasis, Benjamin Demott, The Trouble with Friendship: Why Americans Can’t Think Straight About Race (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1995), p. 65. 46. For other research that has identified these storylines, see Wetherell and Potter, Mapping the Language of Racism; see also Amy E. Ansell and James M. Statman, “‘I Never Owned Slaves’: The Euroamerican Construction of the Racialized Other,” Research in Politics and Society 6 (1999): 151–174. 47. Louis Althusser, Posiciones (Mexico City, DF: Editorial Grijalbo, 1976). 48. Giddens’s idea of “structuration” is very useful here. Rather than positing that structures determine superstructures, that actors’ actions determine structures, or that structures determine actors, the idea of each being constituted in and through recurrent practices seems more productive. Thus, I conceive racial ideology and racial structure as mutually reinforcing each other. Both change through the “racial contestation” of actors in a racialized social system. Anthony Giddens, Profile and Critique in Social Theory (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1982). 49. Myrdal, An American Dilemma, 106. 50. Althusser, Posiciones. 51. For a few books from the massive literature on slavery that address this point, see Kenneth M. Stampp, The Peculiar Institution (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1956); John Hope Franklin, From Slavery to Freedom (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1947); Jordan, White over Black; Leslie H. Owens, This Species of Property (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1976). 52. As cited in Owens, This Species of Property, 3. 53. Iclus A. Newby, Jim Crow’s Defense: Anti-Negro Thought in America, 1900–1932 (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 1965); Vann C. Woodward, The Strange Career of Jim Crow (New York: Oxford, 1966). 54. Jackman, The Velvet Glove, 16. 55. David T. Goldberg, Racial Subjects: Writing on Race in America (New York: Routledge, 1997), p. 20. 56. Herbert Aptheker, American Negro Slave Revolts (New York: International Publishers, 1943); Cedric J. Robinson, Black Movements in America (New York: Routledge, 1997). 57. Kelley, Yo’ Mama’s DisFUNKtional: Fighting the Culture Wars in Urban America (Boston: Beacon Press, 1997), p. 44. 58. On the relevance of utopian thinking, see Karl Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World Inc., 1936). See also Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man (London: Sphere, 1964).

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59. Massey and Denton, American Apartheid (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993). 60. Johnson, Patterns of Negro Segregation (New York: Harper Publishers, 1943), p. 194. 61. Howard Winant, “Racial Dualism at Century’s End,” in The House That Race Built, edited by Waheena Lubiano (New York: Pantheon Books, 1997), p. 89. 62. Armour, Negrophobia and Reasonable Racism; Goldberg, Racial Subjects. 63. Wetherell and Potter, Mapping the Language of Racism, 77. 64. On racialized practices to maintain white neighborhoods, see Judith N. Desena, “Local Gatekeeping Practices and Residential Segregation,” Sociological Inquiry 64, no. 3 (1994): 307–321. On the invisibility of dominant identities, see Joan Nagel, “Constructing Ethnicity: Creating and Recreating Ethnic Identity and Culture,” Social Problems 41, no. 1 (1994): 152–176; and Beverly Tatum, Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?: And Other Conversations About Race (New York: Basic Books, 1997). 65. For a discussion on race in Latin America, see my “The Essential Social Fact of Race,” American Sociological Review 64, no. 6 (December 1999): 899–906. For discussions on whites’ denial of race in America, see Ruth Frankenberg, The Social Construction of Whiteness: White Women, Race Matters (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1993); Charles A. Gallagher, “White Racial Formation: Into the Twenty-First Century,” pp. 6–11 in Critical White Studies: Looking Beyond the Mirror, edited by Richard Delgado and Sean Stefanlil (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1996). 66. Besides Frankenberg, The Social Construction of Whiteness: White Women, Race Matters, see Ian F. Haney Lopez, White by Law: The Legal Construction of Race (New York and London: New York University Press, 1997). 67. On the limited black-white interaction among successful blacks and whites, see Cose, The Rage of a Privileged Class. On the racialized character of jobs, see Sharon Collins, Black Corporate Executives: The Making and Breaking of a Black Middle Class (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1997). On whites’ racial isolation, see Massey and Denton, American Apartheid. On school segregation, see Gary Orfield and Susan Eaton, Dismantling Desegregation: The Quiet Reversal of Brown v. Board of Education (New York: The New Press, 1996). 68. Henry Giroux, “Racial Politics and the Pedagogy of Whiteness,” pp. 294–315 in Whiteness: A Critical Reader, edited by Mike Hill (New York and London: New York University Press, 1997), p. 296. 69. Warren Montag, “The Universalization of Whiteness: Racism and Enlightment,” pp. 281–293 in Whiteness: A Critical Reader, edited by Mike Hill (New York and London: New York University Press, 1997), p. 291. 70. Analogously, all members of society are affected by gender and class ideologies. For example, reviews of research on working-class con-

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sciousness (see, for example, Harold R. Kerbo, Social Stratification and Inequality: Class Conflict in Historical and Comparative Perspective [New York: McGraw Hill, 1996]) suggest that capitalist ideology pervades workers’ consciousness to a large degree. In most studies, anywhere between 50 and 75 percent of workers agree with views that are harmonious with capitalist ideology. Similarly, studies on gender role attitudes show that patriarchal ideology significantly affects women’s views (see Jackman, The Velvet Glove). 71. Stuart Hall has made this argument in his “The Toad in the Garden: ‘Thatcherism Among the Theorists,’” pp. 9–16 in The Politics of Thatcherism, edited by Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1988). 72. For a recent discussion on the relevance of skin color in the black community, see Lawrence Otis Graham, Our Kind of People: Inside America’s Black Upper Class (New York: HarperCollins, 1999). 73. Howard Schuman and Shirley Hatchett, Black Racial Attitudes: Trends and Complexities (Ann Arbor: Institute for Social Research, 1976); Lee Siegelman and Susan Welch, Black Americans’ View of Racial Inequality: The Dream Deferred (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1991). 74. Hochschild, Facing Up to the American Dream; Lipset, American Exceptionalism; Lee Siegelman and Susan Welch, Black American’s Views of Racial Inequality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). 75. This point, originally made by Antonio Gramsci, has recently been forcefully made by Stuart Hall in his Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies, edited by David Morley and Kuan-Hsing Chen (London and New York: Routledge, 1996). 76. These survey findings are congruent with what most survey researchers have found. For a few recent examples, see Dawson, Behind the Mule; Kinder and Sanders, Divided by Color; and Schuman et al., Racial Attitudes in America. 77. James C. Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Resistance (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1985); Rick Fantasia, Cultures of Solidarity: Consciousness, Action, and Contemporary American Workers (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1988); Alma M. García, “The Development of Chicana Feminist Discourse,” pp. 268–287 in The Social Construction of Gender, edited by Judith Lorber and Susan A. Farrell (Newbury Park, CA: Sage, 1991). 78. Marx made this same point in The German Ideology regarding class domination: For each new class which puts itself in the place of one ruling before it, is compelled, merely in order to carry through its aim, to represent its interests as the common interest of all the members of society, that is, expressed in ideal form: it has to give its ideas the form of universality and represent them as the only rational, universally valid ones. (65–66)

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79. Stampp, The Peculiar Institution, 86–87. 80. Ibid., 87. 81. Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States (New York: HarperPerennial, 1990), p. 168. 82. David R. Goldfield, Black, White, and Southern: Race Relations and Southern Culture, 1940 to the Present (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 1990). 83. Johnson, Patterns of Negro Segregation, 258.

4 The New Racism: The Post–Civil Rights Racial Structure in the United States

M

ost whites believe that “racism” is less relevant today than ever before as a factor determining blacks’ life chances.1 In social science circles this view was succinctly made by black sociologist William J. Wilson in his book The Declining Significance of Race, in which he stated that “class has become more important than race in determining black life chances in the modern industrial period [post–World War II era].”2 This view is consistent with some survey data on whites’ attitudes since the early 1960s3 as well as with many demographic and economic studies comparing the status of whites and blacks in terms of income, occupations, health, and education that suggest a remarkable reduction in racial inequality has occurred in the United States.4 A smaller number of social scientists, on the other hand, believe that race continues to play a role similar to the one it played in the past.5 For these authors, little has changed in the United States, and thus they are pessimistic about the prospects of minorities ever achieving racial equality. Although this viewpoint is not shared by most academicians, it is widely held among rankand-file members of minority communities, especially the black community. These views on the significance of race and racism in the United States are based on a narrowly defined notion of racism. For these analysts, racism is fundamentally an ideological or attitudinal phenomenon. In contrast, I regard racism in structural terms: a network 89

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of social relations at social, political, economic, and ideological levels that shapes the life chances of the various races. What most social scientists consider “racism,” I conceptualize in my framework as the racial ideology that helps support and structure racialized social systems (for a full discussion, see Chapter 2). From this vantage point, rather than arguing about whether the significance of race in the United States has declined, increased, or not changed at all, the real issue is determining whether there has been a transformation in the racial structure. My contention is that since the late 1960s a new racial structure—the new racism for short—has emerged that accounts for the persistence of racial inequality.6 This new racial structure comprises the following elements: (1) the increasingly covert nature of racial discourse and practice; (2) the avoidance of racial terminology and the ever growing claim by whites that they experience “reverse racism”; (3) the elaboration of a racial agenda over political matters that eschews direct racial references; (4) the invisibility of most mechanisms to reproduce racial inequality; and, finally, (5) the rearticulation of some racial practices characteristic of the Jim Crow period of race relations. I begin this chapter with a brief description of how the new racism came about. Against this backdrop, I survey the evidence of how black-white racial inequality7 is produced and reproduced in the United States in five areas: socially, economically, politically, ideologically, and through social control (the criminal justice system, arrest rates, etc.). My main analytical goal is to identify the central mechanisms responsible for keeping blacks “in their (new) place.” I conclude the chapter with a discussion of some of the social, political, and legal implications of the new racial structure. The Emergence of a New Racial Structure in the 1960s

Blacks were kept in a subordinate position during the Jim Crow period of race relations through a variety of bluntly racialized practices. At the economic level, blacks were restricted to menial jobs by the joint effort of planters, corporations, and unions. In the South, they were mostly tenant farmers; this was accomplished through vagrancy and apprenticeship laws, restrictions on the rights of blacks to buy land and work in certain occupations, debt imprisonment, and the

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convict lease system.8 In the North, the exclusionary practices of managers and unions kept blacks in unskilled occupations or in domestic service with very little chance for occupational mobility.9 Sterling Spero and Abraham Harris characterize the Jim Crow era jobs of blacks: The jobs into which the Negroes went were usually those which native Americans and Americanized foreign-born white labor did not want. This largely accounts for the almost spectacular increase in the proportion of Negroes in the iron and steel foundries where the work is dirty, hot, and unpleasant.10

At the social level, the rules of the new racial order emerged slowly given that the Civil War and the Reconstruction period (1865 –1877) shook the rules of racial engagement and challenged the place of blacks in society.11 By the late 1880s, segregationist laws and practices had emerged that separated whites and nonwhites in public accommodations, housing, schools, and the workplace. C. Vann Woodward describes the extent of these laws: The extremes to which caste penalties and separation were carried in parts of the South could hardly find a counterpart short of the latitudes of India and South Africa: . . . curfew . . . separate phone booths . . . separate books and storage of books in public schools; . . . South Carolina separated the mulatto caste. . . . [There was] separation of prostitutes, and [there were] even Jim Crow Bibles for Negro witnesses in Atlanta and Jim Crow elevators for Negro passengers in Atlanta buildings.12

Politically, blacks were virtually disenfranchised in the South and were almost totally dependent on white politicians in the North. In the South, poll taxes, literacy tests, and outright coercive strategies restrained their political options. In the North, black politicians were subordinate to white ethnic political machineries and did not represent much for their own communities.13 In terms of social control, blacks in the South were regulated by the actions of individual whites, violent racist organizations such as the Ku Klux Klan, mob violence in the form of lynching, and the lack of law enforcement by state agencies. In the North, blacks suffered less from these practices largely because they were extremely segregated residentially and, in most places, were a small minority, thus not posing a “threat” to whites. However, whenever blacks

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“crossed the line,” whites erupted in violence such as during the race riots of the late 1910s.14 Finally, in consonance with these practices, racial ideology during the Jim Crow period of race relations was explicitly racist. Without question, most whites believed that minorities were intellectually and morally inferior, that they should be kept apart, and that whites should not mix with any of them.15 The apartheid that blacks experienced in the United States was predicated on (1) keeping blacks in rural areas, mostly in the South, (2) maintaining blacks as agricultural workers, and (3) excluding blacks from the political process. However, as blacks successfully challenged their socioeconomic position by migrating initially from rural to urban areas in the South and later to the North and West, by pushing themselves into nonagricultural occupations through strikebreaking and other means, and by developing political organizations and movements like Garveyism, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the National Urban League, and the Southern Regional Council, the infrastructure of apartheid began to crumble.16 Other factors leading to the abolition of the Jim Crow racial order were the participation of blacks in World Wars I and II, which patently underscored the contradiction between fighting for freedom abroad and lacking it at home; the Cold War, which made it a necessity to eliminate overt discrimination at home in order to sell the U.S. as the champion of democracy; and a number of judicial decisions, legislative acts, and presidential decrees that have been enacted since the 1940s.17 The above-mentioned political, social, and economic processes occurred in a fast-changing economy. From 1920 until 1940, the North expanded its industrialization process at a furious pace. After World War II the South industrialized at an even more dramatic pace. Many northern industries moved south in search of lower production costs and have continued doing so. Hence, today over 70 percent of the southern labor force is engaged in nonagricultural pursuits. This industrialization process encouraged blacks to move from the rural South, which, coupled with the motivation to escape the violence of Jim Crow and the demise in agricultural jobs, created the optimal conditions for the “great migration.” 18 Although the 1.8 million blacks who migrated between 1910 and 1940 from the South to the North and West faced severe discrimination and economic constraints from white workers, labor unions, and whites in general, the

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North provided them expanded opportunities in all realms of life. This great migration continued between 1940 and 1970 as 4.4 million more blacks left the South.19 The impact of this migration was enormous on the overall condition of blacks. By 1970 blacks were geographically diffused throughout the United States; 80 percent were urban dwellers and had achieved a higher rate of urbanization than whites; blacks had increased levels of education and developed a small but thriving middle class; social and political organizations flourished and became training grounds for many black leaders; by virtue of their new geographic dispersion, blacks increasingly became a national group and were able to develop a new consciousness, new attitudes, and a new view on how to deal with racial discrimination, characterized by Gunnar Myrdal as the “protest motive.”20 Even in the South, the social, political, and cultural condition of blacks improved somewhat with the early process of industrialization.21 And after the 1960s, even their economic condition changed as the top business elite abandoned explicit discrimination because of the adverse economic effects created by violence and protest demonstrations.22 This pattern was reinforced by northern industrial capital, which had penetrated the South making the “southern system of brutality, social discrimination, and legalized (or extralegalized) persecution ... more and more economically and politically dysfunctional.”23 To be clear, neither urbanization nor industrialization was a nonracial “rational” progressive force in itself. Both northern and southern capitalists accommodated racial discrimination in their hiring practices, company policies, and daily protocol. In the case of southern capitalists, industrialization became a necessity with the progressive decline of its agricultural economy. Although southern capitalists were able to maintain both Jim Crow and industrialization for over fifty years (the 1890s through the 1950s), by the mid-1950s it became clear that the two institutions could not coexist peacefully. Blacks in the North had acquired enough political muscle to push the federal government to do something about their civil rights. After the Brown v. Board of Education decision of 1954 and its rejection by most of the South, instability and protests spread throughout the South. Such instability was an anathema for attracting capital; hence the business elite, reluctantly and gradually, accommodated the new policies.24 In the North, the accommodation began much earlier in the 1920s, 1930s, and particularly after World War II, and it involved

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the subordinate incorporation of blacks into industry.25 This accommodation, although progressive, maintained the view that blacks were inferior workers and kept them in the bottom of the occupational hierarchy. The views of northern managers were typified by a “progressive” manager who in the fifties commented that Negroes, basically and as a group, with only rare exceptions, are not as well trained for higher skills and jobs as whites. They appear to be excellent for work, usually unskilled, that requires stamina and brawn—and little else. They are unreliable and cannot adjust to the demands of the factory.26

Views like this have continued to plague U.S. capitalists in the post1960 period.27 Industrialization and urbanization made the southern Jim Crow system impossible to maintain, but it also provided a new context for struggle. These demographic, social, political, and economic factors made change almost inevitable. But ripe conditions are never enough to change any structural order (see Chapter 2). Hence, the racial order had to be directly challenged if it was going to be effectively transformed. That was the role fulfilled by the civil rights movement and other forms of mass protest by blacks (for instance, the so-called race riots) that took place in the 1950s, 1960s, and early 1970s. Organized and spontaneous challenges were the catalysts that brought down Jim Crow. Yet the demise of Jim Crow did not end racial discrimination and inequality in the United States. Since the mid-1970s various analysts have argued that “racism” (as usually defined) and race relations have acquired a new character.28 They point out the increasingly covert nature of racial discourse and racial practices; the avoidance of racial terminology in racial conflicts by whites; and the elaboration of a racial agenda about political matters (state intervention, individual rights, responsibility, etc.) that eschew any direct racial reference. In the following sections I detail post–civil rights discriminatory practices and assess their character. Interracial Social Interaction During the New Racism Period

In all areas of social life blacks and whites remain mostly separate and disturbingly unequal. A close examination of research in the

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areas of housing, education, and everyday social interaction reveals the minimal progress that has transpired since the 1960s.

Residential Segregation Residential segregation in the United States peaked in the 1950s and 1960s and, since then, there have been only modest changes.29 Today blacks are more segregated than any other racial or ethnic group, have experienced segregation longer than any other group, and are segregated at every income level. In their book American Apartheid, Douglas Massey and Nancy Denton measure the block-level indices of residential segregation of thirty metropolitan areas from 1940 to 1980. The index of residential segregation for the North is around 80 and for the South around 70 (an index of 100 indicates complete segregation and 0, no segregation at all).30 The costs to blacks of residential segregation are high; they are likely to pay more for housing in a limited market, likely to have lower-quality housing, less likely to own their housing, and likely to live in areas where employment is difficult to find. Also, they have to contend with prematurely depreciated housing.31 The big difference between the first half of the twentieth century and today is in how segregation is accomplished. In the Jim Crow era the housing industry used overtly discriminatory practices such as real estate agents employing outright refusal or subterfuge to avoid renting or selling to black customers, federal government redlining policies, overtly discriminatory insurance and lending practices, and racially restrictive covenants on housing deeds in order to maintain segregated communities.32 In contrast, in the post–civil rights era covert behaviors have replaced these practices and have maintained the same outcome—separate communities. Many studies have detailed the obstacles from government agencies, real estate agents, money lenders, and white residents that continue to limit housing options for minorities.33 Housing audits conducted in various U.S. cities suggest that blacks are denied available housing from 35 to 75 percent of the time depending on the city in question. Margery Austin Turner, Raymond Struyk, and John Yinger, in a study sponsored by the Department of Housing and Urban Development, found that blacks and Hispanics were discriminated against in approximately half of their efforts to rent or buy housing.34 These housing studies have shown that, when paired with similar white counterparts, blacks are more likely to be shown fewer apart-

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ments, quoted higher rents, offered worse conditions, or steered to specific neighborhoods. Although some analysts claim that this discrimination is not racially based, neighborhood studies, investigative reports by journalists, and anecdotal data clearly show that race matters.35 In one study of lending practices done by the Kentucky Human Rights Commission,36 black and white testers with equal characteristics requested conventional mortgages for the same housing from ten of the top lending institutions in Louisville, and while there were cases in which discrimination was apparent (blacks having trouble getting appointments, etc.), in the 85 visits made to inquire about loans, none of the black testers (with one exception) knew they were being discriminated against, though all of them were. Blacks were given less information, less encouragement to return and apply for the loan, fewer helpful hints for successfully obtaining a loan, and differential treatment in prequalifying—sometimes being told they would not qualify when whites of the same profile were told they would. Similar studies done in Chicago and New York revealed discrimination in seven out of ten lending institutions in Chicago and in the one institution studied in New York City.37 New national data from the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act show that black applicants are denied mortgages at least twice as frequently as whites of the same income and gender regardless of their income. 38 Finally, a study by the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston found that, controlling for a number of variables, blacks on average are denied loans 60 percent more often than whites.39 As for real estate agents, George Galster’s review of several fair housing audits found that blacks were systematically steered to different neighborhoods in over half of the audited transactions. He concludes, The evidence was fully consistent with only one hypothesis about why real estate agents steer. They steer so as to perpetuate two segregated housing markets buffered by a zone of racially transitional neighborhoods.40

Education The history of black-white education in this country is one of substantive inequities maintained through public institutions.41 While

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today many of the traditional barriers to black advancement have been outlawed, the situation is by no means one of equity. Although scholars have documented the narrowing of the gap in the quantity of education attained by blacks and whites (by 1990 the median level of education for both groups was 12.9 years of education),42 less has been said about the persisting gap in the quality of education received. Still remaining (and in some cases worsening) are high levels of de facto segregation, at least partly to blame for the gap in quality.43 However, tracking, differential assignment to special education, and other informal school practices are important factors too. Over 30 percent of black students attend schools that are 95 percent or more nonwhite and over 30 percent of white students attend schools that are less than 95 percent white.44 Despite some progress during the period immediately after 1964, the level of school segregation for black students remains relatively high in all regions and has deteriorated in the Northeast and Midwest regions. The relevance of this fact is that, as Gary Orfield has noted, “Segregated schools are still profoundly unequal.”45 Inner-city minority schools, in sharp contrast to white suburban schools, lack decent buildings, are overcrowded, have outdated equipment—if they have equipment at all— do not have enough textbooks for their students, lack library resources, are technologically behind, and pay their teaching and administrative staff less, which produces, despite exceptions, a low level of morale. These “savage inequalities,” as Jonathan Kozol calls them, have been directly related to lower reading achievement, limited computer skills, and lower levels of learning in general.46 In integrated schools, blacks still have to contend with discriminatory practices. Jeannie Oakes and her coauthors have found clear evidence of discriminatory practices in tracking within schools. Whites (and Asians) are considerably (and statistically significantly) more likely to be placed in the academic track than comparably achieving African American and Latino students.47 No wonder black students tend to score lower on the SAT than white students. What about blacks in higher education? The data at this level look even bleaker than those before college. First, fewer blacks complete high school than whites (66 percent of blacks compared to 79 percent of whites had completed high school in 1990). Second, the gap widens at the college level (whereas one-third of whites completed college, only 15.5 percent of blacks did so in 1990).48 Finally,

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minority students in predominantly white colleges endure various affronts from instructors, administrators, and their white peers. According to 1998 FBI statistics, campuses are the third most common venue for hate crimes.49

Other Areas of Social Life A brief survey of research in other areas of social life reveals persistent discrimination, unequal treatment, and, in some cases, Jim Crow–like exclusion. In terms of intermarriage, blacks are less likely than any other racial or ethnic group to intermarry.50 This is one of the few areas where whites still openly express reservations in surveys. Although the percentage of whites that claims to approve interracial marriage has increased from 10 percent in the early 1960s to about 60 percent today, still 40 percent of whites openly disapprove of it (for more on this matter, see Chapter 5).51 In addition to whites’ negative attitudes toward interracial relationships, the high level of residential segregation and the limited friendships between blacks and whites contribute to this low rate of intermarriage. Research by Mary Jackman and Marie Crane showed that only 9.4 percent of whites could name one good black friend. This led them to conclude that very few whites “could rightly claim that ‘some of their best friends are black.’”52 In the realm of everyday life, several recent works have attempted to examine the daily experiences blacks have with racism.53 In his interviews of middle-class blacks, Ellis Cose repeatedly discovered a sense among these “successful blacks” that they were being continually blocked and constrained in ways that make it impossible to hold anyone accountable. Black executives, lawyers, and bankers repeatedly reported a feeling of being second-class, of having a constant nagging sense that they were being treated differently despite doing everything they were supposed to do. In one series of examples Cose reports experiences of job tracking in which blacks were only given those jobs that dealt with “minority concerns” and which were seen as either unimportant or undesirable. Cose quotes many of his interviewees discussing the feeling of susceptibility to being “stripped of status at a moment’s notice” by a store clerk, a cab driver, the waiter at a restaurant, a security guard, etc.54 In 1981 Howard Schuman and his coauthors replicated a 1950

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study of restaurants in New York’s Upper East Side and found that a substantial amount of discrimination remained.55 Similar to the housing audits, the discrimination was of a subtle nature. Lawrence OtisGraham reports in his book Member of the Club that in the ten of New York’s best restaurants that he and his friends visited, they were stared at, mistaken for restaurant workers, seated in terrible spots, and buffered so as to avoid proximity to whites in most of them. Otis-Graham reports that they were treated reasonably well in only two of the ten restaurants, one Russian and the other French.56 The lawsuits recently filed against Denny’s, Shoney’s, and the International House of Pancakes seem to suggest that discrimination in restaurants is experienced by blacks of all class backgrounds. Joe R. Feagin and Melvin P. Sykes also document the dense network of discriminatory practices confronted by middle-class blacks in everyday life. Although they correctly point out that blacks face discriminatory practices that range from overt and violent to covert and gentle, the latter seem to be prevalent. In public spaces the discriminatory behavior described by black interviewees included poor service, special requirements applied only to them, surveillance in stores, being ignored at retail stores selling expensive commodities, receiving worse accommodations in restaurants or hotels, being confused constantly with menial workers, along with the usual but seemingly less frequent epithets and overtly racist behavior.57 A recent review of discrimination in everyday commercial transactions underscores the dearth of discrimination and its compound effect. For instance, one study documented that black and Latino testers experience discrimination in buying cars (black women pay $405 and black men $1,060 more than white men for new cars) and another in getting taxicabs (it takes 27 percent longer for blacks to get the cab and they are 11 percent more likely than whites not to get picked). Furthermore, blacks report experiencing discrimination 20 percent of the time they dine out and about 30 percent of the time they go shopping. These figures rise to 32 and 45 percent for the 18–24 age group.58 Interestingly, most of this discrimination is of the new style. In shopping for cars, for example, blacks, without the assistance of testers, are not able to identify price discrimination. In stores, being discreetly followed or asked repeatedly, “May I help you?” has become the order of the day but none of these two practices is legally regarded as discriminatory.

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The Political Structure of the New Racial Order

Almost all commentators on black politics recognize that blacks became serious participants in “legitimate” politics very recently. But since 1965, as blacks were able to register and vote, their representation in local and national political structures has increased dramatically. The data on this point are fairly clear. Whereas in 1970 there were only 1,460 black elected officials at all levels of the U.S. political system, by 1989 the total had increased to 7,226, and in the early 1990s their number reached 8,000. 59 Moreover, by 1990 “blacks held elective positions in every state except Idaho, Montana, and North Dakota.”60 In Congress there has been an increase in the number of African American elected officials from 10, or 1.9 percent of the members of Congress, in 1970 to 26, or 5.8 percent of the total, in 1991. Furthermore, whereas in 1970 only 48 cities, two with populations of 50,000 or more, had black mayors, by 1989 the number had mushroomed to 299, with 26 of them elected in large cities. Overall, the changes in this area give the impression of substantial progress and the beginning of a truly pluralist United States. The new political space that blacks have gained has without question provided them options that were unavailable before. Today blacks have some direct—although small—influence in policies, have sensitized white politicians about the needs of blacks not only through their policy suggestions but simply by their presence, and have established a direct link between government and citizenship.61 In terms of the cities where blacks have been elected as mayors, some commentators have pointed out that “African American–owned businesses expand, the rate of small business failure declines, and there are significant increases in both the number and proportions of African Americans employed in city government.”62 But despite these accomplishments, blacks remain a subordinate group in the political system. What follows is a discussion of the current obstacles blacks face in the political system.

Structural Barriers to the Election of Black Politicians Racial gerrymandering, multimember legislative districts, election runoffs, annexation of predominantly white areas, at-large district elections, and anti–single-shot devices (disallowing concentrating votes in one or two candidates in cities using at-large elections) have

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become standard practices to disenfranchise blacks since 1965.63 All of these tactics attempt to either minimize the number of majorityblack election districts or neutralize their electoral impact by diluting the black vote. Except for gerrymandering (drawing districts so that minority coalitions waste their votes), the mechanisms have the facade of expanding democracy and being race-neutral. For instance, at-large districts were initially developed to weaken political machines by diluting the ethnic vote but in recent times have become a way of diluting the black vote in cities. All these procedures are effective because black representation is still dependent on the existence of black districts.64 Furthermore, the very structure and rules of Congress impose limits on what blacks can accomplish there even in the best of all possible scenarios. As John C. Berg has argued, Congress has an internal structure, and positions in this structure give an advantage to those who hold them, but this advantage is biased; it is not equally available to the powerless and the powerful. Throughout America’s brief history, when representatives of oppressed groups have used the accommodationist strategy, that strategy has failed. They have climbed patiently up the ladder of Congressional seniority and committee position, only to find that they could not use their new power to effect the changes most needed by their constituents.65

Underrepresentation Among Elected and Appointed Officials The best proof that there are still structural barriers to the election of blacks is the fact that despite blacks’ burgeoning rate of voter registration and participation since 1965, black officials still represent 1 to 2 percent of all elected officials. Even more significant, blacks are substantially underrepresented even in places where they make up 30 percent or more of the entire population.66 Black appointees tend to be concentrated in the civil rights and social welfare bureaucracies and, in many of the remaining cases, are unrepresentative blacks like Justice Clarence Thomas, General Colin Powell, and Condoleezza Rice.67 Why are blacks so underrepresented? It is because of the historical tendency of whites to vote for or appoint only white candidates.68 Thus the election and appointment of blacks seem to be circumscribed to locales in which blacks constitute a substantial segment of

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the population (40 percent plus) or to black candidates who “mainstream” or show “moderation.”69

The Limited Possibilities of Elected and Appointed Officials What is the overall impact of black elected officials and appointees for the black community at large? In Congress, because of their relatively small numbers, blacks have a very limited role in creating policy. At best, they can shape aspects of legislation to soften the impact on poor minority communities and, so far, they have been able to curtail anti–civil rights legislation. The record of black appointees, who have been historically few, suggests that they tend to have an even more limited role in shaping policy. In addition, there is a disturbing trend of appointing antiblack blacks (a trend begun by President Carter), which fits well into my new racism argument.70 By appointing conservative blacks to certain positions, the political system is symbolically integrated while maintaining policies and politics that keep blacks “in their place.”

The Limited Impact of Elected Black Mayors Elected black mayors are in a political quandary because of the decline of political machines. This decline reduces significantly the “power” of the mayoral position since political machines allowed mayors in the past to dispense resources to their constituencies. Given that these political machines have been replaced by nonpartisan bureaucratic political structures, the likelihood of a black mayor being able to use his or her position for distributing resources has been seriously eroded. Moreover, the financial crisis of cities limits drastically the projects that mayors can carry out as well as their overall independence from the dominant elite.71 Furthermore, since cities are controlled by the interests of white business elites, elected black mayors are increasingly captive to progrowth policies based on making cities conducive to business investments. 72 These policies usually imply neglecting the most pressing needs of racial minorities and the poor. Moreover, despite the progressive impact that many have noted in the black community (appointment of blacks to various city positions, increase in the rate of black municipal employees, higher responsiveness to the needs of the poor, etc.), most of the benefits have not accrued to the black

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masses. More importantly, the election of black mayors, unlike those from white ethnic groups in the past, has not led to the institutionalization of “black control in the realms of public and private decision making.”73 Thus black mayors become “political managers” of cities in which the present economic, social, and political arrangements still benefit whites at large, and the elite in particular. The subordinate incorporation of blacks into electoral politics has reduced their options to effect meaningful social change. Historically, blacks have advanced in this country through overt protest politics.74 Hence the extension of universal suffrage to blacks has been a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it is one of the most enduring victories of the civil rights movement, but on the other hand, it is progressively becoming an obstacle for further black progress. Because the number of blacks in significant decisionmaking bodies (the U.S. House and Senate, for example) is minuscule, whites still vote largely for white candidates, and blacks do not have enough economic and social resources to use formal political rights as effectively as whites, electoral politics are effectively restricting the political options of blacks in the United States. An example of how electoral politics restricts the options of blacks is the current political impasse experienced by blacks. They cannot vote Republican since that party has become increasingly a white party;75 they cannot fully trust the Democratic Party since it has shown in recent times a tremendous degree of ambivalence in its commitment to blacks as evidenced in the racialized discourse of many leaders on welfare, crime, government spending, and affirmative action; and the third-party option, advocated by many progressives, is still a far-fetched idea with a very limited impact among black urban voters. The way out of this impasse seems to be a return to mass protest, but it is precisely that type of political activity that is incompatible with electoral politics. Hence what blacks need is what electoral participation limits. “Keeping Them in Their Place”: The Social Control of Blacks Since the 1960s

All domination is, in the last instance, maintained through social control strategies. For example, during slavery whites used the whip, overseers, night patrols, and other highly repressive practices along

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with some paternalistic ones to keep blacks “in their place.” After slavery was abolished whites felt threatened by free blacks, hence very strict written and unwritten rules of racial contact (the Jim Crow laws) were developed to specify “the place” of blacks in the new environment of “freedom.” And, as insurance, lynching and other terroristic forms of social control were used to guarantee white supremacy. In contrast, as Jim Crow practices subsided, the control of blacks is today chiefly attained through state agencies (e.g., the police, the criminal court system, and the FBI). Manning Marable describes the new system of control: The informal, vigilante-inspired techniques to suppress Blacks were no longer practical. Therefore, beginning with the Great Depression, and especially after 1945, white racists began to rely almost exclusively on the state apparatus to carry out the battle for white supremacy. Blacks charged with crimes would receive longer sentences than whites convicted of similar crimes. The police forces of municipal and metropolitan areas received a carte blanche in their daily acts of brutality against Blacks. The Federal and state government carefully monitored Blacks who advocated any kind of social change. Most important, capital punishment was used as a weapon against Blacks charged and convicted of major crimes. The criminal justice system, in short, became a modern instrument to perpetuate white hegemony. Extralegal lynchings were replaced by “legal lynchings” and capital punishment.76

In the following sections, I review data on social control to see how well they fit Marable’s interpretation of post–civil rights dynamics.

The State as Enforcer of Racial Order Data on arrest show that the contrast between black and white arrest rates since 1950 has been striking. The black rate increased throughout this period reaching almost 100 per 1,000 by 1978 compared to 35 per 1,000 for whites. In terms of how many blacks are incarcerated, we found a pattern similar to their arrest rates. Although blacks have always been overrepresented in the inmate population, this overrepresentation has skyrocketed since the late 1940s. In 1950, blacks were 29 percent of the prison population. Ten years later, their proportion reached 38 percent. By 1980, blacks made up 47 percent of the incarcerated population, six times that of whites. Today the

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incarceration rate of blacks has “stabilized” to constitute around 50 percent of the prison population.77 This dramatic increase in black incarceration has been attributed to legislative changes in the penal codes and the “get tough” attitude in law enforcement fueled by white fear of black crime. Furthermore, the fact that blacks are disproportionately convicted and receive longer sentences than whites for similar crimes contributes to their overrepresentation in the penal population. For example, “according to the Federal Judicial Center, in 1990 the average sentences for blacks on weapons and drug charges were 49 percent longer than those for whites who had committed and been convicted of the same crimes—and that disparity has been rising over time.”78 This disparity in sentencing, in conjunction with the complex ways in which race works out in the criminal justice system, may explain why, although blacks made up 31 percent of those arrested in 1995, their incarceration rate was close to 50 percent. In comparison, whites constituted 67 percent of those arrested but had an incarceration rate of 50 percent.79

Official State Brutality Against Blacks Police departments grew exponentially after the 1960s, particularly in large metropolitan areas with large concentrations of blacks. This growth has been related by various studies to black urban mobilization and rebellion in the 1960s. 80 Another way of measuring the impact of police departments on the life of blacks is surveying how blacks and whites rate police performance. Rosentraub and Harlow, in an article reviewing surveys on the attitudes of blacks and whites toward the police from 1960 through 1981, found that blacks consistently viewed the police in a much more negative light than did whites. Despite attempts in the 1970s and 1980s to reduce the friction between black communities and police departments by hiring more black police officers and, in some cases, even hiring black chiefs of police, “there has been little change in the attitudes of blacks toward the police, especially when the attitudes of black respondents are compared to those of white respondents.”81 A 1996 report by the Joint Center for Political Economic Studies confirmed this trend: 43 percent of blacks polled believed that police brutality and harassment of blacks were a serious problem where they lived.

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These numbers double when the black population polled resides in urban areas.82 The level of police force used with blacks has always been excessive.83 However, since the police became the primary agent of social control of blacks, the level of violence against them has skyrocketed. For example, in 1975, 46 percent of all the people killed by the police in official action were black. That situation has not changed much since. Robert C. Smith reported recently that of the people killed by the police, over half are black; the police usually claim that when they killed blacks it was “accidental” because they thought that the victim was armed although in fact the victims were unarmed in 75 percent of the cases; there was an increase in the 1980s in the use of deadly force by the police and the only ameliorating factor was the presence of a sensitive mayor in a city; and in the aftermath of the Rodney King verdict, 87 percent of civilian victims of police brutality reported in the newspapers of fifteen major U.S. cities were black, and 93 percent of the officers involved were white.84 The cases of Rodney King (the brutal behavior of the L.A. police caught on tape), Anthony Baez (choked to death in front of his house), Abner Louima (sodomized with a plunger), Ahmed “Amadou” Diallo (gunned down in a hail of 41 bullets), and the pattern of killing black suspects by the Cincinnati police department have crystallized the relevancy of contemporary police brutality.

Capital Punishment as Modern Form of Lynching The raw statistics on capital punishment seem to indicate racial bias prima facie: “Of 3984 people lawfully executed since 1930 [until 1980], 2113 were black, over half of the total, almost five times the proportion of blacks in the population as a whole.”85 However, social scientific research on racial sentencing has produced mixed results. Some authors find that there is bias in capital punishment, while others claim that as legal factors are taken into account, the bias disappears.86 Yet recent research has suggested that “discrimination has not declined or disappeared but simply has become more subtle and difficult to detect.”87 In a review of this literature Cassia Spohn contends that “race affects sentence severity indirectly through its effect on variables such as bail status or type of attorney or that race interacts with other variables and affects sentence severity only in particular types of cases or for particular defendants.”88 Others have point-

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ed out that the discrimination experienced by blacks may occur at earlier stages. For instance, research by M. L. Radelet and G. L. Pierce suggests that homicides with white victims and black suspects are more likely to be upgraded to a more aggravated description by prosecutors.89 Thus, straightforward regression models (additive and linear) will likely miss the effect of race. There is a substantial body of research showing that blacks charged with murdering whites are more likely to be sentenced to death than with any other victim-offender dyad. Similarly, blacks charged with raping white women receive the death sentence at a much higher rate than whites charged with raping white women. The two tendencies were confirmed by Spohn in a 1994 article using data for Detroit in 1977 and 1978: “Blacks who sexually assaulted whites faced a greater risk of incarceration than either blacks or whites who sexually assaulted blacks or whites who sexually assaulted whites; similarly, blacks who murdered whites received longer sentences than did offenders in the other two categories.”90 The most respected study on race and death penalty, carried out by David C. Baldus to support the claim of Warren McClesky, a black man convicted of murdering a white police officer in 1978, found that there was a huge disparity in the imposition of the death penalty in Georgia. The study found that in cases involving white victims and black defendants, the death penalty was imposed 22 percent of the time whereas with the reverse dyad, the death penalty was imposed in only 1 percent of the cases. Even after controlling for a number of variables, blacks were 4.3 times as likely as whites to receive a death sentence. In a 1990 review of 28 studies on death penalty sentencing, 23 of the studies showed that the fact that victims are white “influences the likelihood that the defendant will be charged with a capital crime or that death penalty will be imposed.”91 It should not surprise anyone that in a racialized society, court decisions on cases involving the death penalty exhibit a race effect. Research on juries suggests that they tend to be older, more affluent, more educated, more conviction-prone, and more white than the average in the community.92 Moreover, research on the process of selecting jurors for death penalty cases suggests that the voir dire process (questions to select the jury) produces juries that are pro–death penalty.93 This particular bias has been found to have a racial effect. Gregory D. Russell, in The Death Penalty and Racial Bias: Overturning Supreme Court Assumptions, found indirect data

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(exhibited via surrogate measures) of racial bias among death-qualified jurors.94 This finding adds to our understanding of why there is a differential conviction rate for blacks and whites in cases involving the death penalty. As Russell explains, The evidence developed did suggest that juries composed of death-qualified jurors are more likely to be white, punitive, and authoritarian. Hence, they are more likely, on this evidence, to exhibit a tendency toward racially biased decisions. Will every juror or jury act in this manner? Of course not. The evidence simply suggests the probability that jurors so composed are more likely than not to be more predisposed to racially biased determinations than other juries, though the appearance of racial bias is quite idiosyncratic.95

Preliminary data from the Capital Jury Study96—ongoing interviews with more than 1,000 jurors who have served in death penalty trials in 14 states—reveal that deep-seated prejudice finds its way into the jury room. The following three statements by some of the jurors interviewed in this study chillingly illustrate this point: He [the defendant] was a big man who looked like a criminal. . . . He was big an’ black an’ kind of ugly. So, I guess when I saw him I thought this fits the part. You know, if they’d been white people, I would’ve had a different attitude. I’m sorry that I feel that way. Just a typical nigger. Sorry, that’s the way I feel about it.97

High Propensity to Arrest Blacks Blacks complain that police officers mistreat them, disrespect them, assume that they are criminals, violate their rights on a consistent basis, and are more violent when dealing with them than when dealing with whites. Blacks and other minorities are stopped and frisked by police in “alarmingly disproportionately numbers.”98 Why is it that minorities receive “special treatment” from the police? Studies on police attitudes and their socialization suggest that police officers live in a “cops’ world” and develop a cop mentality.99 That cops’ world is a highly racialized one; minorities are viewed as dangerous, prone to crime, violent, and disrespectful. Various studies have noted that the racist attitudes that police officers exhibit have an impact in

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their behavior toward minorities. Furthermore, other studies have suggested that police discretion and demographic bias contribute to the overarrest of blacks. Extralegal subjective characteristics such as demeanor, appearance, and race have been found to influence the decision of police officers to arrest individuals.100 In terms of demographic bias, research suggests that because black communities are overpatrolled, officers patrolling these areas develop a stereotypical view of residents as more likely to commit criminal acts and are more likely to “see” criminal behavior than in white communities.101 Thus it is not surprising that blacks are disproportionately arrested compared to whites. It is possible to gauge the level of overarrest endured by blacks by comparing the proportion of times that they are described by victims as the attackers with their arrest rates. Using this procedure, Farai Chideya contends, For virtually every type of crime, African-American criminals are arrested at rates above their commission of the acts. For example, victimization reports indicated that 33 percent of women who were raped said that their attacker was black; however, black rape suspects made up fully 43 percent of those arrested. The disproportionate arrest rate adds to the public perception that rape is a “black” crime.102

Using these numbers, the rate of overarrest for blacks in cases of rape is 30 percent. As shocking as this seems to be, the rate for cases wherein the victim is white is even higher. Douglas Smith, Christy Visher, and Laura Davidson found that whereas the probability of arrest for cases in which the victim was white and the suspect black was 33.6 percent, for cases of white suspects and black victims the probability dropped to 10.7 percent.103

Repression of Black Leaders and the Civil Rights Movement Leaders of the black movement such as Elijah Muhammad, Malcolm X, Stokely Carmichael, Louis Farrakhan, Huey P. Newton, Bobby Seale, Ron Karenga, and Martin Luther King Jr. and organizations such as SNCC, NAACP, SCLC, Black Panthers, RAM, and MOVE104 have been monitored by the FBI. Of particular significance was the six-year investigation (from 1962 to 1968) launched by the FBI against Martin Luther King Jr. given that King, unlike other black leaders of his time, was not advocating change through radical means. As David Garrow points out, “it is quite apparent that no

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other black leader came in for the intensive and hostile attention that Dr. King was subjected to in the mid-1960s.”105 Although initially the FBI claimed that the surveillance of King and the SCLC was because communists were involved in the organization—in this sense, it fit the FBI organizational prerogatives—it soon delved into purely private matters of King’s life with the explicit intent of discrediting him.106 Although many theories have been advanced for why King was singled out (J. Edgar Hoover’s racism, racism in the FBI, Hoover’s reaction to King’s public criticism of the FBI in 1961, the conservatism of the FBI, and Hoover’s as well as other top FBI agents’ fascination with sexuality), the bottom line was that King, the most important black leader of this century, was carefully monitored by the FBI until his assassination in 1968. The FBI persecution of leaders such as Elijah Muhammad and Malcolm X and their organization, the Nation of Islam, was less hostile and consistent than that of King and the SCLC because they were not mobilizing the black masses as King was. Only after Malcolm began making overtures to civil rights leaders and advocating militant political involvement did the FBI begin paying serious attention to him.107 After Malcolm’s assassination in 1965—an assassination in which the FBI was apparently involved108—the FBI launched a special offensive (the COINTELPRO against so-called black nationalist hate groups) to curb the spread of black nationalism by any means necessary.109 By 1967, the FBI had over 3,000 informants in black communities as part of this program and was conducting surveillance and playing “dirty tricks” 110 on SNCC leader Stokely Carmichael and on the Black Panthers.111 The FBI through a smear campaign and other techniques neutralized Stokely Carmichael, H. Rap Brown, the Reverend Charles Koen of the Cairo United Front, and activist-comedian Dick Gregory. Even seemingly less threatening groups such as black student unions on campuses around the nation were infiltrated by the FBI.112 By the time the COINTELPRO became known to U.S. citizens in 1971, radical black organizations had been all but dismantled.

Post–Civil Rights Social Control and the New Racism Police brutality, overarrest, racial profiling, and many of the other social control mechanisms used to keep blacks “in their (new) place” in the contemporary United States are not overwhelmingly covert.

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Yet, similar to many of the mechanisms previously discussed in this chapter, these practices are invisible to vast numbers of U.S. citizens. They are rendered invisible in four ways. First, because the enforcement of the racial order from the 1960s onward has been institutionalized, individual whites can express a detachment from the racialized way in which social control agencies operate in the United States. Second, because these agencies are legally charged with maintaining order in society, their actions are deemed neutral and necessary. Thus, it is no surprise that whereas blacks mistrust the police in surveys, whites consistently support them.113 Third, journalists and academicians investigating crime are central agents in the reproduction of distorted views on crime. Few report the larger facts of crime in the United States (e.g., most crime is committed by whites; so-called white-collar crime costs us ten times as much as street crime; youth crime, which accounts for most crime, is directly connected to the “structure of opportunity” youngsters face,114 etc.). Instead, thanks to their efforts, “The public’s perception is that crime is violent, Black, and male, [trends that] have converged to create the criminalblackman.”115 Finally, incidents that seem to indicate racial bias in the criminal justice system are depicted by white-dominated media as isolated incidents. For example, cases that presumably expose the racial character of social control agencies (e.g., the police beating of Rodney King, the police killing of Malice Green, the acquittal or lenient sentences received by officers accused of police brutality, etc.) are viewed as “isolated” incidents and are separated from the larger social context in which they transpire. Therefore, these mechanisms fit my claim about the new racism because they are largely undetected and ignored. The Continuing Racial Economic Inequality

The economic life of blacks has always been structured by racial inequality. A substantial body of literature on white-black employment differences has documented the influence of labor market discrimination, wage differentials, and occupational segmentation as well as income and wealth inequalities in explaining racially differential economic outcomes.116 Despite the well-documented disparities between blacks and whites, many social scientists have focused their attention on the growth of the black middle class as a sign of

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significant racial progress.117 Some of them have projected the “success” of this segment of the black community to all blacks, creating an image of general economic progress. To be sure, blacks have experienced significant progress in several areas of their economic life over the past three decades (e.g., the economic standing of black women vis-à-vis white women, the opening of jobs that were reserved for whites, and the development of a significant middleincome class). Yet their overall situation relative to whites has not advanced that much.118 In the following sections I highlight the economic status of blacks and the mechanisms that structure racial inequality at the economic level in the post–civil rights period.

Income and Earnings Differentials Studies analyzing the differences in median income between blacks and whites have revealed some convergence, and much of it has been attributed to the rising levels of educational attainment of African Americans, in particular among younger cohorts, as well as affirmative action policies.119 However, the empirical evidence regarding racial convergence in income is somewhat mixed. Several social scientists have found that family incomes of African Americans began rapid convergence with whites from World War II up until the recession of the early 1970s when African American income levels began to stagnate and the racial convergence ceased.120 In fact, by 1990 a substantial black-white earnings gap had reemerged as the blackwhite family income ratio reached .56, a ratio hardly larger than the .55 of 1960.121 Interestingly, the decline in blacks’ income vis-à-vis whites has been attributed to the decline in enforcement of antidiscrimination laws and affirmative action policies by the federal government in the 1980s. 122 Thus, while African Americans made marked advancement from World War II to the early 1970s, they have experienced more recently—in the 1980s and 1990s—a substantial deterioration in their income relative to whites.123 Furthermore, analysts who focus on income convergence tend to mask serious trends affecting the African American population such as unemployment and underemployment and the decrease in the rate of labor force participation—by making their comparisons based on full-time workers. William Darity and Samuel Myers astutely observe that the exclusion of African Americans with zero incomes

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(i.e., the unemployed and the jobless) in social scientists’ assessment of income differences between African Americans and whites masks the persistent racial fault line in economic life.124 The gap in unemployment between blacks and whites increased during the 1970s and the 1980s, the same period in which African Americans’ incomes ceased converging with whites’.125 Income differences reflect to a large extent the different earning potential of blacks and whites in America. Blacks earn today around 60 percent as much as whites. This vast difference is attributed to blacks’ lesser educational attainment, lesser rates of return for their education and their labor market experience, and their concentration in the South, all directly related to the racial dynamics of this country.126 Does the difference in earnings disappear when the comparison is between blacks and whites with similar characteristics? The answer is no. Reynolds Farley and Walter Allen did such a comparison for 1980 and found the gap for black men to be 14 percent. Although this gap, known in the literature as the “cost of being black,” was better than the 19 percent gap of 1960, the fact that the gap grew to 16 percent in 1985 does not give much hope.127

Occupational Mobility and Segmentation One of the primary reasons why blacks’ economic standing is much worse than that of whites is occupational race-typing. Although recent occupational data show that African Americans have made substantial progress in obtaining employment in occupational categories from which they were, for all practical purposes, excluded, they are still overrepresented among unskilled workers and underrepresented in higher-paying white-collar jobs.128 In 1960, whereas 60.4 percent of white men worked in blue-collar jobs, a whopping 76.7 percent of blacks did so. In 1990, as the economy shifted away from the industrial to the service sector, the proportion of both blacks and whites in blue-collar jobs decreased significantly. However, 52.5 percent of black men worked in blue-collar occupations compared to 43.2 percent of whites. More significantly, whereas white men were more likely to be employed as managers and professionals (27.3%), black men were more likely to be employed as operators, fabricators, and laborers (33.4%).129 Two other factors point to the segmentation experienced by

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blacks in the United States. First, despite the increase in the proportion of blacks in managerial and professional occupations, those employed in these occupations have lower earnings than their white counterparts.130 Second, their occupational mobility is less frequent and more restricted than that of whites.131 Some mainstream analysts have attributed the racial differences in earnings to the existing educational gap between blacks and whites.132 However, an examination of returns from education challenges such simple assessment. Jeremiah Cotton found that racial differences among those employed in the managerial and professional occupations could not be explained by educational differences. 133 This is not surprising as research has consistently shown that blacks earn less than whites in almost all occupations. For instance, Farley and Allen’s analysis of 1979 data for full-time workers with the same educational attainment and of similar age revealed that black men earned less than white men in all occupations. For instance, black doctors 25–34 years of age earned $3.39 less than their white counterparts and janitors earned $1.33 less than their counterparts per hour.134 On the second point, studies since the 1960s have suggested that, for the most part, Jim Crow discrimination has been replaced by a new web of practices that limits the mobility of blacks and affects their everyday performance.135 One of the most pervasive of these practices is pigeonholing blacks in some positions, a practice reminiscent of typecasting blacks for “nigger jobs” during the Jim Crow era. For instance, Sharon Collins finds that many African American executives fill affirmative action, community relations, minority affairs or public relations positions, positions created during the 1960s and 1970s to respond to civil rights demands and which do not provide much mobility.136

Labor Market Discrimination Since the early 1960s social scientists have acknowledged that labor market discrimination is an important causal factor in explaining the differential employment outcomes of blacks and whites.137 Yet, until recently, studies on labor market discrimination assessed discrimination as the unexplained residual in black and white earnings after controlling for a number of variables. Although this measurement is useful, it tends to underestimate the real impact of discrimination by eliminating differences in, for

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example, education and occupational status that are themselves the product of discrimination.138 In the last twenty years analysts developed a research strategy to directly assess the impact of discrimination. The technique used to examine labor market discrimination is called an employment audit and consists of sending subjects matched in most characteristics except their race to find jobs.139 By doing this, analysts have been able to estimate the extent as well as assess the form of discrimination that minorities endure in the labor market. Jerome Culp and Bruce Dunson conducted the first employment audits and reported that black males were not (1) addressed as “Mr,” (2) invited to sit, (3) offered a handshake, or (4) engaged in conversation. In addition, Culp and Dunson found two clear signs of discrimination in that several employers in the sample did not tell the black males about employment opportunities and quoted lower wages to black male applicants.140 Probably the most famous of these studies was that carried out by the Urban Institute in 1991. It was conducted on randomly selected employers in San Diego, Chicago, and Washington, D.C., and found that on average, white testers were significantly favored over black testers. For example, in 20 percent of the audits blacks were denied job opportunities, and in 31 percent of the audits Latinos were denied job opportunities.141 Finally, research by James Braddock and J. M. McPartland indicates that blacks are discriminated against at all levels of the job process. In the search process, they are left behind because most employers rely on informal social networks to advertise their jobs.142 And, because blacks are not part of those networks, they are left out in the cold.143 At the job entry level, in addition to the practices mentioned before, blacks are screened out by tests and the requirement of a high school diploma. These two practices were developed in the late fifties and early 1960s as substitutes for outright exclusion from jobs and were mentioned in the 1964 Civil Rights Act as practices that could have exclusionary results. They are discriminatory because the diploma and the tests are not usually essential to job performance. Finally, in terms of job promotion, blacks face a glass ceiling because (1) they are pigeonholed in dead-end jobs, (2) employers seek people for promotion informally and blacks are less likely to be part of the “good-old-boys’ network,” and (3) seniority rules favor whites when promotion time comes around.144

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Wealth There is very little data on the wealth differentials between blacks and whites in the United States. Yet the available data indicate that the disparities in this important area are greater than in any other economic area. One of the earliest studies, using data for 1967, showed that blacks on average had 18.8 percent the net wealth of whites.145 Although the wealth gap decreased with education and income, it never topped 47 percent. This study also showed that whereas whites had a more diversified portfolio of assets (30 percent liquid and 70 percent nonliquid), blacks had almost all their assets in nonliquid forms (equity in homes, cars, etc.). Data for 1984 indicated no change in this area. For instance, the black-white net worth averaged 9 percent for all households and, although the gap decreased at higher levels of income, it never topped 46 percent. The most recent study on wealth indicated that the black-white ratio in net worth for 1988 was 8 percent and that most blacks did not own any financial assets. The implications of this last point are startling. According to Melvin Oliver and Thomas Shapiro 61 percent of blacks compared to 25 percent of whites do not have liquid assets to survive at the poverty level in case of unemployment or a family crisis. If you include the figure of those who cannot survive for more than three months, the proportion reaches 79 percent for blacks and 38 percent for whites. As in previous studies, the wealth fragility of blacks was evidenced in all groups. For instance, the net per-person financial assets of the black middle class, whether indexed by income, occupation, or education, did not surpass $290.146 In addition to the historical effects of discrimination, Oliver and Shapiro uncover a number of practices that contribute to the current wealth disparity. Among the institutional factors that they discuss are the higher denial of loans for blacks (60 percent higher than for whites), the higher interest rates that banks charge them (1 percent higher), and the lower appreciation of their houses.147

Managerial Views on Blacks Have the views of white managers on blacks changed dramatically since the 1960s? The research done on this matter suggests that their

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views have not changed that much. Early studies were very optimistic and claimed that managers would assume their social responsibilities toward blacks after years of exclusion.148 However, by the late 1960s a study sponsored by the American Management Association in which black white-collar workers were interviewed revealed that 60 percent thought that whites were condescending to them.149 Another study concluded that employers were paying lip service to Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and that they were placing the brunt of the blame for employment problems with blacks on blacks themselves.150 In the seventies, John Fernandez found in his survey of eight firms in California that a significant proportion of managers held old-fashioned racist views and believed that blacks were pushing too hard. Furthermore, in the open-ended questions managers who had scored relatively well in other parts of the survey were more likely to express antiblack views. All in all, only 10 percent of black managers and 17 percent of the whites said that they were not aware of any negative attitude toward blacks.151 The results of these studies are confirmed by recent surveys of blacks in corporate America. Blacks complain that they are bypassed by white managers for promotion, that they are not treated as equals, and that they endure a subtle hostility from their fellow workers and supervisors.152 White employers and managers hiring for unskilled positions hold views that are more openly racist. In interviews with Chicago and Cook County employers, Joleen Kirschenman and Kathryn Neckerman found that blacks were considered to have a bad work ethic and attitude, create tensions in the workplace, be lazy and unreliable, and lack leadership. Many of these views were captured by a suburban drugstore manager: It’s unfortunate, but, in my business I think overall [black men] tend to be known as dishonest. I think that’s too bad but that’s the image they have. [So you think it’s an image problem?] Yeah, a dishonest, an image problem of being dishonest, mean and lazy. They are known to be lazy. They are. I hate to tell you, but. . . . It’s all an image though. Whether they are or not, I don’t know, but, it’s an image that is perceived. [I see. How do you think that image was developed?] Go look in the jails.153

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Conclusion

As the United States entered a profound crisis of accumulation in the 1970s, poor and working-class whites began blaming minorities for the decline in jobs. Hence hate crimes, typical of the apartheid period of race relations, have resurfaced since the late 1970s.154 Organized hate groups such as the Ku Klux Klan grew in membership from 5,000 in 1973 to 20,000 by 1990. Jack Levin and Jack McDevitt estimate that the total number of people involved in organized hate groups today is between 20,000 and 50,000.155 Yet, despite this upsurge in racial attacks in the United States and the increase in the membership of the Klan and Klan-like groups, their membership today pales against the 5 million members they had in the 1920s. Moreover, extralegal violence today, as sensational and symbolic as it is, is not the primary method used to keep blacks in check. New racial practices characterized by their covertness and subtlety, explicit avoidance of traditional racist discourse, and insulation through institutionalization in the “normal” operations of many organizations have, for the most part, replaced Jim Crow practices. The changes in the racial dynamics at all levels seem to amount to a reorganization—still incomplete and somewhat partial—of the racial structure of the United States. This reorganization is incomplete because (1) not all the mechanisms and practices have settled, that is, have become institutionalized, and (2) we still have many legacies of the previous period affecting the life chances of blacks. On the first point, discrimination in the realm of education, for example, has not taken a definite institutional pattern in the contemporary period. Instead, there are various means (resegregation through white flight to the suburbs and to private schools, within school segregation, tracking, etc.) to guarantee white advantages. On the second point, we still have old-fashioned racists, extralegal violence, and an undeclared apartheid in the housing arena. Although many of these practices are manifestations of the legacies of slavery and the Jim Crow era in this country, the evidence reviewed here suggests that blacks and other minorities should fear less the angry men with white hoods and their traditional discriminatory practices than the men (and women) with suits and their “smiling discrimination.”156 I agree with Thomas Pettigrew and Joanne Martin when they claim,

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The greater subtlety of these new forms [of racial discrimination] poses new problems of remedy. They act at both the structuralinstitutional level focused on by sociologists, and the face-to-face situational level focused on by social psychologists.157

The hurdles that require remedy include: 1. Proving racial discrimination is extremely difficult for the party being discriminated against. Thus, it is not surprising that many progressive whites do not take seriously many claims of discrimination. As Pettigrew and Martin point out: Often the black is the only person in a position to draw the conclusion that prejudice is operating in the work situation. Whites have usually observed only a subset of the incidents, any one of which can be explained away by a nonracial account. Consequently, many whites remain unconvinced of the reality of subtle prejudice and discrimination, and come to think of their black co-workers as “terribly touchy” and “overly sensitive” to the issue. For such reasons, the modern forms of prejudice frequently remain invisible even to its perpetrators.158

2. The standards that the Supreme Court enacted recently on discrimination cases (plaintiffs carrying the burden of proof in discrimination cases and the denial of statistical evidence as valid proof of discrimination) help to preserve intact the contemporary forms for reproducing racial inequality in the United States. Unless the court becomes cognizant of the new character of racial discrimination and changes its current practice of requiring the “smoking gun” in discrimination cases, the Court itself will be participating in covering up the far-reaching effects of racism. 3. Minority leaders who continue to focus on the “old racism” will miss the most important manners by which racial inequality is being reproduced in the United States. It is vital that studies documenting the pervasive and comprehensive character of the new racism are done systematically. 4. Research that is still focused on the old racism will invariably find a decline in the significance of race. Contemporary research on racial practices has to become as sophisticated as the new racism. The studies carried out by the Urban Institute and HUD in which testers are sent out to various settings and organizations are an example of what can be done. Unfortunately, that type of research is not

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viewed as “scientific” in many quarters and has even been deemed as “unethical.” 5. On the policy front, there are at least two major hurdles. First, because many civil rights regulations were based on the struggle against Jim Crow racism, they are not very effective tools to fight contemporary discrimination. Second, the call for replacing racebased with class-based policies, despite its intellectual appeal, must be rejected. Since racial discrimination is alive and well, eliminating race-specific policies without racially based alternatives in place is nonsensical. The web of discriminatory practices in the contemporary period has not cemented yet. Hence it is still possible to mount an offensive to change its course. However, at the present time, the prospects for such an offensive look bleak. Many of the achievements of the civil rights movement (e.g., affirmative action, the real possibility of bringing claims against organizations for discrimination, efforts to desegregate schools) are being rapidly eroded. At the same time, the civil rights movement and many of its organizations are in a state of disarray, there is a serious crisis in leadership in minority communities, and many traditional allies have moved to the right. 159 For example, during the summer of 1995 the Supreme Court imposed “formidable standards” for government-sponsored affirmative action programs and the Board of Regents of the University of California system decided to eliminate its affirmative action programs, yet organizations representing minorities have not been able to offer any significant resistance.160 Progressives and civil rights groups have not been able to challenge the subtle racialization of the discourse on crime, taxes, and welfare, a practice that has paid dividends to the Republican Party and which the Democratic Party has embraced in recent times. Therefore, unless this situation is reversed, the new racial practices will become our enemy for years to come. If there is a new racial structure responsible for the reproduction of racial inequality, new ideas must have emerged to support and reproduce its existence. The examination of post–civil rights racial ideology is thus my task in the next chapter. Notes 1. Since whites believe that discrimination is not central in the United States, they disbelieve blacks’ claims that it is. That is why so many whites

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believe, as the 1993 Anti-Defamation League of B’nai and B’rith poll found (62 percent), that blacks complain too much. I found a similar rate in my 1998 Detroit Area Study. 2. Wilson, The Declining Significance of Race (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980 [1978]), p. 150. Although Wilson never claimed that “racism” had disappeared, the suggestive title of his book and the argument that class was more salient than race in shaping blacks’ life chances left the unmistakable impression that Wilson believed that racism was not a central factor in the United States. 3. Early articles on this optimistic view were written by Paul B. Sheatsley in Scientific American and later reproduced elsewhere. For example, see Sheatsley, “White Attitudes Toward the Negro,” pp. 303–324 in The Negro American, edited by Talcott Parsons and Kenneth B. Clark (Boston: Beacon Press, 1966). This tradition has continued in the work of Paul Sniderman, The Scar of Race (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993) and Reaching Beyond Race (Cambridge, MA, and London, England: Harvard University Press, 1997); Lipset, American Exceptionalism (New York and London: W. W. Norton, 1996); and to a lesser extent, in the work of Howard Schuman, e.g., Racial Attitudes in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997). 4. This tradition is strong and has many adherents. For early examples, see Otis A. Duncan, “Patterns of Occupational Mobility Among Negro Men,” Demography 5 (1968): 11–22. For more recent examples, see James P. Smith and Finnis R. Welch, Closing the Gap: Forty Years of Economic Progress for Blacks (Santa Monica, CA: Rand Corporation, 1986). 5. See, particularly, Pinkney, The Myth of Black Progress (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1984); Derrick Bell, Faces at the Bottom of the Well (New York: Basic Books, 1992); and Charles V. Willie, Caste and Class Controversy on Race and Poverty (New York: General Hall Inc., 1989). 6. For similar arguments, see Roy L. Brooks, Rethinking the American Race Problem (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and Oxford: University of California Press, 1990); and Robert C. Smith, Racism in the Post–Civil Rights Era: Now You See It, Now You Don’t (New York: State University of New York Press, 1995). 7. I limit the analysis to white-black racial inequality. Nevertheless, I contend that this structure shapes the life chances of most racial minorities in the United States. 8. Lorenzo Greene and Carter G. Woodson, The Negro Wage Earner (New York: Association for the Study of Negro Life and History, Inc., 1930); George M. Fredrickson, White Supremacy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981); Mary Beth Norton et al., A People and a Nation: A History of the U.S. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1990). 9. Myrdal, An American Dilemma (New York and London: Harper and Brothers Publishers, 1944); Sterling D. Spero and Abraham L. Harris, The Black Worker: The Negro and the Labor Movement (New York: Atheneum, 1974); Robert Higgs, Competition and Coercion: Blacks in the American Economy, 1865–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,

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1977); Foner, Organized Labor and the Black Worker, 1619–1981 (New York: International Publishers, 1981). 10. Spero and Harris, The Black Worker, 155–156. 11. Woodward, The Strange Career of Jim Crow (New York: Oxford University Press, 1966); Fredrickson, White Supremacy. 12. Woodward, The Strange Career of Jim Crow, 102. 13. Hanes Walton, Black Politics: A Theoretical and Structural Analysis (Philadelphia, New York, and Toronto: J. B. Lippincott Company, 1972); Ernest Patterson, City Politics (New York: Dood, Mead, and Co., 1974). 14. Marable, How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America; William M. Tuttle, Jr., “Labor Conflict and Racial Violence: The Black Worker in Chicago, 1894–1919,” pp. 86–110 in Black Labor in America, edited by Milton Cantor (Westport, CT: Negro Universities Press, 1970). 15. Thomas Gossett, Race: The History of an Idea in America (Dallas, TX: Southern Methodist University Press, 1963); Newby, Jim Crow’s Defense (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University, 1965). 16. On black migration, see Florette Henri, Black Migration: Movement North, 1900–1920 (New York: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1975); and Alferdteen Harrison, Black Exodus: The Great Migration from the American South (Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 1991). On blacks’ resistance to occupational segregation, see Tuttle, “Labor Conflict and Racial Violence”; Foner, Organized Labor and the Black Worker, 1619–1981; and Melvin M. Leiman, Political Economy of Racism (London and Boulder: Pluto Press, 1991). On blacks’ political organizational efforts against Jim Crow, see Douglas McAdam, Political Process and the Development of Black Insurgency, 1930–1970 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982); and Aldon Morris, The Origins of the Civil Rights Movement: Black Communities Organizing for Change (New York: Free Press, 1984). 17. On the contradictions between fighting for “democracy” abroad and living in segregation at home, see Richard M. Dalfiume, Desegregation in the Armed Forces: Fighting on Two Fronts, 1939–1953 (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 1969); Neil A. Wynn, The Afro-American and the Second World War (New York: Holmes and Meier Publishers, Inc., 1993); and Richard M. Burkey, Racial Discrimination and Public Policy in the United States (Lexington, MA, London, and Toronto: Heath Lexington Books, 1971). 18. For the effect of industrialization on black migration, see Stewart Tolnay and E. M. Beck, “Rethinking the Role of Racial Violence in the Great Migration,” pp. 20–35 in Black Exodus, edited by Alferdteen Harrison (Jackson, MS: University of Mississippi Press, 1991). For discussions on the demise of the southern agricultural economy and race relations, see Ray Marshall, “Industrialisation and Race Relations in the Southern United States,” pp. 61–96 in Industrialisation and Race Relations: A Symposium, edited by Guy Hunter (London and New York: Oxford University Press, 1965); Virgil Christian and Admentios Pepelasis, “Rural Problems,” Employment of Blacks in the South, edited by Virgil Christian and Admentios Pepelasi (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1978).

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19. For an estimate on the number of black migrants in this period, see Dernoral Davis, “Toward a Socio-Historical and Demographic Portrait of Twentieth-Century African Americans,” pp. 1–19 in Black Exodus: The Great Migration from the American South, edited by Alferdteen Harrison (Jackson, MS: University of Mississippi Press, 1991). For discussions on the conditions they faced in the South, see Carole Marks, “The Social and Economic Life of Southern Blacks During the Migration,” pp. 36–50 in Black Exodus, edited by Alferdteen Harrison (Jackson, MS: University of Mississippi Press, 1991). For discussions of the conditions they faced in the North, see Tuttle, “Labor Conflict and Racial Violence,” and Foner, Organized Labor and the Black Worker, 1619–1981. 20. Myrdal, An American Dilemma. 21. Ibid., 998–999. 22. See Christian and Pepelasis, “Rural Problems.” 23. Leiman, Political Economy of Racism, 174. 24. For a superb collection of articles dealing with the attitudes of various southern elites in this period, see Elizabeth Jacoway and David R. Colburn, Southern Businessmen and Desegregation (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1982). 25. The incorporation of blacks became almost a necessity with the tremendous manpower needs of World War I, World War II, the Korean War, and the economic boom during the Pax Americana (1944–1960s). This process was slow and marred with lots of opposition and posturing from northern capitalists and the pressure from local states and the federal government as well as civil rights organizations. For an account of the racial attitudes of northern businesspeople and of the protracted acceptance of blacks in industry, see Steven M. Gelber, Black Men and Businessmen: The Growing Awareness of a Social Responsibility (Port Washington, NY: Kennikat Press, 1974). 26. Joseph J. Morrow, “American Negroes—A Wasted Resource,” Harvard Business Review (January–February 1957): 65–74; quoted from p. 69. 27. Victor Perlo, Economics of Racism U.S.A. (New York: International Publishers, 1975); Wilson, When Work Disappears (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996). 28. Judith Caditz, White Liberals in Transition: Current Dilemmas of Ethnic Integration (New York: Spectrum Publications, Inc., 1976); Wellman, Portraits of White Racism (Cambridge, London: Cambridge University Press, 1977); and, in particular, see Dorothy K. Newman et al., Protest, Politics, and Prosperity: Black Americans and White Institutions, 1940–75 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978). 29. Reynolds Farley and Walter R. Allen, The Color Line and the Quality of Life in America (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1987). 30. Massey and Denton, American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the American Underclass (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993). 31. The references on these matters are extensive. A few important ones published in the 1970s are Harold Baron, “The Web of Urban Racism,”

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pp. 134–176 in Institutional Racism in America, edited by Louis L. Knowles and Kenneth Prewitt (Patterson, NJ: Prentice Hall); Raymond S. Franklin and Solomon Resnick, The Political Economy of Racism (Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1973); Thomas A. King and Peter Mieszkowski, “Racial Discrimination, Segregation, and the Price of Housing,” Journal of Political Economy 81 (1973): 590–606; George C. Galster, “A Bid Rent Analysis of Housing Market Discrimination,” American Economic Review 67 (1977): 144–155. For a recent review, see John Yinger, Closed Doors, Opportunities Lost: The Continuing Costs of Housing Discrimination (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1995). 32. Karl E. Tauber and Alma E. Tauber, Negroes in Cities (Chicago: Aldine, 1965); William K. Tabb, The Political Economy of the Black Ghetto (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1970); Massey and Denton, American Apartheid. 33. George C. Galster, “Racial Steering by Real Estate Agents: Mechanisms and Motives,” The Review of Black Political Economy (spring 1990): 39–61; and Galster, “Racial Steering in Urban Housing Markets: A Review of the Audit Evidence,” Review of Black Political Economy (summer 1990): 105–129; Margery A. Turner, Raymond Struyk, and John Yinger, The Housing Discrimination Study (Washington, D.C.: The Urban Institute, 1991); Robert Kaestner and Wendy Fleischer, “Income Inequality as an Indicator of Discrimination in Housing Markets,” The Review of Black Political Economy 20 (1992): 55–77; Cathy Cloud and George Galster, “What Do We Know About Racial Discrimination in Mortgage Markets?” The Review of Black Political Economy 21 (1993): 101–120. 34. Turner, Struyk, and Yinger, The Housing Discrimination Study. For the most recent data, see John Yinger, “Testing Discrimination in Housing and Related Markets,” chapter 2 in A National Report Card on Discrimination in America: The Role of Testing, edited by Michael Fix and Margery Austin Turner (Washington, D.C.: The Urban Institute, March 1999). 35. For analysts who believe that discrimination is class- rather than race-based, see David R. Harris, “‘Property Values Drop When Blacks Move in, Because . . .’: Racial and Socioeconomic Determinants of Neighborhood Desirability,” American Sociological Review 64 (June 1999): 461–479. For an example of neighborhood studies that show how race matters, see Desena, “Local Gatekeeping Practices and Residential Segregation,” Sociological Inquiry 64, no. 3 (1994): 307–321. Excellent examples of investigative pieces on how race matters in neighborhoods have been done by Tom Brokaw (a 1997 Dateline piece on a Chicago neighborhood) and Diane Sawyer (a piece on discrimination in East St. Louis aired on Prime Time Live in 1992). 36. Center for Community Change, Mortgage Lending Discrimination Testing Project (Washington, D.C.: CCC/U.S. Dept. of Housing and Urban Development, 1989). 37. Cloud and Galster, “What Do We Know About Racial Discrimination in Mortgage Markets?”

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38. This rate was confirmed in a recent article in the Wall Street Journal of a study done by the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago. See John Wilke, “Race Is a Factor in Some Loan Denials,” Wall Street Journal, July 13, 1995. Although that study did not find that minority borrowers with good credit histories experience discrimination, it did find that those with poor credit histories have an approval rate of 16 percent compared to 69 percent for whites! 39. Melvin L. Oliver and Thomas M. Shapiro, Black Wealth/White Wealth (New York and London: Routledge, 1995). 40. Galster, “Racial Steering in Urban Housing Markets: A Review of the Audit Evidence,” 39. 41. For an excellent review, see Robert A. Margo, Race and Schooling in the South, 1880–1995: An Economic History (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1990). 42. See Farley, Blacks and Whites Narrowing the Gap? (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984); Farley and Allen, The Color Line and the Quality of Life in America; and Gerald D. Jaynes and Robin M. Williams, A Common Destiny: Blacks and American Society (Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press, 1989). 43. For an interesting commentary on this matter, see Stephen Rivken, “Residential Segregation and School Integration,” Sociology of Education 67 (1994): 279–292. 44. These numbers include only those students attending public schools, since a greater proportion of white students than black attend private schools. See James A. Blackwell, The Black Community: Diversity and Unity (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1991). It is likely that these numbers underestimate the real extent of segregation experienced by blacks. For recent statistics on levels of school segregation, see Gary Orfield, Susan Eaton, and the Harvard Project on School Desegregation, Dismantling Desegregation: The Quiet Reversal of Brown v. Board of Education (New York: The New York Press, 1996). 45. Gary Orfield, “School Desegregation After Two Generations: Race, Schools and Opportunity in Urban Society,” in Race in America, edited by Herbert Hill and James E. Jones (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1993), p. 235. 46. Jonathan Kozol, Savage Inequalities (New York: Crown, 1991); Robert Dreeben and Adam Gamoran, “Race, Instruction, and Learning,” American Sociological Review 51 (1986): 660–669. 47. Jeannie Oaks, Molly Selvin, Lynn Karoly, and Gretchen Guiton, Educational Matchmaking: Academic and Vocational Tracking in Comprehensive High Schools (Santa Monica, CA: Rand, 1992). 48. Data from Alphonso Pinkney, Black Americans (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2000). 49. See Joe R. Feagin, Hernán Vera, and Nikitah Imani, The Agony of Education: Black Students at White Colleges and Universities (New York and London: Routledge, 1996). See also chapter 2 in Roy Brooks, Integration or Separation? A Strategy for Racial Equality (Cambridge, MA,

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and London: Harvard University Press, 1996). For a recent report on hate crimes on campuses, see “Hate Goes to School,” Intelligence Report 98 (spring 2000): 6–15. 50. Stanley Lieberson and Mary C. Watters, From Many Strands: Ethnic and Racial Groups in Contemporary America (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1988). 51. Schuman et al., Racial Attitudes in America, 115–118. 52. Mary R. Jackman and Marie Crane, “‘Some of My Best Friends Are Black . . .’: Interracial Friendship and Whites’ Racial Attitudes,” Public Opinion Quarterly 50 (1986): 459–486. 53. Among the most notable of these studies are Philomena Essed, Understanding Everyday Racism: An Interdisciplinary Approach (London: Sage Publications, 1991); Cose, The Rage of a Privileged Class: Why Are Black Middle Class Angry? Why Should America Care (New York: HarperCollins, 1993); Joe R. Feagin and Melvin Sykes, Living with Racism: The Black Middle Class Experience (Boston: Beacon Press, 1994); and Lawrence Otis-Graham, Member of the Club: Reflections on Life in a Racially Polarized World (New York: HarperCollins, 1995). 54. Cose, The Rage of a Privileged Class. 55. Howard Schuman et al., “Discriminatory Behavior in New York Restaurants,” Social Indicators Research 13 (1983): 69–83. 56. Otis-Graham, Member of the Club. 57. See chapter 2 in Feagin and Sykes, Living with Racism. 58. See Peter Siegelman, “Racial Discrimination in ‘Everyday’ Commercial Transactions: What Do We Know,” chapter 4 in A National Report Card on Discrimination in America: The Role of Testing, edited by Michael Fix and Margery Austin Turner. 59. Theresa Chambliss, “The Growth and Significance of African American Elected Officials,” pp. 53–70 in From Exclusion to Inclusion: The Long Struggle for African American Political Power, edited by Ralph C. Gomes and Linda Faye Williams (New York and London: Greenwood Press, 1992), p. 55. 60. Pinkney, Black Americans, 117. 61. Leonard A. Cole, Blacks in Power: A Comparative Study of Black and White Elected Officials (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975). 62. Chambliss, “The Growth and Significance of African American Elected Officials,” 67. See also Rufus P. Browning, Dale Rogers Marshall, and David H. Tabb, “Minority Mobilization in Ten Cities: Failures and Successes,” pp. 8–32 in Racial Politics in American Cities, edited by Rufus P. Browning, Dame Rogers Marshall, and David H. Tabb (New York and London: Longman, 1990); and Huey L. Perry, “The Evolution and Impact of Biracial Coalitions and Black Mayors in Birmingham and New Orleans,” pp. 140–154 in Racial Politics in American Cities (New York and London: Longman, 1990). 63. For an early review, see Knowles and Prewitt, Institutional Racism in America. For two more recent reviews, see Frank R. Parker, “Eradicating

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the Continuing Barriers to Effective Minority Voter Participation,” pp. 73–84 in From Exclusion to Inclusion: The Long Struggle for African American Political Power, edited by Ralph C. Gomes and Linda Faye Williams; and Yvonne E. Moss et al., “Black Political Participation: The Search for Power,” pp. 81–118 in African Americans: Essential Perspectives, edited by Wornie L. Reed (Westport, CT, and London: Aubirn House, 1993). 64. For an early discussion of how “equal” practices produce unequal results, see Edwin Dorn, Rules and Racial Equality (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1979). For a discussion on how race affects voting, see John C. Berg, Class, Gender, Race, and Power in the U.S. Congress (Boulder: Westview Press, 1994). 65. Berg, Class, Gender, Race, and Power in the U.S. Congress, 137. 66. Walton, Black Politics; Robert C. Smith, “‘Politics’ Is Not Enough: The Institutionalization of the African American Freedom Movement,” pp. 97–126 in From Exclusion to Inclusion: The Long Struggle for African American Political Power, edited by Ralph C. Gomes and Linda Faye Williams (New York: Greenwood Press, 1992). 67. Manning Marable labels the politics of this group as “post Black.” By that he means that they are “elected officials, recruited from the professional classes, who are racially and ethnically ‘Black’ but who favor programs with little kinship in the traditional agendas of the civil rights movement. . . . [They] generally favor the death penalty, oppose new taxes, and support corporate interests.” “A New Black Politics,” The Progressive (August 1990): 20. 68. For data and discussions on this tendency, see Walton, Black Politics; Charles P. Henry, “Racial Factors in the 1982 Gubernatorial Campaign: Why Bradley Lost,” in The New Black Politics: The Search for Political Power, edited by Michael B. Preston, Lenneal J. Henderson, Jr., and Paul L. Puryear (New York and London: Longman, 1987); Parker, “Eradicating the Continuing Barriers to Effective Minority Voter Participation”; Berg, Class, Gender, Race, and Power in the U.S. Congress. 69. This point has been advanced by Ralph C. Gomes and Linda Faye Williams, “Coalition Politics: Past, Present, and Future,” pp. 129–160 in From Exclusion to Inclusion: The Long Struggle for African American Political Power, edited by Ralph C. Gomes and Linda Faye Williams. 70. See Chuck Stone, “Measuring Black Political Power,” pp. 227–252 in Black Political Life in the United States, edited by Lenneal J. Henderson, Jr. (San Francisco, Scranton, London, and Toronto: Chandler Publishing Company, 1972); and Smith, “‘Politics Is Not Enough.’” 71. For early discussions on these matters, see Knowles and Prewitt, Institutional Racism in America; and Franklin and Resnick, The Political Economy of Racism. For more recent discussions, see William E. Nelson, “Black Mayoral Leadership: A Twenty-Year Perspective,” pp. 188–195 in Black Electoral Politics, edited by Lucius Barker (New Brunswick and

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London: Transaction Publishers, 1990); and Moss et al., “Black Political Participation.” 72. Patterson, City Politics; Sidney Wilhelm, Black in a White America (Cambridge, MA: Schenkman, 1983). 73. Nelson, “Black Mayoral Leadership,” 193. See also James Jennings, The Politics of Black Empowerment: The Transformation of Black Activism in Urban America (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1992). 74. Charles Hamilton, The Black Political Experience in America (New York: Capricorn Books, 1973); Piven and Cloward, Poor People’s Movements: Why They Succeed, How They Fail (New York: Vintage, 1979); Button, Blacks and Social Change: Impact of the Civil Rights Movement in Southern Communities (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989). 75. Thomas B. Edsall and Mary D. Edsall, Chain Reaction (New York: W. W. Norton, 1992); Omi and Winant, Racial Formation in the United States: From the 1960s to the 1980s (New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1986). 76. Manning Marable, How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America (Boston: South End Press, 1983), pp. 120–121. 77. Jaynes and Williams, A Common Destiny, 457–459. Trend data suggest that the arrest rate for blacks and whites has stabilized. Sixty-seven to 70 percent of those arrested are whites and 29 to 31 percent are black. For an excellent book that deconstructs these numbers, see Katheryn K. Russell, The Color of Crime (New York and London: New York University Press, 1998). 78. Farai Chideya, Don’t Believe the Hype: Fighting Cultural Misinformation About African-Americans (New York: Penguin Books, 1995), p. 195. On these matters, see also John Hagan and Ruth D. Peterson, “Criminal Inequality in America: Patterns and Consequences,” pp. 14–36 in Crime and Inequality, edited by John Hagan and Ruth D. Peterson (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995). See also A. J. WilliamsMyers, Destructive Impulses, An Examination of an American Secret in Race Relations: White Violence (New York, London: University Press of America, 1995). 79. K. Russell, The Color of Crime, 114. Interestingly, according to Russell, this racial disproportionality between arrest and incarceration rates seems not to have been connected to type of crimes since whites committed a substantial number of the serious offenses in 1995 (e.g., 56 percent of forcible rapes, 75 percent of sex offenses, 67 percent of burglaries, and 65 percent of property crimes). 80. See David Jacobs, “Inequality and Police Strength: Conflict and Coercive Control in Metropolitan Areas,” American Sociological Review 44 (December 1979): 913–925; Allen Liska et al., “Perspectives on the Legal Order: The Capacity for Social Control.” American Journal of Sociology 87 (September 1981): 413–426; Pamela I. Jackson and Leo Carroll, “Race and the War on Crime: The Non-Southern U.S. Cities,” American Sociological Review 46 (June 1981): 290–305; and Pamela I. Jackson, Minority Group

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Threat, Crime, and Policing (New York, Westport, and London: Praeger, 1989). 81. Mark S. Rosentraub and Karen Harlow, “Police Policies and the Black Community: Attitude Toward the Police,” pp. 107–121 in Contemporary Public Policy Perspectives and Black Americans, edited by Mitchell F. Rice and Woodrow Jones, Jr. (Westport, CT and London: Greenwood Press, 1984), p. 119. 82. K. Russell, The Color of Crime, 35. For recent data on blacks’ belief in the prevalence of police brutality in urban areas, see Shielded from Justice: Police Brutality and Accountability in the United States (New York: Human Rights Watch, 1999). 83. For an excellent short review, see chapter 3, “History: Unequal Enforcement,” in Randall Kennedy, Race, Crime, and the Law (New York: Pantheon Books, 1997). 84. For earlier data, see Lawrence W. Sherman, “Execution Without Trial: Police Homicide and the Constitution,” Vanderbilt Law Review 33 (1980): 71–100; quoted from p. 85. More recent data can be found in Smith, Politics Is Not Enough, 47–48. 85. Samuel R Gross and Robert Mauro, Death and Discrimination: Racial Disparities in Capital Sentencing (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1989). 86. The literature on this issue is vast. For an example of early work supporting the idea that race matters, see Marjorie S. Zatz, “Race, Ethnicity, and Determinate Sentencing: A New Dimension to an Old Controversy,” Criminology 22 (1984): 146–171. For the opposing view, see Joan Petersilia, “Racial Disparities in the Criminal Justice System” (Santa Monica, CA: Rand, 1983). 87. Cassia Spohn, “Crime and the Social Control of Blacks: Offender/Victim Race and the Sentencing of Violent Offenders,” pp. 249–268 in Inequality, Crime, and Social Control, edited by George S. Bridges and Martha A. Myers (Boulder, San Francisco, and Oxford: Westview Press, 1994). Chapter 2 in Gross and Mauro, Death and Discrimination, provides excellent examples of how race may affect the outcome of cases involving the death penalty before the trial begins. In their opinion, “discrimination of a particular type at an early stage of the criminal justice process may conceal, or partially conceal, discrimination of the same type at a later stage” (25). 88. Spohn, “Crime and the Social Control of Blacks,” 249. 89. M. L. Radelet and G. L. Pierce, “Race and Prosecutorial Discretion in Homicide,” Law and Society Review 19 (1985). 90. Spohn, “Crime and the Social Control of Blacks,” 264. On which cases bring significantly higher rates of conviction, see Gary D. Lafree, “The Effect of Sexual Stratification by Race on Official Reactions to Rape,” American Sociological Review 45 (1980): 842–854; Lafree, Rape and Criminal Justice: The Social Construction of Sexual Assault (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 1989); and Anthony Walsh, “The Sexual Stratification

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Hypothesis and Sexual Assault in Light of the Changing Conceptions of Race,” Criminology 25 (1987): 153–173. 91. Derrick Bell, Race, Racism, and American Law (Boston, Toronto, and London: Little, Brown and Company, 1992), pp. 332–333. For a more recent review of the data on the death penalty and the Baldus study, see Kennedy, Race, Crime, and the Law. 92. Hayward R. Alker, Jr., Carl Hosticka, and Michael Mitchell, “Jury Selection as a Biased Social Process,” Law and Society 11 (fall 1976): 9–41; Charlan J. Nemeth, “Jury Trials: Psychology and the Law,” in Advances in Experimental Psychology, vol. 14, edited by Leonard Berkowitz (New York: Academic Press, 1981); and Nijole Benokratis, “Racial Exclusion in Juries,” Journal of Applied Behavioral Science 18, no. 1 (1982): 29–47. 93. Craig Haney, “On the Selection of Capital Juries: The Biasing of the Death-Qualification Process,” Law and Human Behavior 8, nos. 1, 2 (1984): 121–132; and Haney, “Examining Death Qualification: Further Analysis of the Process Effect,” Law and Human Behavior 8, nos. 1, 2 (1984): 133–151. For a more recent discussion, see Kennedy, Race, Crime, and Law. 94. In the selection of jurors for cases involving the death penalty, the jurors must be death-qualified, that is, they are able, in the opinion of the trial judge, to sentence the accused to death if they believe that he or she is guilty. See Gregory D. Russell, The Death Penalty and Racial Bias: Overturning Supreme Court Assumptions (Westport, CT, and London: Greenwood Press, 1994). 95. G. Russell, The Death Penalty and Racial Bias, 128. 96. William J. Bowers, Marla Sandys, and Benjamin D. Steiner, “Foreclosed Impartiality in Capital Sentencing: Jurors’ Predispositions, Guilt Trial Experience, and Premature Decision Making,” Cornell Law Review 83 (1998): 1476–1556. 97. Amnesty International, Killing with Prejudice: Race and Death Penalty in the USA, 1999. Available online at http://www.amnestyusa.org/rightsfor all/dp/race (May 6, 2001). 98. Bell, Race, Racism, and American Law, 340. Today, thanks to the efforts of the NAACP and the ACLU, who have begun campaigns against racial profiling, the U.S. public has been sensitized about the impact of race in policing practices. See, for example, David A. Harris, Driving While Black: Racial Profiling on Our Nation’s Highways (Special Report, ACLU, June 1999). A 1999 poll by the Gallup organization found that 42 percent of blacks (versus 6 percent of whites) answered “yes” to the question, “Have you ever felt that you were stopped by the police just because of your race or ethnic background?” See Will Lester, “Most Americans Believe Police Use Racial Profiling, Poll Finds,” Associated Press Release, December 11, 1999. Their belief may not be unfounded as data from the state of Maryland show that although 17 percent of the drivers on I-95 were black (75 percent were white), they were 70 percent of those pulled over (compared to a 23 percent rate for white drivers). See also Pinkney, Black Americans. 99. For early studies, see David H. Bayley and Harold Mendelsohn,

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“The Policemen’s World,” pp. 206–218 in Race, Crime, and Justice, edited by Charles E. Reasons and Jack L. Kuykendall (Pacific Palisades, CA: Goodyear Publishing Company, 1972); and John L. Cooper, The Police and the Ghetto (Port Washington, NY, and London: Kennikat Press, 1980). 100. Jerome H. Skolnick, “The Police and the Urban Ghetto,” pp. 236–258 in Race, Crime, and Justice, edited by Charles E. Reasons and Jack L. Kuykendall; William Chambliss, and R. H. Nagaswawa, “On the Validity of Official Statistics: A Comparative Study of White, Black, and Japanese School Boys,” Journal of Research on Crime and Delinquency 6 (1969): 71–77; D. Black, “The Social Organization of Arrest,” Stanford Law Review 23 (1975): 1087–1111; A. J. Lizote, “Extra-Legal Factors in Chicago’s Criminal Courts: Testing the Conflict Model of Criminal Justice,” Social Problems 25 (1978): 564–580. 101. Gilbert Geis, “Statistics Concerning Race and Crime,” pp. 61–78 in Race, Crime, and Justice, edited by Charles E. Reasons and Jack L. Kuykendall; Alfred Blumestein, “On the Racial Disproportionality of U.S. Prison Populations,” Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology 73 (1981): 1259–1281; Clayton Obie, “A Reconsideration of the Effects of Race in Criminal Sentencing,” Criminal Justice Review 8 (1983): 15–20. 102. Chideya, Don’t Believe the Hype, 194. 103. Douglas Smith, Christy A. Visher, and Laura Davidson, “Equity and Discretionary Justice: The Influence of Race on Police Arrest Decisions,” Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology 75 (1984): 234–249. 104. Most of these acronyms are well known. SNCC is the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee; NAACP stands for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People; SCLC is the Southern Christian Leadership Conference; RAM stands for Revolutionary Action Movement, organized by Maxwell Sanford in Philadelphia in 1967. MOVE was the acronym of a small and very extreme “back to nature” radical group following the teachings of the self-styled John Africa in Philadelphia in the 1970s and 1980s. 105. David J. Garrow, The FBI and Martin Luther King (New York: Penguin Books, 1983), pp. 154–155. 106. Michael Friedly and David Gallen, Martin Luther King, Jr.: The FBI File (New York: Carroll and Graf, 1993). 107. This point has been made by Clayborne Carson, Malcolm X: The FBI File (New York: Carroll and Graf, 1991). 108. Malcolm X told Alex Haley one day before his assassination that “the more I keep thinking about this thing, the things that have been happening lately, I’m not at all sure it’s the Muslims—I know what they can do, and what they can’t, and they can’t do some of the stuff recently going on.” Carson, Malcolm X, 83. For an elaboration on the thesis that the FBI was involved in Malcolm’s assassination, see George Breitman, Herman Porter, and Baxter Smith, The Assassination of Malcolm X (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1976). For an author who argues that the FBI, CIA, and State Department created the climate that led to Malcolm’s assassination, see Rod Bush, We Are Not What We Seem: Black Nationalism and Class

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Struggle in the American Century (New York: New York University Press, 1999). 109. Baxter Smith, Secret Documents Exposed: FBI Plot Against the Black Movement (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1974); Ward Churchill and Jim Vander Wall, Agents of Repression: The FBI’s Secret Wars Against the Black Panther Party and the American Indian Movement (Boston, MA: South End Press, 1988). 110. The dirty tricks used by the FBI were eavesdropping, bogus mail, false black propaganda, disinformation, harassment arrests, infiltration of organizations, planting agents provocateurs, spreading rumors, fabricating evidence, and assassinations. See Churchill and Vander Wall, Agents of Repression. 111. Carson, Malcolm X: The FBI File, 46–47. 112. Churchill and Vander Wall, Agents of Repression, 59. See also Mary F. Berry, Black Resistance, White Law: A History of Constitutional Racism in America (New York, NY: Penguin Press, 1994). 113. Poll after poll corroborates this trend. Thus the December 9, 1999, release by the Gallup organization that reported 85 percent of whites have a favorable opinion of their local police, whereas only 58 percent of blacks shared their view. Lester, “Most Americans Believe Police Use Racial Profiling, Poll Finds.” 114. An excellent book that demythologizes how class and race affect how we think and study crime in America is Jeffrey Reiman, The Rich Get Richer and the Poor Get Prison: Ideology, Class, and Criminal Justice (Boston: Allyn & Bacon, 1995). 115. K. Russell, The Color of Crime, 114. 116. Knowles and Prewitt, Institutional Racism in America; Franklin and Resnick, The Political Economy of Racism; Perlo, Economics of Racism U.S.A.; Farley and Allen, The Color Line and the Quality of Life in America; Jaynes and Williams, A Common Destiny. 117. Richard B. Freeman, “Black Economic Progress Since 1964,” The Public Interest (summer 1978); Wilson, The Declining Significance of Race; Thomas Sowell, Civil Rights: Rhetoric of Reality? (New York: Morrow, 1984). 118. William Darity, Jr., Jeremiah Cotton, and Herbert Hill, “Race and Inequality in the Managerial Age,” pp. 33–80 in African Americans: Essential Perspectives, edited by Wornie L. Reed (Westport, CT, and London: Aubirn House, 1993). 119. Charles Hirschman and Morrison G. Wong, “Socioeconomic Gains of Asian Americans, Blacks, and Hispanics: 1960–1976,” American Journal of Sociology 90 (1984): 584–607; Smith and Welch, Closing the Gap, Forty Years of Economic Progress for Blacks; Farley, “The Common Destiny of Blacks and Whites,” in Race in America, edited by Herbert Hill and J. Jones, Jr. (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990); Jonathan Leonard, “The Effectiveness of Equal Employment Law and Affirmative Action Regulation,” Report to the Subcommittee on Employment Opportunities of the Education and Labor Committee and the Subcommittee on Civil and Constitutional Rights of the Judiciary Committee (U.S.

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Congress, School of Business Administration, University of California, Berkeley, 1990); James J. Heckman and Brooks S. Payner, “Determining the Impact of the Federal Antidiscrimination Policy on the Economic Status of Blacks: A Study of South Carolina,” American Economic Review 79, no. 1 (1992): 138–172. 120. Gerald Jaynes, “The Labor Market Status of Black Americans: 1939–1985,” Journal of Economic Perspectives 4 (1990): 9–24. 121. Pinkney, Black Americans. 122. Conservative and some liberal social scientists attribute contemporary differences in family income to differences in family structure between whites and blacks. But, as Steven Shulman has rightly pointed out, these differences are related to the socioeconomic conditions experienced by poor blacks, themselves shaped by racial discrimination. Shulman, “A Critique of the Declining Discrimination Hypothesis,” pp. 126–152 in The Question of Discrimination: Racial Inequality in the U.S. Labor Market, edited by Steven Shulman and William Darity (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1989). For analysis of affirmative action policies on blacks’ income, see John Bound and Richard B. Freeman, “Black Economic Progress: Erosion of the Post-1965 Gains in the 1980s,” pp. 32–49 in The Question of Discrimination: Racial Inequality in the U.S. Labor Market, edited by Steven Shulman and William Darity. 123. K. L. Bradbury and L. E. Browne, “Black Men in the Labor Market,” New England Economic Review (March/April 1986): 32–42. For similar findings, see Jaynes and Williams, A Common Destiny; and Farley, The New American Reality (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1996). 124. William Darity, Jr., and Samuel L. Myers, “Changes in the BlackWhite Income Inequality, 1968–1978: A Decade of Progress?” The Review of Black Political Economy 10 (summer 1980): 365–392. See also Darity et al., “Race and Inequality in the Managerial Age”; and M. V. Lee Badgett, “Rising Black Unemployment: Changes in Job Stability or in Employability,” The Review of Black Political Economy 22 (winter 1994): 55–75. 125. Jeremiah Cotton, “Opening the Gap: The Decline in Black Economic Indicators in the 1980s,” Social Science Quarterly 70 (1989): 803–819. 126. Hacker, Two Nations: Black and White, Separate, Hostile, Unequal (New York: Ballantine Books, 1992); Javed Ashraf, “Differences in Returns to Education: An Analysis by Race,” American Journal of Economics and Sociology 53, no. 3 (1994): 281–290. 127. Farley and Allen, The Color Line and the Quality of Life in America. I must point out that this strategy of comparing people with equal characteristics must be used cautiously because it can lead to a terrible distortion of reality. Many demographers carelessly “control for” numerous factors until they find the blacks who statistically look like whites even if they are a very small segment of the black population. For a critique of this demographic myopia, see Carole C. Marks, “Demography and Race,” pp. 159–171 in Race and Ethnicity in Research Methods, edited by John Stanfield and Rutledge M. Dennis (Newbury Park, CA: Sage, 1993).

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128. William O’Hare, Kelvin Pollard, Taynia Mann, and Mary Kent, “African Americans in the 1990s,” Population Bulletin 46, no. 1 (1991). See also Hacker, Two Nations. 129. Pinkney, Black Americans. 130. Jeremiah Cotton, “The Gap at the Top: Relative Occupational Earnings Disadvantages of the Black Middle Class,” The Review of Black Political Economy (winter 1990). 131. See Marshall Pomer, “Labor Market Structure, Intragenerational Mobility, and Discrimination: Black Male Advancement out of Low-Paying Occupations, 1962–1973,” American Sociological Review 51 (1986): 650–659; and Jeffrey Waddoups, “Racial Differences in Intersegment Mobility,” Review of Black Political Economy (fall 1991): 23–43. 132. David L. Featherman and Robert M. Hauser, “Prestige or Socioeconomic Scales in the Study of Occupational Achievement,” Sociological Methods and Research 4, no. 4 (May 1976): 403–422; Smith and Welch, Closing the Gap, Forty Years of Economic Progress for Blacks. 133. Cotton, “The Gap at the Top.” 134. Farley and Allen, The Color Line and the Quality of Life in America. 135. Paul Norgren and Samuel E. Hill, Toward Fair Employment (New York: Columbia University Press, 1964); John S. Morgan and Richard L. Van Dyke, White-Collar Blacks: A Breakthrough? (Washington, D.C.: American Management Association, Inc., 1970); John P. Fernández, Black Managers in White Corporations (New York, London, Sydney, and Toronto: John Wiley and Sons, 1975); Fernández, Racism and Sexism in Corporate Life: Changing Values in American Business (Lexington, MA: Heath, 1982); Bert Landry, The New Black Middle Class (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1987); Richard G. Dudley, “Blacks in PolicyMaking Positions,” pp. 15–26 in Black Families in Crisis: The Middle Class, edited by Alice F. Coner-Edwards and Jeanne Spurlock (New York: Bruinner/Mazel, Publishers, 1988); Dempsey J. Travis, Racism—American Style: A Corporate Gift (Chicago: Urban Research Press Inc., 1991). The most recent study on this matter is Collins, Black Corporate Executives: The Making and Breaking of a Black Middle Class (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1997). 136. Collins, Black Corporate Executives. 137. Howard J. Samuels, “Prejudice in the Marketplace,” pp. 150–168 in Prejudice U.S.A., edited by Charles Y. Glock and Ellen Siegelman (New York, Washington, and London: Praeger, 1969); R. Oaxaca, “Male-Female Wage Differentials in Urban Labor Markets,” International Economic Review 14, no. 3 (1973): 693–709; Lester C. Thurow, Generating Inequality (New York: Basic Books, 1975); Irwin Garfinkel, Robert H. Haveman, and David Betson, Earnings Capacity, Poverty, and Inequality (New York, San Francisco, and London: Academic Press, 1977). 138. This point has been made, among others, by Marcus Alexis, “Black and White Wealth: A Comparative Analysis,” pp. 191–206 in Public Policy for the Black Community: Strategies and Perspectives, edited by

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Marguerite Ross Barnett and James A. Hefner (New York: Alfred Publishing Co., 1976); and Thomas D. Boston, Race, Class, and Conservatism (Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1988). 139. For a recent discussion on the relevance of this technique to assess employment discrimination, see Marc Bendick, Jr., “Adding Testing to the Nation’s Portfolio of Information on Employment Discrimination,” chapter 4 in A National Report Card on Discrimination in America: The Role of Testing, edited by Michael Fix and Margery Austin Turner. 140. Jerome Culp and Bruce H. Dunson, “Brother of a Different Color: A Preliminary Look at Employer Treatment of White and Black Youth,” pp. 233–260 in The Black Youth Employment Crisis, edited by Richard Freeman and Harry J. Holzer (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1986). 141. Turner et al., The Housing Discrimination Study. 142. James H. Braddock and J. M. McPartland, “How Minorities Continue to Be Excluded from Equal Employment Opportunities: Research on Labor Market and Institutional Barriers,” Journal of Social Issues 43, no. 1 (1989): 5–39. 143. For the importance of networks in getting jobs, see Robert Cherry, Discrimination: Its Impact on Blacks, Women, and Jews (Lexington, MA, and London: Lexington Books, 1989). 144. On early 1960s patterns, see Norgren and Hill, Toward Fair Employment. On more recent matters, see Collins, Black Corporate Executives; and Bendick, “Adding Testing to the Nation’s Portfolio of Information on Employment Discrimination.” 145. Alexis, “Black and White Wealth: A Comparative Analysis.” 146. Oliver and Shapiro, Black Wealth/White Wealth. 147. Ibid. 148. See, for example, George Strauss, “How Management Views Its Race Relations Responsibilities,” pp. 261–289 in Employment, Race, and Poverty, edited by Arthur M. Ross and Herbert Hill (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, 1967). 149. Morgan and Van Dyke, White-Collar Blacks: A Breakthrough? 150. Marvin Levine, The Untapped Human Resource: The Urban Negro Employment Equality (Morrison, NJ: General Learning Press, 1972). 151. Fernández, Black Managers in White Corporations. 152. Collins, Black Corporate Executives; Travis, Racism—American Style: A Corporate Gift; Cose, The Rage of a Privileged Class; and Steve Watkins, The Black O: Racism and Redemption in an American Corporate Empire (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1997). 153. Joleen Kirschenman and Kathryn M. Neckerman, “‘We’d Love to Hire Them, but . . .’: The Meaning of Race for Employers,” in Race and Ethnic Conflict, edited by Fred L. Pincus and Howard J. Erlich (Boulder: Westview Press, 1991), p. 221. See also Wilson, When Work Disappears. 154. Jack Levin and Jack McDevitt, Hate Crimes: The Rising Tide of Bigotry and Bloodshed (New York and London: Plenum Press, 1993). See also Marable, How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America.

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155. Levin and McDevitt, Hate Crimes, 109. 156. This term was coined by Brooks, Rethinking the American Race Problem. 157. Thomas F. Pettigrew and Joanne Martin, “Shaping the Organizational Context for Black American Inclusion,” Journal of Social Issues 43, no. 1 (1987): 41–78; quoted from p. 42. 158. Ibid., 50. 159. Clarence Lusane, African Americans at the Crossroads: The Restructuring of Black Leadership and the 1992 Elections (Boston: South End Press, 1994). 160. Linda Greenhouse, “Ruling Is a Big Shift,” New York Times, June 13, 1995.

5 Color-Blind Racism: Toward an Analysis of White Racial Ideology

A

ll groups in power build ideologies to rationalize social inequality. Even in situations of crude domination such as slavery, patriarchy in antiquity, or early capitalism, dominants develop very complex ideological formations that provide them rhetorical ammunition to account for social inequality. They also cultivate a moral framework to deal with dilemmas arising from maintaining domination, such as killing a slave, maiming a woman, or forcing children to work in factories. Thus, ideology, borrowing from Ann Swidler, can be conceived as a practical toolkit of ideas and concepts, expressions, prejudices, and stories that provide individuals with “naive basic ‘theories’ of social life.”1 Hence, from this vantage point, ideology is, as John B. Thompson has succinctly defined it, “meaning in the service of power.”2 In this chapter I examine color-blind racism or the central ideological formation that has emerged to support and reproduce the new racial structure of the United States.3 I recognize that writing about a racial ideology that is alive and well and shapes the views of most whites in the United States is risky business because, as William Ryan stated in his famous book Blaming the Victim, “no one [wants to think] of himself as a son of a bitch.”4 Thus, I remind readers that analyzing ideologies is not a matter of finding good and bad people but of examining the collective understanding and representation produced by social groups to explain their world (for details on the 137

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concept of racial ideology, see Chapter 3). Doing ideological analysis about race then is not a matter of finding “racists” but rather an attempt to uncover the frames, racetalk, and storylines that help lubricate a racial order at a particular historical juncture. My main analytical tasks, therefore, are determining whether actors share social representations about the world and analyzing how they use them to explain a host of racial matters. Before examining the contours of color-blind racism, let me recapitulate first why it is that we have a new racial ideology. As I argued in Chapter 4, events that transpired between the 1940s and 1960s (e.g., the urbanization of racial minorities, the gradual incorporation of minorities into the industrial sector, the protests by civil rights organizations as well as the over 200 race riots in the 1960s, and the contradiction between the democratic rhetoric of the U.S. government at the height of the Cold War and its treatment of minorities at home) led to a change in the racial structure of the United States. Specifically, I suggested that whereas the racial practices typical of the Jim Crow era were overt and clearly racial, today they tend to be covert, institutional, and apparently nonracial. Whether in politics, housing markets, banks, stores, corporate America, restaurants, schools, or universities, white supremacy is fundamentally maintained today in a style that Roy Brooks has labeled “smiling discrimination.”5 Not surprisingly, since white supremacy changed in nature, the ideological glue that binds U.S. racial dynamics has changed too. This change in the content of the dominant racial ideology has been documented by analysts such as William Ryan and Joel Kovel, who wrote in the 1970s about a nascent “meta racism” and of whites’ employment of “cultural deprivation” arguments to “blame the victim.” More recently Larry Bobo and Philomena Essed and his associates have written about “laissez faire racism” and “competitive racism” respectively.6 According to these analysts, although racial ideology today tends to exclude old-fashioned racist speech, it effectively safeguards racial privilege by applying the principles of liberalism to racial matters in an abstract and decontextualized manner. It also protects the status quo by focusing on minorities’ (particularly dark-skinned minority groups such as blacks, Puerto Ricans, Mexican Americans, and some Asian Americans) cultural differences as the reason for their inferior performance in labor and educational markets. Although the ideas endorsed by most whites today may

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sound like “racism lite” or may seem absent of racism altogether, they signify postmodern support of the racial status quo. For example, most whites indicate in surveys that they support integration and equal opportunity and that they are less likely than ever before to disapprove of interracial marriage; yet they oppose most programs to reduce racial inequality and residential and school segregation, and they have limited primary associations with blacks.7 How do whites explain these apparently contradictory positions? They explain them by appealing to liberalism (“Affirmative action violates the American creed”), blaming minorities for their problems (“Blacks are poor because they lack the proper values”), and by claiming that segregation is the product of the invisible (nonracial) hand of the market (“I live in this white neighborhood, but it has nothing to do with race”).8 Since ideology is expressed and reproduced in communicative interaction, I base most of my analysis on interview data. Although I recognize that whites may try to place their “best foot” forward in interviews as much as they do in surveys (see my conclusions in Chapter 3), I contend that it is easier to extract their beliefs from interviews because, as Nietzsche stated a long time ago, “Even when the mouth lies, the way it looks still tells the truth.”9 However, whenever possible, I present interview material against the backdrop of survey findings to make my point. Data Source and Analytical Methods

Depending on the survey questions used, researchers can construct a variety of interpretations about whites’ racial attitudes ranging from the view that they are racially tolerant to the idea that they are “modern” or “symbolic” racists.10 However, based on college students’ responses to race-related questions in interviews on affirmative action, interracial marriage, and the significance of discrimination, Tyrone A. Forman and I discovered a more consistent pattern. Students were significantly more likely to express prejudiced views on a number of issues although they filtered them through various “semantic moves” or rhetorical constructions to avoid appearing racist. Although I believe that our findings in this study are very suggestive, our study had some limitations. First, our analysis was based on a convenient rather than a representative sample, which limited

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our capacity for generalizing our findings to the white population at large. Nevertheless, it is worthwhile to point out that the bias in that sample was in the direction of more racial tolerance since researchers have consistently found that young, college-educated whites are more likely to be racially tolerant than any other segment of the white population.11 Another limitation of our study was that we did not interview any blacks and thus could not assess whether their racial views were different from those of whites. Finally, due to budget constraints, our sample was somewhat small (41 subjects, or 9 percent of the white respondents who participated in the survey), albeit large by interview-based work standards.12 The data for this chapter come from the 1998 Detroit Area Study on White Racial Ideology (DAS) in which I served as the principal investigator. This data set overcomes most of the limitations of my previous work since it is based on a representative sample and includes a significant number of interviews with both white and black respondents. The 1998 DAS is a probabilistic survey of 400 black and white Detroit metropolitan-area residents (323 whites and 67 blacks). The response rate was an acceptable 67.5 percent. As part of this study, 84 respondents (a 21 percent subsample) were randomly selected for in-depth interviews (67 whites and 17 blacks). The interviews were race-matched, meaning that the interviewer and respondent were of the same race; followed a structured interview protocol; were conducted in the respondents’ homes; and lasted about one hour. After the interviews were completed, my assistants transcribed the recorded material verbatim, that is, the transcripts included nonlexicals, pauses, and meaningful changes in intonation. After the material was transcribed, I read all the interviews to extract common themes and patterns. At that stage, I performed a basic content analysis of a number of questions. Most of this chapter is based on the 1998 DAS interviews with white respondents. Color-Blind Racism

I have argued elsewhere that “in the postmodern world few claim to be ‘racist’ except for Nazis and Neonazis and members of white supremacist groups.”13 In the United States most whites proclaim to be color-blind and express their wish to live in a society where race

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does not matter at all. 14 Yet whites tend to navigate every day a “white habitus”15 and seem to be rather “color-conscious” in terms of their choice of significant others (close friends and romantic partners). When confronted with these apparent contradictions between what they believe and what they do, whites argue that “it’s economics, not race,” “the evidence is not clear,” “it’s just the way things are,” or “it’s natural for people to gravitate toward likeness.”16 Thus, whites today are, as Thurgood Marshall once wrote, “strict in theory but fatal in fact.”

The Dominant Frames of Color Blindness I list the central themes, or “frames,”17 of color-blind racism and of alternative racial ideologies in Table 5.1. The most salient frames of this ideology are (1) abstract liberalism (“I am all for equal opportunity and that’s why I oppose affirmative action”), (2) “biologization of culture”18 (“Blacks are poor because they do not have the proper values”), (3) naturalization of matters that reflect the effects of white supremacy (“Neighborhood segregation is a sad but natural thing since people want to live with people who are like them”), and (4) minimization of racism and discrimination (“There are racists out there but they are few and hard to find”). These frames were used by white respondents, as shown in Table 5.2 below, anywhere between 43 and 94 percent of the time in their responses. In the sections below, I will address three things: First, I will illustrate how whites deploy the major frames of color blindness. Second, I will analyze the style typical of color blindness. Lastly, I will explore the major storylines that have emerged along with this new racial ideology. The reasonable racist: liberal justifications. In the post–civil rights era whites articulate their race-related views as “reasonable racists.” 19 Today they apply elements of political liberalism (equal opportunity, meritocracy, equal rights) and economic liberalism (free market, competition, individuals’ preferences, little government intervention) to racial matters in an abstract and decontextualized manner that rationalizes racially unfair situations. Because political and economic aspects of liberalism appear intermingled in whites’ responses, I regard this as one frame: abstract liberalism. Since this

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Table 5.1

Central Frames of Color-Blind Racism and Contemporary Alternative Racial Ideologies

Dominant Racial Ideology (Color-Blind Ideology)

Critical Alternative Racial Ideologies (Cultural Pluralism, Nationalism, and Others)

1. Abstract liberalism: Abstract and decontextualized extension of principles of liberalism to racial matters in ways that preserve racially unfair situations (e.g., “Race should not be a factor when judging people”)

Concrete and contextualized notions of political liberalism or more egalitarian views on how social goods ought to be distributed

2. Biologization of culture: Cultural rationale for explaining blacks’ status in society (e.g., “Blacks are lazy” or “Blacks lack the proper work ethic”)

Political rationale for explaining the status of racial subjects in society (e.g., “Blacks have been left behind by the system”)

3. Naturalization of racial matters: Naturalization of matters that reflect the effects of the racial order (e.g., explaining segregation or low levels of interracial marriage as natural outcomes)

Explanation of race-related issues with race-related arguments (e.g., segregation as the product of the racialized actions of the state, realtors, and individual whites)

4. Minimization of racism: Denial of structural character of discrimination viewed as limited, sporadic, and declining in significance

Understanding racism as “societal,” with recognition of new forms of racism

Table 5.2

Deployment of Color-Blind Frames by White Respondents

Frames

Whites

Abstract liberalism On affirmative action

64/67 (96%) 59/67 (88%)

Biologization of culture

59/67 (88%)

Naturalization of racial matters Minimization of racism

27/67 (43%) 56/67 (84%)

frame has become the centerpiece of color blindness (for example, abstract liberalism was deployed by 96 percent of the white respondents), I present five cases to illustrate how white Detroiters used this frame to articulate their views on a variety of issues. First is Richard, a 46-year-old construction foreman, who explained his opposition to affirmative action as follows:

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I [am] really against it because I feel it’s the attitude of the person, not the color of the person that should be given a break. I think, I feel it’s the attitude.

Richard also responded to a question dealing with a hypothetical company described as 97 percent white that hired a black over an equally qualified white candidate for diversity reasons: “Umhumm, and I said the same thing; it doesn’t matter whether you’re white or black. It matters whether they’re qualified. Attitude and qualification. Richard’s views on this issue are not much different from those of most whites in the United States. Richard, like most whites, uses the liberal ideal of meritocracy to oppose affirmative action. And he ignores the impact of both past and contemporary discrimination on blacks’ life chances, as most whites do. For example, he does not see anything racial about this hypothetical company being 97 percent white. His response to the question, “Why do you think that the company was 97% white?” was, “Ummm, our company’s that way. It’s how, it’s like I said, you have to be recommended to be able to work, you know.” Here Richard does not even realize that the way the company where he works does business violates the principles of equal opportunity and meritocratic hiring practices that he endorses.20 Before moving to the next case, I cite part of Richard’s response to a question on interracial marriage. Richard, who admitted that he was not “too crazy about interracial marriage” and that he “wouldn’t want [my daughter] do that,” stated in his answer that his parents were not bigots and that he had a black friend while growing up. To make his point, Richard narrated the following story: And my mother, I would say something about Robert [his black friend] and call him a nigger and she say, “He is not a nigger. He’s a black person.” I would, I, I, I’m kind of a person that jokes a lot and would say, “wait until your daughter brings home one of those, one of those black people, he’s turn into a nigger real quick!”

I include this quote not to demonize Richard but to point out that Richard expressed more directly racial views on certain subjects. This was not peculiar to Richard but was typical of most white respondents. Only a handful of white respondents did not say something that was racially problematic at some point in their interview.

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The next case is Jim, a 30-year-old computer software salesperson who explained his opposition to affirmative action: I think it’s unfair top to bottom on everybody and the whole . . . the whole process. It often . . . you know, discrimination itself is a bad word, right? But, uh, but you discriminate every day and you go . . . and you look at the . . . you wanna buy a beer at the store, if there are six kinda beers you can get from Natural Light to Sam Adams, right? And you look at the price and you look at the kind of beer, and you . . . it’s a choice. And a lot of that you have laid out in front of you . . . which one you get? Now, should the government sponsor Sam Adams and make it cheaper than Natural Light because it’s brewed by . . . someone in Boston? That doesn’t make much sense, right? Why would we wanna do that or . . . make Sam Adams eight times as expensive because we want people to buy Natural Light? And it’s the same thing about getting into school or . . . getting into some place. And the reason I have that, you know, and universities it’s easy, and universities is a hot topic now, and I could bug you, you know, UM [University of Michigan] I don’t think has a lot of racism in the admissions process. And I think UM would, would agree with that pretty strongly. So why not just pick people that are going to do well at UM, pick people by their merit? I, I think that . . . I think you, we should stop the whole idea of choosing people based on their color. It’s bad to choose someone based on their color, why do we, why do we enforce it in an institutional process?

Since Jim assumes that hiring decisions are like market choices (choosing between competing brands of beer), he embraces a laissez faire position on hiring. The problem with Jim’s view is that discrimination in the labor market is alive and well (e.g., it affects black and Latino job applicants 30 to 50 percent of the time) and that most jobs (as many as 80 percent) are obtained through informal networks (for details, see Chapter 4). Jim himself acknowledged that being white is an advantage in the United States because “there’s more people in the world who are . . . white and are racist against people that are black than vice versa.” However, Jim also believes, as he stated in response to a question on the significance of discrimination for blacks’ life chances, that although blacks “perceive or feel” that there is a lot of discrimination, he doesn’t believe there is. Hence, by upholding a strict laissez fare view on hiring and, at the same time, ignoring the significant impact of past and contemporary discrimination in the labor market, Jim can safely voice his opposition to affirmative action in an apparently race-neutral way.

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The third case is Beverly, a self-employed woman in her early forties, who answered a question about who is at fault for the high level of residential segregation in the United States in the following manner: I don’t think much about it at all. I guess, ah, you’re in a neighborhood, you’re in a neighborhood. You know, I, I, just don’t. I guess I don’t think about that.

After a brief exchange with the interviewer in which she stated that the government should only intervene to guarantee that no one is prevented from moving into any neighborhood, the interviewer asked her, “And you don’t think it’s bad [that] the neighborhoods are segregated?” Beverly answered, It, it, it just isn’t that important. Where you live is where you decide to live. If you decided to live in and can afford to live in a very upscale house, great! If you are black and you can afford to do that, fantastic. I mean . . . people have choices as to where they live. If they have the economic background or money to do this with . . . . I can’t envision . . . 97 percent of the black people saying, “I’m going to live in a white neighborhood ’cause it will make my life better.” And I can’t imagine 97 percent of the white people saying, “I’m gonna move to a black neighborhood ’cause it will make me feel better.” You know, I, I . . . where you decide to live is your choice.

Beverly relies on individual choice to rationalize the tremendous level of residential segregation in the United States. By doing this, she is able to deflate its centrality as a factor shaping racial matters. As for relationships, the last two cases illustrate how many whites use a free market view on love in a way that allows them to safely state their doubts on (if not opposition to) interracial marriage. First is Darrell, a driver of chartered buses in his late forties who answered the question on interracial marriage like most white respondents. I don’t have anything against it if two people are in love and want to get married. The only thing that I see a problem with, ah . . . I can see where it’s regional. Where the children are gonna have problems because they are mixed. But the outlook is on the children, if they’re in a racially biased area. I don’t think it’s fair to the kids.

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Rogelio Saenz and I have identified this “I don’t have anything against interracial marriage, but . . .” rhetorical strategy as central in whites’ repertoire of answers to the interracial marriage question.21 This answer allows respondents to signify their nonracial stand (“if two people are in love”) but, at the same time, safely offers a plethora of reasons why they believe interracial marriage is problematic (e.g., location, family concerns, children’s welfare, and society is not ready). Furthermore, we suggested that whites’ profession of color blindness on love is an abstract ideal that is very unlikely to be realized because most of them live in racially hypersegregated communities and have minimal levels of interaction with blacks. This situation creates a white habitus or a white-based structure that shapes whites’ cognitive, emotional, and aesthetic reading of blacks. Thus, for example, Darrell grew up in an almost totally white community in northern Michigan and never had black friends or associates. Although he presently works in Detroit and has worked in all kinds of jobs in the Detroit metro area, he reports never having had a black friend or close acquaintance. When questioned about the racial background of all his significant others (he had said that all of them had been white), he responded, “[I] just haven’t met anyone I was interested in” and added that “I don’t date down here in Detroit area” because “I’m too busy working.” The last case is Olga, a salesperson of software for an independent insurance agency in her late twenties, who stated that she did not have an “aversion to it [dating outside her race],” but that she did not do it because in her schools and neighborhood she only “had access to [no] other than vanilla people.” However, like most whites, Olga’s answer to the interracial marriage question revealed that she had lots of apprehension about interracial marriage: Ummmm . . . well . . . I guess my only concern is always if there’s children and how those children will be accepted or not accepted. And it would be nice to think that the world would be lovely and wonderful, but . . . you know, I think people should be allowed to do whatever they want to do. I don’t think you should look at people’s skin color or their origin or anything to determine what it is that you want to do. However, ummmm . . . what are you putting those kids through when they’re ah . . . a mixed that, that neither culture would accept because the cultures are sometimes just as bad about sticking together as they are about claiming that no one will let them in and out of each other’s areas. So sometimes that really affects the kids and neither culture will accept the child as

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being their culture or the other. Ummmm, so that concerns me. But, in general, . . . I don’t have any problem with any of that. . . . I mean, if I wasn’t married, I’d, I’d date anyone that interested me. So that not, that’s not an issue.

Regardless of Olga’s protestations to the contrary (“in general, . . . I don’t have any problem with that”) and her stated willingness to date blacks (an unlikely claim since she has navigated a white habitus all her life), her answer reveals that she does have some issues with interracial relationships. The biologization of culture. For many years whites explained blacks’ inferior status in the United States as the result of their natural endowments (“They are less intelligent than us” or “God made them different”). Although these naturalistic explanations have not disappeared, they have declined in significance tremendously.22 Yet since the 1960s, a new rationalization has emerged to explain blacks’ status: the idea that blacks are poorer than whites because they have a different (inferior) culture. My Detroit data reveal that this was another central frame since 88 percent of white Detroiters used this frame in their responses. In this section I present two examples to illustrate how whites justify blacks’ status in cultural terms. The first case is Ian. In his forties, he is a manager of information security at an automotive company. Ian’s explanation of why blacks have on average worse jobs, income, and housing than whites was the following: The majority of ’em just don’t strive to do anything, to make themselves better. Again, I’ve seen that all the way through. “I do this today, I’m fine, I’m happy with it, I don’t need anything better.” Never, never, never striving or giving extra to, to make themselves better. And I know a lot of people say “well, the opportunity isn’t there.” Well, the opportunity wasn’t there when I got into high school either. My parents weren’t rich and they wanted me to go to school and the only way I could go to school was to get a full-time job, my parents couldn’t even pay for my books ’cause they didn’t make enough. So I had to do certain things.

Ian’s perception of blacks as lazy emerged from his understanding of blacks as culturally deficient. His response to the question, “Do you think that the races are naturally different?” therefore, was the following:

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Well I think that genes have something, some play in this, but I think a lot of it is past history of the people and the way they’re brought up. You look at Chinese, if you’re gonna get ahead in China, you’ve gotta be very intellectual and you’ve gotta be willing to, uh, to fight for everything that you’re gonna get. Ja-Japan is the same way. For a kid just to get into college, they gonna take two years of going through entrance exams to get in. Um . . . then you kinda look at the blacks’ situation. It’s like, “well, because of slavery, I ought to be given this for nothing, so I don’t have to work for it, just give it to me.” So, I, you know, culture, and their, and the upbringing is the big, the big part of this.

Although some analysts regard the demise of biological or Jim Crow racism as a tremendous sign of racial progress, 23 I suggest that whites’ contemporary view of blacks as culturally deficient is as problematic because (1) it is as extensive as biological racism used to be among whites, (2) it is regarded by whites as fixed or as something very hard to change (hence the idea of the “biologization of culture”), and (3) like biological or God-given ideas of inferiority, it allows whites to express resentment and hostility safely since, in their view, blacks are where they are as a group because they do not want to get ahead.24 For instance, although Ian acknowledged that “being white is still an advantage in America,” he added: I still think there is a very high level of people that are as frustrated as I am with the, with the blacks not wanting to strive, not wanting to, to do more. Always whining, “I don’t have the opportunity,” “I can’t do that.” You can if you get off your butt and try. So, you know, I know, [name of Automotive Company] bends over backwards to try to help the blacks up. But I would still say it’s an advantage being white.

Ian’s relative directness and coarseness in expressing his negative views on blacks, however, were not the norm among white respondents.25 Most mixed up their answers to avoid the appearance of being flat-out antiblack and to deal discursively with the reality of discrimination. For example, Bill, a manager in a manufacturing plant in his fifties, answered the question on blacks’ inferior social status in this way: They have a tougher time, you know, being equal and that’s the reason. And they’ve had a harder row to hold and just tough because of racism and that.

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Although Bill seems to be sympathetic to blacks’ plight, in an exchange that followed this answer, he suggested another possible explanation for blacks’ inferior social status: [Interviewer: Mainly racism would you say, or . . . ?] Yeah, yeah, mainly. [Other factors of uh would also be important, would you say?] Well, if you have a person that throws in the towel and starts saying racism when in fact, it truly isn’t it at all, and what it really is, is that you need to work harder. Then it’s a crutch that they’re using as an excuse and that is probably part of it. But I don’t know how, I couldn’t imagine how extensive that would be.

“How extensive that would be” seems a lot in Bill’s estimation since he stated the idea that blacks do not work hard and that they use the “race card” whenever they are pressured to perform in three different occasions in the interview. Naturalization of racial matters. In the Jim Crow era few would have doubted that racial considerations were central factors explaining the high levels of residential and social segregation or the limited number of black-white interracial unions. Thirty years after the death of Jim Crow, the levels of social and residential segregation remain unabated and the number of black-white interracial unions lags far behind any other dyad.26 This being the case, how do whites explain this situation? In general their answer boils down to anything but race.27 The frame of naturalization was used by 43 percent of the white respondents to explain the effects of white supremacy; I will focus here on school and residential segregation. The first example is John. In his forties and the vice president of a pest control company, he answered questions dealing with school segregation and busing as did most white respondents: I . . . it’s not anybody’s fault. I think it just happens. I mean when we talk about . . . about uhm . . . . where people live . . . uhmm . . . there are backgrounds, there are cultures, people stay together. Why is that, that eh, Dearborn has one of the largest Arab communities in the country? Is it anybody’s fault? No, they chose to live there. Uhm. [Ok, umm, should the government continue busing to guarantee some mixing of the races in our schools? No. [For some of these reasons or . . . ?]

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Why force the issue? I mean, you can force it, but what good is it gonna do? Either they’re gonna be happy or they aren’t gonna be happy. And uh, it just goes back to . . . natural tendencies. People naturally gravitate . . . toward . . . likeness.

Although John uses a free market rationale to express his opposition to busing (“they chose to live there”), market choices are regarded as grounded in people’s “natural tendencies,” or in John’s words, “people naturally gravitate toward likeness.” Older and less educated white respondents, whom social scientists have traditionally labeled “racist,” used this natural topic in a much bolder, unsophisticated, and often quaint fashion. For example, Earl, a small-time contractor in his fifties with very little education, explained the high level of segregation in the United States: I think you’re never going to change that! I think it’s just kind of, you know, it’s going to end up that way. . . . Every race sticks together and that’s the way it should be, you know. I grew up in a white neighborhood, you know, most of the blacks will live in the black neighborhood. [So you don’t think there’s anything wrong?] No. Well, they can move, they still have the freedom to move anywhere they want anyway.

Nevertheless, I do not want to make much of this distinction between older and lesser educated vis-à-vis younger and more educated white respondents, particularly when younger and educated whites made some racially charged comments too. For instance, Bill, the manufacturing manager that I mentioned before, explained school segregation as follows: I don’t think it’s anybody’s fault. Because people tend to group with their own people. Whether it’s white or black or upper-middle class or lower class or, you now, upper class, you know, Asians. People tend to group with their own. Doesn’t mean if a black person moves into your neighborhood, they shouldn’t go to your school. They should and you should mix and welcome them and everything else, but you can’t force people together. . . . If people want to be together, they should intermix more. [OK. Hmm, so the lack of mixing is really just kind of an individual lack of desire?] Well, yeah individuals, it’s just the way it is. You know, people group together for lots of different reasons: social, religious. Just

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as animals in the wild, you know. Elephants group together, cheetahs group together. You bus a cheetah into an elephant herd because they should mix? You can’t force that.

Minimization of racism. When white and black Detroiters were asked whether “discrimination against blacks is no longer a problem in the United States,” a high proportion of both groups (82.5 percent of whites and 89.5 percent of blacks) indicated that they “disagree” or “strongly disagree” with that statement. However, although whites and blacks believe that discrimination is still a problem in the United States, they dispute its salience as a factor explaining blacks’ standing. Thus, in response to the more specific question, whether “blacks are in the position that they are today as a group because of presentday discrimination,” 60.5 percent of blacks compared to only 32.9 percent of whites stated that they “agree” or “strongly agree.” In general, whites believe that discrimination has all but disappeared whereas blacks believe that discrimination—old and new—is alive and well. Since whites do not think that discrimination is central, they explain racially apparent matters as (1) aberrations committed by the few ignorant “racists” who are still out there or (2) blacks’ own doing. In this section I provide two examples of whites’ denial of the structural character of discrimination, a frame that was deployed by 84 percent of the white respondents. One typical example is Sandra, a retail salesperson in her early forties, who answered the question on discrimination as follows: I think if you are looking for discrimination, I think it’s there to be found. But if you make the best of any situation, and if you don’t use it as an excuse . . . [Right] I think sometimes it’s an excuse because ah, people felt they deserved a job, ah, whatever! I think if things didn’t go their way I know a lot of people have tendency to use . . . prejudice or racism as whatever as an excuse. I think in some ways, yes there is . . . ummm . . . people who are prejudiced. It’s not only blacks, it’s about Spanish, or women. In a lot of way there [is] a lot of reverse discrimination. It’s just what you wanna make of it.

Not surprisingly, since Sandra believes that antiblack racial discrimination is not very salient, she does not believe that being white is an advantage:

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I think at one time it used to be an advantage. Ummm and I think now it’s probably becoming a disadvantage because you have to, as a white person, you basically have to be very careful [of] what you say and what you do because if something is taken the wrong way by anyone, then you can be considered a racist.

Henrietta, a transsexual school teacher in her fifties, replied the following to the question of discrimination: Trying to be an unbiased observer . . . because as a transsexual I am discriminated against. . . . I think if people act responsible they will not be discriminated against. People who are acting irresponsible, in other words, demanding things, ah, “I need this” or “You did this because of my skin color” . . . yeah then, they will be . . . discriminated against. People who are intelligent present themselves in a manner that is appropriate for the situation and will not be discriminated against.

Because whites do not believe that discrimination is a normal part of life in the United States, they view most race-targeted government programs as illegitimate. Furthermore, because they believe that the bulk of the problems afflicting the black community are selfinflicted, they do not consider programs to deal with the effects of past discrimination necessary. Thus, for example, Sandra answered a question on whether or not the government should have specific programs on behalf of blacks to deal with the history of discrimination as follows: No, no. Irish were persecuted when they came over. Polish, Russians, Germans, you name it. There aren’t any individual programs for them. Everybody basically is listed and my grandparents taught me, you pull yourself up by your bootstraps. Don’t count on anybody else to help you out. You have to help yourself first. So, ummm, should a program be done just because they were slaves? No!

And Henrietta answered the question on government intervention on blacks’ behalf in the following manner: As a person who was once reversed discriminated against, I would have to say no. Because the government does not need those programs if they, if people would be motivated to bring themselves out of the poverty level. Ah, when we talk about certain programs,

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when the Irish came over, when the Italians, the Polish, and the Eastern European Jews, they all were immigrants who lived in terrible conditions too, but they had one thing in common, they all knew that education was the way out of that poverty. And they did it. I’m not saying . . . the blacks were brought over here maybe not willingly, but if they realize education’s the key, that’s it. And that’s based on individuality.

The Style of Color Blindness Ideologies include modalities, common phrases or “argumentation schemata,” semantic strategies, and an overall style.28 Color blindness is no exception. Because the normative climate of what can be said in public venues changed dramatically from the Jim Crow to the post–civil rights era, the rhetoric of color blindness is slippery, apparently contradictory, and often subtle. Since a discursive analysis of the various semantic moves typical of color blindness is beyond the scope of this chapter,29 I will focus on showcasing how whites avoid using direct racial references and traditionally “racist” language and rely on covert, indirect, and apparently nonracial language to state their racial views. Avoidance of “racist” terminology. Almost all whites in the interview sample avoided using the Jim Crow terminology to refer to blacks. Only 6 of the 67 whites involved used terms such as colored or Negroes to refer to blacks and not a single one used the term nigger as a legitimate term, and all of them were over 60 years old.30 An example of these respondents is Lucy, a part-time commissary for a vending business in her sixties, who when asked to describe the racial makeup of her place of work, stated, “Oh, we used to have, um, about three colored girls that uh, had worked with us, but since then they have quit.” Although none of the respondents in this study were racial progressives, it would be a mistake to regard them as “Archie Bunkers” just because they used the racial language of the past.31 In truth, like Lucy, all of the other respondents were paternalistic whites who have not fully absorbed the racial language and style of the post–civil rights era. And based on what they said, some of these respondents seemed more open-minded than many of the younger respondents. For instance, Pauline, when asked if she had black friends while growing up, said,

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I always had black friends. Ah, even when I worked I had black friends. In fact, I had a couple of my best friends.”

Although whites’ self-reports of friendship with blacks are often problematic,32 based on her own narrative, she seems to have had real associations with blacks. For example, she played with black kids while growing up and remembered fondly her black coworker. More significantly, Pauline has a niece who is dating a black “gentleman.” When asked, “How do you feel about this relationship?” she responded, I feel like it’s none of my business. She’s had trouble . . . with ah, she’s divorced. She’s had a lot of trouble with her ex, and he’s very, very abusive. This fellow she’s going with is very kind. The kids like him so there you go. So maybe it’s gonna be good for her and the kids. And for him too, who knows!

The rhetorical maze of color blindness. Since post–civil rights racial norms disallow the open expression of views and positions that are directly racial, whites have developed a new racetalk to voice their views (see Chapter 3). I will point out a few of the most common verbal strategies of post–civil rights racetalk. “Yes and no, but. . . .” One common way of stating racial views without opening yourself to the charge of racism is apparently considering all sides of an issue. Although this has been regarded by discursive social psychologists as the way that people express their opinions all the time, I suggest that at least on racial matters, whites’ dilemmatic statements contain, more often than not, strong for or against positions that are not so well hidden.33 Since I have already presented a few quotations that show how whites use this strategy (e.g., Olga’s and Darrell’s answers on interracial marriage), I present only one example in this section to illustrate how whites used this strategy to address other difficult subjects. Sandra, the retail person cited above, used this rhetorical tactic to voice her opposition to affirmative action in a manner that allowed her to save face. Thus, Sandra’s answer to the question, “Are you for or against affirmative action?”: Yes . . . and no. I feel . . . someone should be able to . . . have something, education, job, whatever . . . ah . . . because they’ve

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earned it, they deserve it, they have the ability to do it. You don’t want to put a six-year-old as a rocket scientist. They don’t have the ability. It doesn’t matter if the kid’s black or white. Ah . . . as far as letting one have the job over another one just because of their race or their gender, I don’t believe in that.

Sandra’s “yes and no” answer on affirmative action is truly a strong “no” since she does not find any reason why affirmative action programs must be in place. “I am not prejudiced, but. . . .” Phrases such as “I am not a racist” and “Some of my best friends are black” have become standard fare of post–civil rights racial discourse.34 Therefore, it was not surprising to find that most whites used these rhetorical shields or semantic moves35 in their responses. For example, Carrie, a retired woman in her late sixties, used the same move to safely express her extremely negative views on blacks. She inserted it to anchor her answer to the question on the significance of discrimination for blacks’ life chances: I don’t think it’s the case [that blacks experience a lot of discrimination]. I think it, I think they’re looking for an easy way out. Some of them, I mean, it’s not your, ah, ah, well what I am trying to say, it’s not your ah, ah . . . the ones who, your educated ones, it’s not them. It’s the other ones that are just too lazy to get up and get a job and they’re looking for an easy way out. . . . Instead of studying, the world’s against them, so they just sit and get into gangs and things like that. . . . It bothers, it, a lot of things bother me, I’m not trying to be racist or anything like that, but I just feel that ah, I think a lot of them hurt themselves.

Rhetorical incoherence. Rhetorical incoherence is not a strategy but a consequence of the post–civil rights racial discursive climate. Even though all natural speech exhibits a certain degree of incoherence, the level of incoherence increases noticeably when the respondents in my studies discussed racially sensitive subjects.36 One area that elicited high levels of rhetorical maneuvering and thus incoherence was the sequence of questions on interracial relationships. For example, Dorothy, a retired worker from an automobile company in her seventies,37 who was very articulate and talkative throughout the interview, became almost incomprehensible when she answered the question on intermarriage:

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Eh, well, I donno, but I, I, I feel that uh, I donno, I just feel like, that uh, you should stick to your own race for marriage. [Hmm, and why is that?] Uh because I feel that there’s uh proble . . . there would be problems on both sides. A girl would feel hurt . . . if uh, if his parents, you know were [end of tape—interviewer asked her to continue her answer]. Yeah, I really do. Well, I donno . . . they have different culture than we do, really . . . and I think that his family would be, would probably be just as upset. . . . I watch this on TV every day and see how, you know, how they uh, they have a different, I donno, I hear the men, I know I hear that the black men on TV say that the . . . black women are so, you know, so wild and mad, you know . . . tempers, you know what I mean. And I just feel that’s the limit. . . . I donno. If my dau . . . if one of my daughters would ah married one, I would have accepted it because it’s my daughter . . . and I would, I wo, and I would have never be, I would never be nasty to them. Because I feel they’re just as human as we are. If they treat me decent, I’m gonna treat them decent. That’s my feelings!

Dorothy’s incoherence makes sense in light of her openly expressed opposition to interracial marriages. However, since openly opposing interracial marriage is controversial and violates the notion of color blindness, white respondents who took this stance felt forced to “soften” the blow. That is why Dorothy added all the qualifications about what she would have done if one of her own daughters had “married one” and why she felt compelled to insert the profoundly awkward statement about the equality of the races (“they’re just as human as we are”). Lynn, a human resource manager in her early fifties, expressed her reservations about dating black men in her response to a question on dating: I don’t know. Just . . . well . . . I think I would have been very uncomfortable, okay, I really do. I mean, it would just be, I wouldn’t want to go out with a, ah . . . ah . . . really dark Middle Eastern man, or Indian, or Oriental. I mean, I, I just would be uncomfortable. If they’re closer to me in looks, okay. That’s just always the way I felt. Not that I didn’t like men of ethnic diversity, but I just . . . you have a certain taste, you know. I think I do.

Since Lynn had stated something that could be interpreted as “racist,” she had to do lots of rhetorical work to explain her position on interracial marriage:

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I have mixed emotions on it. I feel that two people can fall in love and it, you know, can build a strong . . . bond with one another, but also, you know, there are consequences to that unfortunately in this world, and so it would be a very difficult relationship. If my daughter or son were to date somebody of another ethnic background, black especially, I’d be uncomfortable. But not any more so than if they were dating, like I said, an Indian, or a ah . . . ah Mexican or a non-Caucasian. I just would be [Um-humm]. Even an Italian. I don’t know why, I mean, it, ’cause I’m not . . . in fact, I, I, you know, I think the black race is one of the most gentle races of all of them. I think that they are violent out of emotion not out of indecisiveness or evilness. They are not that spicy, but, I don’t know.

As in Dorothy’s case, Lynn felt obliged to clarify that she is not a racist and to insert a truly odd statement about the gentleness of blacks at the same time she claims that blacks are violent by nature.

The Storylines of Color Blindness All ideological formations produce common stories that become part of the racial folklore and thus are shared, used, and believed by members of the dominant race (see Chapter 3). These narratives provide powerful emotional, almost visceral, accounts about why the world is the way it is or, in some cases, reasons why the world ought to be different. During Jim Crow, for example, the storyline of the black rapist served as a justification for maintaining the racial and gender order.38 The post–civil rights era has produced to date four primary storylines, which are (1) “The past is the past,” (2) “I didn’t own slaves,” (3) “My (friend or relative) didn’t get a (job or promotion) because a black (usually man) got it,” and (4) “If (ethnic groups such as Jews, Italians, Irish, or Chinese) made it, how come blacks have not?” The first storyline was used by whites to punctuate one of either two things. Some respondents used the storyline to suggest that U.S. citizens must put this element of their history behind and move on, while others used it to suggest that slavery ended so long ago that blacks cannot use it as an excuse for their predicament today. The second storyline was used to criticize race-targeted programs and to rationalize not doing anything about blacks’ contemporary plight in the United States.39 These two related stories were used

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by 78 percent of the white respondents in the DAS. The argument behind the third storyline is self-evident. The storyline was usually inserted when discussing race-targeted programs (e.g., affirmative action) and was used by about half of the white respondents who believe that affirmative action is “preferential treatment” or “reverse discrimination.” The last storyline has a relatively long history (a question based on this storyline has been used in surveys since the 1960s) and is used to suggest that blacks lack something (work ethic, proper social values, intelligence, etc.) that accounts for their standing. “The past is the past” and “I didn’t own any slaves.” Diana, an employment manager in her late twenties, inserted these two storylines in her answer to a question on whether or not the government should help blacks to overcome the effects of past discrimination: No, and I, you know, I have to say that I’m pretty supportive of . . . anything to help people, but um . . . I don’t know why that slavery thing has a . . . I’ve got a chip on my shoulder about that. It’s like it happened so long ago and yeah you’ve got these 16 year old kids . . . saying, “Well, I deserve this because my great-great granddaddy was a slave.” Well, you know what, that doesn’t affect you. Me as white person, I had nothing to do with slavery. You as a black person, you never experience it. It was . . . so long ago, I just don’t see how that pertains to . . . what’s happening to the race today. So . . . you know, that’s one thing that I’m just like “God, shut up!” You know, it, it’s so long ago, get over it! Um, you know, it’s kinda like the South still thinking the Civil War was yesterday. [Right.] Yeah, no, I, those are things I just feel like, “Let it go.”

Here Diana combined “The past is the past” with a mild version of “I didn’t own any slaves” to state her opposition to race-targeted programs. Diana is a strong opponent of affirmative action and used “The past is the past” storyline again later on in the interview to explain why she opposes a hypothetical company hiring a black applicant to compensate for past discrimination by the company. In her words: I think, I . . . I think I disagreed with that. . . . I don’t think you can fix something you’ve done wrong in the past. I think you can identify what you’ve done in the past and just don’t do it again, but don’t do something to try to make up for it.

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Roland, an electrical engineer in his forties, inserted the two storylines in his answer to the question of reparations: I think they’ve gotten enough. I don’t think we need to pay them anything or I think as long as they are afforded the opportunities and avail themselves to the opportunities like everybody else . . . I, I don’t know why we should give them any reparation for something that happened, you know . . . I can’t help what happened in the 1400s, er the 1500s or the 1600s when the blacks were brought over here and put into slavery. I mean . . . I had no control over that, neither did you, so I don’t think we should ah . . . we should do anything as far as reparations.

“My friend did not get a job because a black man got it.” Although researchers have found that just between 1 and 3 percent of the employment discrimination cases filed with EEOC fit the “reverse discrimination” mold and that most of these cases are brought by disappointed whites whom the courts have found “to be less qualified than the job winners,” many whites believe that they have experienced it.40 Whites translate this belief into stories of friends or relatives who vouch that they did not get a job or a promotion or were not admitted to certain colleges because these organizations had to hire or admit less qualified blacks. A quarter of the white Detroit respondents used this storyline. For example, Monica, a medical transcriber in her fifties, used this storyline to explain her opposition to affirmative action. My cousin had a 100 percent on his promotion tests many, many times and he was passed over because he was white. That’s not right. You know, um, I think (affirmative action) made a lot of opportunities for people to get a foothold into companies where they weren’t before. I’ve seen people get jobs that were not qualified and they sit there and take it for granted and they dare you to criticize them. Because you can’t fire me anyhow because I got in on affirmative action. My daughter, both my daughters said, don’t give me a promotion because I’m the first woman. Give me the promotion because I’m the best person for the job. Um, I think, our qualifications are more important than our color, our gender. You know, because if you’re selected on your qualifications then nobody should be able to complain or argue the issue.

Tony, a carpet installer in his late twenties, used the storyline to explain why his girlfriend was denied welfare. Tony’s answer to the

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question on whether or not being white is an advantage in the United States was as follows: Some times a disadvantage [Is it?] Yeah. [Can you say more about that?] Oh yeah. Like when my girlfriend went to get on aid, the lady told her if she was black, she could have gotten help. But she wasn’t black and she wasn’t getting no help. But that’s the only thing I think is unfair.

“If Jews made it, how come blacks have not?” When we asked in the survey the question, “Irish, Italian, Jewish, and many other minorities overcame prejudice and worked their way up. Blacks and other minorities should do the same without any special favors. Do you strongly agree, agree, disagree, or strongly disagree?” white and black respondents differed dramatically in their responses. Whereas 74.4 percent of whites chose the “strongly agree” or “agree” response, only 38.3 percent of blacks did so. About 20 percent of white respondents used this storyline spontaneously in the interviews to suggest that not all minorities are “lazy,” thus implying that blacks are lazy, or to point out that other groups use the opportunities available to them while blacks do not. Because I cited an example of this storyline already (Henrietta), I will just cite two more cases that illustrate a variation, focusing on contemporary matters but still using the experiences of other ethnic groups as a counterpoint to explain blacks’ status. The first example is Mandy, a registered nurse in her thirties. She used the storyline to address the question on whether blacks are where they are because of their values. Ummm, generally I think that’s probably true. Now are you talking about all minorities? [Um-humm.] ’Cause I don’t (think) all minorities do. . . . When you look at the people coming from Asia, Japan, and China and, ah, they’re making the honor roll. When you look at the honor here in Rochester, they’re all foreign names. You know, some of those kids from minority families figured out that they had to work and strive and work harder if they were going to make it all the way to the top. [Okay. So you’re saying that you would classify minorities by race and go from there?] Not all minorities are lazy [Okay] . . . and lay on the couch all the time.

Ian, the information security manager in an automotive company cited above, used the same version of the storyline as Mandy in his

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awkward attempt to define racism. I cite his answer in an edited fashion: What is racism in my view? [Although a commonly used word, it’s not usually defined.] Yeah . . . I guess, I would kind of define it as havin, having your personal opinions about somebody formed, uh, by their race [the respondent comments on his problems with black workers and with blacks in general while he was growing up]. . . . I’ve been, this is the way I am and it’s seeing what they’ve done, and just the same thing I’ve always been around Jewish kids, Jewish people. OK? They’re always fighting to be the best that—I don’t know if that’s good or bad, OK? They’re always striving to do better. I don’t see that in the black people. I see it in Japanese, I see it in Chinese, Indians. . . . I don’t see it in blacks.

Conclusion

In this chapter I documented primarily three things. First, I showed that white Detroiters use the frames of color-blind racism at high rates ranging from a low of 43 percent to a high of 96 percent. Second, I suggested that the style of color-blind racism, unlike the openly “racist” and direct style associated with Jim Crow racism, is subtle, full of double-talk, and replete with apparent contradictions. I specifically showed how white Detroiters avoid traditional racist speech, use a variety of semantic moves to safely voice their racial views, and become rhetorically incoherent when addressing racially sensitive issues. Finally, I showcased four of the dominant storylines that have emerged as part of post–civil rights racial folklore. At this point I can piece together the puzzle formed by color blindness. Whites believe that the United States has de facto extended equal opportunities to all of its citizens and is, for the most part, a race-neutral society. Therefore, they exhibit little sympathy if not outright resentment for affirmative action, race-targeted government programs, or minorities’ demands for their fair shares. The belief that the United States is truly the land of opportunity for all allows whites to use liberal arguments—although in an abstract and decontextualized manner—to explain racial inequality and justify all sorts of race-related matters (e.g., residential segregation and limited interracial socialization). Furthermore, because whites believe that discrimination is no longer a salient factor in the United States, they believe

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that blacks’ plight is the result of blacks’ cultural deficiencies (e.g., laziness, lack the proper values, and disorganized family life). Taken together, whites’ views represent nothing less than a new, formidable racial ideology: new because the topics of color blindness have replaced, for the most part, those associated with Jim Crow racism;41 formidable because these topics leave little intellectual, moral, and practical room for whites to support the policies that are needed to accomplish significant racial change in this country. Furthermore, because color-blind racism seems reasonable and has frames that are so different from those typical of Jim Crow racism and because its style is so slippery, this new ideology provides an almost impenetrable defense of postmodern white supremacy. Despite the formidableness of color-blind racism, this ideology does not control the entire racial ideological universe. Although most whites breathe color blindness, some do not. In previous work, I estimated that about 10 percent of white college students were racial progressives.42 The students, as well as members of the population at large, most likely to be racial progressives or “ideological dissidents”43 were women from working-class backgrounds. Although this finding may be surprising to mainstream social analysts, it is consistent with previous work.44 If we apply very strict criteria for defining racial progressives (respondents who did not use any of the topics of color blindness), only 4 percent of the whites I have interviewed in the DAS survey qualify as such. However, if we use a more flexible definition (respondents who subscribed to less than two topics in a mild fashion), the number of progressives doubles. If a small segment of the white population does not subscribe to color blindness, to what extent do blacks themselves buy into this ideology? Have they developed a totally different ideology to explain racial matters? Do blacks use the same style to communicate their racial views? Do they believe the stories propagated by the racial folklore? These are the main questions I attempt to answer in the next chapter. Notes 1. The quotation is from van Dijk, Ideology (London: Sage, 1999), p. 91. The concept of “tool kit” is from Ann Swidler, “Culture in Action: Symbols and Strategies,” American Sociological Review 51 (1984): 273–286.

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2. Thompson, Studies in Theory and Ideology (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1984), p. 25. 3. Color-blind racism is not the only racial ideology in play in the United States. My argument is, however, that the racial ideologies typical of the Jim Crow era based on overt white supremacy have declined in significance and have become secondary. 4. Ryan, Blaming the Victim (New York: Random House, 1976), p. 20. 5. Brooks, Rethinking the American Race Problem (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1990). For a similar argument about how racial inequality is produced in the post–civil rights United States, see Smith, “‘Politics’ Is Not Enough: The Institutionalization of the African American Freedom Movement,” pp. 97–126 in From Exclusion to Inclusion: The Long Struggle for African American Political Power, edited by Ralph C. Gomes and Linda Faye Williams (New York and London: Greenwood Press). 6. Ryan, Blaming the Victim; Kovel, White Racism: A Psychohistory (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984); Essed, Diversity: Gender, Color, and Culture (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1996); Bobo, Kluegel, and Smith, “Laissez Faire Racism: The Crystallization of a Kinder, Gentler, Antiblack Ideology,” pp. 15–42 in Racial Attitudes in the 1990s, edited by Steven A. Tuch and Jack K. Martin (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1997). 7. Schuman et al., Racial Attitudes in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997). See also Bonilla-Silva and Forman, “‘I Am Not a Racist but . . .’: Mapping White College Students’ Racial Ideology in the USA,” Discourse and Society 11, no. 1 (2000): 51–86. 8. For a review of how survey researchers interpret whites’ attitudes, see Chapter 3. 9. Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future (New York: Vintage Books Edition, 1966), p. 92. 10. Bonilla-Silva and Forman, “‘I Am Not a Racist but. . . .’” 11. Lawrence Bobo and Fred Licari, “Education and Political Tolerance: Testing the Effects of Cognitive Sophistication and Target Group Affect,” Public Opinion Quarterly 53 (1989): 285–308; Schuman et al., Racial Attitudes in America. 12. According to Steinar Kvale (An Introduction to Qualitative Research Interviewing [Thousands Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 1996]), most interview-based projects use between ten and fifteen subjects. 13. Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, “‘This Is a White Country’: The Racial Ideological Convergence of the Western Nations of the World-System,” Research in Politics and Society 6 (1999): 96. 14. Politicians such as former president George H. Bush, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, and Louisiana Governor Mike Foster claimed to be color-blind and praised Martin Luther King. However, Congressperson Bush opposed the civil rights legislation in the 1960s, Newt Gingrich orchestrated the “Contract with America” full of racial implications, and Mike Foster signed an order banning affirmative action in agencies under his control.

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15. My cowriter and I define white habitus as the social and residential racial isolation experienced by whites at youth and adulthood. We postulate that this white habitus conditions and creates whites’ racial taste, perceptions, feelings, emotions, and even their views on racial matters and limits the likelihood of cross-racial friendships with blacks. See Eduardo BonillaSilva and Saenz, “‘If Two People Are in Love . . .’: Color-Blind Dreams, (White) Color-Coded Reality Among White College Students” (forthcoming). 16. For a marvelous critique of these arguments, see chapter 7 in Ellis Cose, Color-Blind (New York: HarperCollins, 1997). 17. Van Dijk, Ideology. 18. This notion is from Pierre Andre Taguieff, “The New Cultural Racism in France,” Telos 83 (spring 1990): 109–122. 19. I borrow this term from Jody D. Armour, Negrophobia and Reasonable Racism: The Hidden Costs of Being Black in America (New York and London: New York University, 1997). 20. The contradiction between Richard’s belief in meritocracy and the way his own company does business is not perceived as such by him—or at least does not concern him much—because, as Mary Jackman has pointed out (Velvet Glove), ideology, as a political tool, needs to be flexible to work. 21. Bonilla-Silva and Saenz, “‘If Two People Are in Love. . . .’” See also Bonilla-Silva and Forman, “‘I Am Not a Racist but. . . .’” 22. See John F. Dovidio and Samuel L. Gaertner, “Changes in the Expression and Assessment of Racial Prejudice,” pp. 119–140 in Opening Doors: Perspectives on Race Relations in Contemporary America, edited by Harry J. Knopke, R. J. Norrell, and R. W. Rogers (Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 1991). See also Schuman et al., Racial Attitudes in America. 23. For examples, see Lipset, American Exceptionalism; Sniderman and Piazza, The Scar of Race (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993); Sniderman and Carmines, Reaching Beyond Race (Cambridge, MA, and London, England: Harvard University Press, 1997); and Schuman et al., Racial Attitudes in America. 24. This idea is discussed by Jackman, The Velvet Glove, and Kinder and Sanders, Divided by Color (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1996). 25. As a general rule, elite whites were less likely than poorer whites to use these frames in a blunt and coarse manner. This finding fits well Jackman’s argument that elite whites have the cultural apparatus to better express their racialized views. Mary R. Jackman and Michael J. Muha, “Education and Intergroup Attitudes: Moral Enlightenment, Superficial Democratic Commitment, or Ideological Refinement? American Sociological Review 49 (1984): 751–769. 26. For data on residential and social matters, see Chapter 3. For data on interracial unions, see Matthijs Kalmijn, “Trends in Black/White Intermarriage,” Social Forces 72 (1993): 119–146; and Kalmijn, “Inter-

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marriage and Homogamy: Causes, Patterns, Trends,” Annual Review of Sociology 24 (1998): 395–421. 27. This stance also affects social analysts’ views. See Melvin Thomas, “Anything but Race: The Social Science Retreat from Racism,” African American Research Perspectives 79 (winter 2000): 96. 28. For details, see van Dijk, Prejudice in Discourse: An Analysis of Ethnic Prejudice in Cognition and Conversation (Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 1984). See also chapter 27 in van Dijk, Ideology. 29. For an example, see Bonilla-Silva and Forman, “‘I Am Not a Racist but. . . .’” 30. I have no data on how whites refer to minorities in private. It is interesting to point out that anecdotal (Otis-Graham, Member of the Club: Reflections on Life in a Racially Polarized World [New York: HarperCollins, 1995]; interview (Feagin and Sykes, Living with Racism: The Black Middle Class Experience [Boston: Beacon Press, 1994]; Feagin and Vera, White Racism: The Basics [New York: Routledge, 1995]); and ethnographic work with blacks and whites (John Hartigan, Jr., Racial Situations: Class Predicaments of Whiteness in Detroit [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999]) suggests that whites use these words more often than they did in my interviews. I suspect that the structured and formal nature of our interview process made it a public matter and thus caused respondents to be cautious. 31. Using racial terminology a “racist” does not necessarily make. Today, for example, there are many working-class whites who live in or near racial ghettos and use the word “nigger” in a nonracist manner. In the same vein, many “liberals,” who would never use this terminology, endorse wholeheartedly the topics of color-blindness and thus the racial status quo. For an insightful analysis of how working-class whites use the word “nigger,” see Hartigan’s Racial Situations: Class Predicaments of Whiteness in Detroit. For an early analysis of liberal white middle-class racial blues, see Judith Caditz, White Liberals in Transition: Current Dilemmas of Ethnic Integration (New York: Spectrum Publications Inc., 1976). 32. Benjamin DeMott, The Trouble with Friendship: Why Americans Can’t Think Straight About Race (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1995). See also Bonilla-Silva and Saenz, “‘If Two People Are in Love. . . .’” 33. Here I take issue with discursive social psychologists such as Michael Billig et al., Ideological Dilemmas: A Social Psychology of Everyday Thinking (London: Sage Publications, 1988), and Wetherell and Potter, Discourse and Social Psychology: Beyond Attitudes and Behaviour (London: Sage Publications, 1987), for whom all speech is dilemmatic. I contend that at least in terms of racial matters, the dilemmatic character of speech is mostly strategic and, as I will show, it barely conceals whites’ positions on a variety of hotly contested issues. 34. These disclaimers have been studied by discourse analysts for years. See Teun A. van Dijk, Elite Discourse and Racism (Newbury Park, CA: Sage, 1993).

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35. Semantic moves are “strategically managed relations between propositions” that allow interlocutors to achieve the goal of saving face. Teun A. van Dijk, Communicating Racism (Newbury Park, Beverly Hills, London, and New Delhi: Sage Publications, 1987), p. 86. 36. For a similar finding, see van Dijk, Prejudice in Discourse (Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 1984). 37. We found similar levels of incoherence among young college students. See Bonilla-Silva and Forman, “‘I Am Not a Racist but. . . .’” 38. Patricia Hill-Collins, Black Feminist Thought (New York: Routledge, 1990). 39. For a similar analysis, see Amy E. Ansell and James M. Statman, “‘I Never Owned Slaves,’” Research in Politics and Society 6 (1999): 151–174. 40. Tom Wicker, Tragic Failure: Racial Integration in America (New York: William Morrow and Company, 1996), p. 98. 41. For a similar analysis, see Bobo, Kluegel, and Smith, “Laissez Faire Racism: The Crystallization of a Kinder, Gentler, Antiblack Ideology.” 42. Bonilla-Silva and Forman, “‘I Am Not a Racist but. . . .’” 43. See van Dijk, Ideology. 44. Herbert Apthteker, Anti-Racism in U.S. History: The First Two Hundred Years (New York: Greenwood Press, 1992); Feagin and Vera, White Racism: The Basics. For an interesting study on the limitations of white liberals on racial matters, see Ruth Frankenburg, White Women, Race Matters: The Social Construction of Whiteness (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993). For a study on the possibilities of antiracism, see Eileen O’Brien, “Mind, Heart, and Action: Understanding the Dimensions of Antiracism,” Research in Politics and Society 6 (1999): 305–322.

6 Color-Blind Racism and Blacks

S

urvey researchers have serious disagreements on how to analyze and interpret whites’ racial views. In contrast, they almost unanimously agree that whites and blacks have vastly different views on fundamental racial matters in the United States.1 These basic disagreements between whites and blacks appeared in my 1998 Detroit Area Survey too. For example, whereas 53 percent of whites stated that they prefer to live in neighborhoods that are “all white” or “mostly white,” only 22 percent of blacks preferred such neighborhoods.2 In fact 62 percent of blacks stated that they prefer to live in neighborhoods that are “half and half.” In terms of busing, 69 percent of whites opposed it compared to 26 percent of blacks. As far as the state of race relations, 56 percent of whites believe that this country has experienced lots of racial progress, but only 29 percent of blacks agree with this view. Because whites believe, as I suggest in Chapter 5, that discrimination is no longer a salient feature of the United States, only 32 percent believe that blacks have any reason to be angry. In sharp contrast, 76 percent of blacks believe that blacks have reasons to be angry. Finally, on the hot issue of affirmative action, 50 percent of the surveyed white Detroiters stated that if a proposal similar to that passed in California to eliminate affirmative action was put on the ballot in Michigan, they would support it, but only 7 percent of blacks said they would support such a proposal. These vast attitudinal differences between blacks and whites 167

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were also evident in the DAS interviews. In general, blacks rejected the dominant themes and positions on race-related matters associated with color blindness. Unlike whites, blacks believe that discrimination is central in the United States, segregation is largely whites’ fault, and equality and fairness must be practical rather than abstract. Additionally, they support affirmative action and even more radical policies such as reparations. Blacks were also significantly less likely than whites to use the indirect and subtle style of color blindness and even less likely to use the storylines of color blindness (see below). However, dominant ideologies affect, influence, and partly shape the consciousness of subordinated groups (see Chapter 3). Therefore, it was not surprising to find that a number of blacks were directly affected by the frames of color blindness. In Table 6.1 I present data on the proportion of blacks who used the various frames of color blindness directly in the interviews. Whereas these topics were central to the ideological universe of whites (see Table 5.2 in Chapter 5), they were significantly less central for blacks. Only one frame (abstract liberalism) seems to have made serious inroads in blacks’ social imaginary, albeit the cultural rationale and the naturalization frame have also had an impact. Table 6.1

Deployment of Color-Blind Frames by Black Respondents

Frames

Blacks

Abstract liberalism On affirmative action

6/17 (35%) 1/17 (6%)

Biologization of racism

4/17 (24%)

Naturalization of racial matters

4/17 (24%)

Minimization of racism

1/17 (6%)

So far my analysis is congruent with that of most survey researchers. Whites and blacks seem to have opposite group-based views on racial matters. Nevertheless, the effectiveness of an ideology should not be judged exclusively by the number of people who use its topics or modalities. A dominant ideology is effective (dominant) if it blurs the positions of the dominated groups and, more sig-

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nificantly, if it shapes the terrain of the political struggle against the dominant groups. As Nicos Poulantzas wrote about dominant class ideology: The dominance of [an ideology] is shown by the fact that the dominated classes live their conditions of political existence through the forms of dominant political discourse: this means that often they live even their revolt against domination of the system within the frame of reference of the dominant legitimacy.3

Women and workers, for example, may have views that are different from those of men and capitalists, but the former shares with the latter enough views and ideas and, more importantly, the terrain of political discourse, so that even the women’s and workers’ challenges to patriarchy and capitalism fall within the limits of what is “legitimate” for men and capitalists. Women and workers may demand “equal opportunity” or the end to gender- and class-based discrimination—demands that by themselves do not subvert the parameters of gender or class rule—but they are less likely to struggle for proportional representation in all social networks and institutions or for wealth redistribution. In the case of blacks, few seem to be directly affected by color blindness, but this ideology has shaped the argumentative terrain in which they battle. In the following sections I analyze the extent to which color blindness has shaped blacks’ views on various racial matters. I also examine the extent to which the style and storylines of color blindness have affected blacks. Frames of Color-Blind Racism and Blacks

In the previous chapter I introduced the central frames of color-blind racism. Although most blacks do not directly use these frames, color blindness has affected their views on various race-related matters.

Abstract Liberalism and Blacks Abstract liberalism is at the core of color-blind racism. As I documented in the previous chapter, this frame affects the way whites view race-related matters such as social, residential, and school segregation; intermarriage; and affirmative action. Slightly more than a

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third of blacks also used this frame directly in their answers. 4 It seems to have affected their views on two issues, namely, affirmative action and school and residential segregation. Affirmative action. In terms of affirmative action, color blindness has had very little direct or indirect influence on blacks. A typical response to the question, “Are you for or against affirmative action?” was that of Edward, an unemployed man in his early fifties: I’d say that I would have to be for affirmative action simply because you still have ignorant people. Some of these ignorant people have, are in control and have a little more power than I’d like to think they should have in regards to what they can do to prevent other people from having opportunities that means that they can’t have growth and development. Affirmative action is a means and method. Then it’s like a key when you got a locked door. You’ve got to have it.

When asked, “What would you say to those who say affirmative action is unfair to whites?” Edward responded as follows: I tell them that “what do you call fair?” If you got everything, it’s kind of like saying, “you are upset because you got ice cream and you don’t have a cone.” Then put in in a bowl, you already got everything. Don’t worry about it.

Jimmy, a social worker in his forties who strongly supported affirmative action, did not have much sympathy for whites claiming that affirmative action discriminates against them: Uhh, I say . . . they just hollerin’. I don’t agree with it and all. You know, it’s like every time a person uhh, every time you uncover something that’s wrong, people try to, it’s like reverse psychology. . . . It’s like now they want to holla’ “I’m being discriminated against.” I don’t agree with that and all. It’s like there’s no other way really to reverse these ills . . . other than affirmative action.

Similarly, Joe, an electronic technician in his thirties, echoed the views of the two previous respondents on whites’ concerns about the unfairness of affirmative action: “They need to wake up and smell the roses.” Even conservative black respondents, who subscribed to many of the frames of color blindness, had views on affirmative action that

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were more in line with the majority of blacks. For example, Carla, an executive secretary in her early thirties, supported affirmative action. She stated her belief that affirmative action is not unfair to whites in the following manner: Wow! Getting back into the stereotypical thing. Whites have had a lot of times better advantage as far as school, work, because they are known to produce or known to succeed. Black, on the other hand, we need affirmative action in order to make. . . . At first, I thought affirmative action was only to fill a quota. Now I know it is a chance or an opportunity for a black person to show them what they’re really made of.

School and residential segregation. In contrast to affirmative action, the frame of abstract liberalism had a much larger impact on how blacks interpreted the issue of segregation. Although the majority of blacks blamed the government, whites, or racism for school (12/17) and residential (7/12) segregation and demanded school equality (in funding and otherwise), their views were not monolithical. For example, four blacks argued that school or residential segregation is “natural” (see analysis in section below), three said that blacks had something to do with residential segregation or that it is “no one’s fault,” and two older respondents said that racial segregation is not a problem. More importantly, six blacks used the abstract liberalism frame directly to explain school or residential segregation. First, I include one example of how most blacks answered the questions on segregation. Latasha, a self-employed nail polisher in her late twenties, blamed the government for the lack of school integration. She pointed out that whereas schools in the suburbs “might get $2,500 per child,” public schools in Detroit “only get $1,000 per child.” She insisted in her discussion on busing that “the problem you come about education it’s the money . . . that’s what the main thing is, is the money with the kids.” Latasha’s concern with the limited funding received by the public schools where blacks attend was echoed directly and indirectly by most blacks. Latasha also aspired to live in a society where race does not affect people’s residential choices or, in her own words, “you shouldn’t have to . . . single yourself to this area or single yourself to that area because you’re [of a] different race.” However, she realizes that discrimination has not disappeared in the United States. For example, after stating her hope for race not being a factor in the housing mar-

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ket, she commented, at the bequest of the interviewer, that “sometimes it is.” More significantly, Latasha narrated her own experiences with discrimination while shopping in downtown Detroit. Therefore, Latasha supported government intervention to guarantee that blacks have equal access to any neighborhood where they may want to buy a house and to improve the neighborhoods where most blacks live in downtown Detroit. But blacks’ views on segregation were more mixed and contradictory than this example would suggest. For instance, Tyrone, an unemployed man in his early forties, supported school and residential integration. His response to the question on the high level of school segregation was as follows: Yeah, let ’em keep on busing. It won’t hurt ’em. Then the kids will learn to get along better. When they become adults they should get along better. They only know about racist by what they hear in their own neighborhood.

Based on this answer, it was not surprising to hear that Tyrone also supported residential integration, a choice supported by 62 percent of the blacks in the survey: I think all the neighborhoods should be mixed. Then every, then there wouldn’t be no concept of how different people are. They would know how each race would be.

Nevertheless, Tyrone, who was one of the most outspoken blacks in this study, opposed government intervention to guarantee residential integration in the following manner: Well, you can’t tell people where [to] live. They got to pay for their own house, so people are going to live where they want to live. So you can’t do that.

Tyrone uses the frames of abstract liberalism and free market rationale to oppose doing anything about one of the central factors behind blacks’ contemporary plight in the United States. Interestingly, Tyrone, as I will show later, was a strong supporter of government intervention on many other matters. Tyrone’s defeatist posture on housing, however, was not unique to him. For example, Mark, a bus driver in Detroit in his thirties and

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another very conscientious man who recognized that blacks have been kept segregated in schools by violent means and thus supported busing, opposed government intervention to increase neighborhood integration. After stating that neighborhood segregation occurs “naturally,” Mark answered the question, “So do you think that the government should do something about the situation?”: No more than if blacks or whites attempt to integrate an area and are faced with, are faced with . . . I can’t think of the word . . . aggression when attempting to do so. And I can’t say necessarily the federal government, but on a local level, they should be afforded every protection or opportunity that they deserve and that is their right.

Mark’s answer, particularly his insistence on only having the government intervene to guarantee individuals’ access to housing markets, is almost verbatim the standard answer of most whites to this question.

Biologization of Culture and Blacks Few blacks (3/17 blacks in the sample) were directly affected by whites’ cultural explanation of blacks’ standing in the United States. Most blacks said that this is a ruse used by whites to hide their role in the situation of blacks. For example, Trisha, a homemaker in her twenties, answered a question about whether blacks are poorer than whites because they are lazy as follows: I wouldn’t say they lazy. I think, I think they just say you lazy ’cause you black. But I don’t think they is. They just don’t want to give them a chance to prove themselves that they can achieve more.

Although few blacks bought completely into this cultural explanation, this topic did frame the way many discussed issues such as discrimination and the specific charge that blacks are lazy. The influence of this cultural frame did not come as a surprise since a significant proportion of blacks agreed with stereotypes about blacks in the survey. For instance, 32 percent of blacks agreed with the proposition that blacks are “violent,” 32 percent with the idea that blacks are “lazy,” and 30 percent with the notion that blacks are “welfare-

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dependent” (50 percent, 20 percent, and 53 percent of whites agreed with these stereotypes respectively).5 First, I provide one example of blacks who adopted the cultural frame directly. Vonda, a homemaker in her late fifties with very little education, explained blacks’ inferior status to whites in the following manner: Ah . . . I don’t know, I don’t know how to answer that one. Maybe if they get off their butts and get an education like white, I don’t know. Maybe that’s it.

When asked specifically if she believes that blacks are worse off than whites because they are lazy, Vonda stated, “Yeah, I think they probably more and more lazy than white are.” Although Vonda sounds here like most whites on this issue, it is important to point out that she agreed with the majority of blacks on most of the other issues. Regina, a homemaker in her early fifties, who shared most of the positions on race issues with the majority of blacks in the sample, exemplifies how this cultural frame has affected the way many blacks think and argue about race in the United States. When asked if she believed that blacks are worse off than whites because they are lazy, Regina answered, Well, I don’t think they [lack] the proper, you know, things to succeed in and ah, but the ones that wants to have, they can have. But it’s just some don’t want to have anything. They can’t blame it on other person, which I don’t. I don’t blame it on anyone ’cause I don’t have anything. I blame it on myself ’cause I think I should have did better when I was coming up and got a better education.

There are two significant things to underscore in Regina’s answer. First, although Regina believes that lazy blacks are a minority in the black community, she accepts the ideological terrain of whites to explain blacks’ status in the United States. Furthermore, like most blacks, Regina believes that discrimination is a central factor responsible for blacks’ collective standing in the United States. Regina responded to specific questions on discrimination that she believes blacks experience “a lot of discrimination” and that the reason blacks have an inferior standing than whites is that “they don’t have the education that they should have.” She also commented, without hesitation and with emphasis, that being white is still an advantage. When asked, “Why?” she replied, “Because of they color.”

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Another example of this laziness-discrimination duality is Nel, a retired janitor in her sixties. Nel remembered how “black people always, at that time, had it really, really hard” in her native Arkansas and how she had to address whites as “Mister” or “Miss.” She even narrated her uncle’s lynching, carried out, she said, because he “went out with this white woman.” Although she believes that things have improved, she cited her own recent bouts with discrimination in Detroit as evidence that discrimination has not disappeared: Well, I believe some of the people, because I have, I have been on my job, and you know, I used to, before I started, working for [University in Michigan], I used to work, babysit for people in the house. And this is true, right on 14th and Calvin, I used to be standing out with the baby and a carload of white boys, a truckload, went past and they called me names. Now, I know about that [discrimination].

In line with this answer, Nel cited discrimination as a major reason why blacks are worse off than whites in the United States. Regardless of her recognition of the centrality of discrimination, when she was asked the question, “Some people say that minorities are worse off than whites because they lack motivation, are lazy, or do not have the proper values to succeed in society. So what do you think?” she answered, “I know they lazy.” However, she immediately qualified this position: “But really, you know . . . the majority you said? But you can’t [say] all the same because all people are not the same.”

Naturalization of Racial Matters and Blacks Although blacks do not have a solid collective view on segregation, in general, their explanations for segregation differ from those of whites. Most blacks point out that whites have something to do with segregation or that whites do not want to live or share resources with them. For example, Jimmy, the social worker cited above, answered the question on school segregation as follows: Yeah, I think the mixing of the races in the school, to me, is probably the whites’ fault to me. And, if it’s a better school, and blacks try to go there and all, I think they are not really welcome and given an opportunity to [develop] and then they don’t get the. . . . In the inner city and all, it’s not . . . the schooling; the funding or

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whatever is not the same. If it was equal here in the black and white areas and all, they might not even want to go there. But, I think this, if they, where they try to go to better schooling at, I think they’re prohibited from going there more so by whites and the government and all.

Yet the explanations of some blacks (3/17) included naturalization mixed with abstract liberalism. For instance, although Jimmy underscored the role of discrimination to explain school segregation, he believes that neighborhood segregation is the result of natural tendencies in people. Well . . . I’m sure that people clique by choice and all. I mean whites tend to stay with whites because they’re comfortable. But, ugh given, you know, given ugh, I’d say if we tried to mix a little more and we might tend to get together more, ugh and all, integrate more and all, but as it stands now and all, we tend to be comfortable uh with our race and that’s the way it generally goes.

Natasha, a licensed practical nurse in her early thirties, blamed the government for the low level of school integration in this country “because they make, make the laws.” She also supported busing because she thinks that it is “a good thing because you get to know about other people’s cultures and their way of living.” However, Natasha believes that neighborhood segregation is the product of natural choices or, in her own words: Ah . . . I really don’t [think about this situation] ’cause I move basically where I can afford it. I don’t think that any, that any one race shouldn’t be allowed anywhere in this world. It’s a free country, so. I think they just choose to be with their kind. Blacks choose to live around blacks and whites choose to live around whites.

Therefore, when she was asked if the government should do something to remedy residential segregation, Natasha said, No, but I think it, that it shouldn’t be any limitations on that one man, one black woman moving into an all white neighborhood. He shouldn’t get treated any different. But I know that fantasizing, I mean, you never know it may work out. I really don’t think the government should get into it because I don’t think they’d say, “OK, this is a white neighborhood,” you know what I’m saying? Like I said, people tend to segregate together.

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Minimization of Racism and Blacks Although color-blind racism has affected blacks’ understanding and framing of various race-related issues, the reality of discrimination is such that very few blacks believe that discrimination is no longer significant.6 In fact, the immense majority of blacks stated, although with various levels of intensity, that discrimination against blacks is central in the United States. For example, Tyrone, the unemployed man cited previously, replied the following when asked about the centrality of discrimination: ’Cause I used to work in Sterling Heights. I used to be out there waiting on the bus, somebody would drive by and call me a “blackass nigger” at least three times out of the week and I’m just trying to work and come home [Wow!].

Furthermore, when Tyrone was asked why blacks have a worse standing than whites in the United States, he responded, Well . . . ’cause, who is the boss? He give, he want to give you the worse job ’cause of the color of your skin. I been through that up in Sterling Heights (neighborhood in Detroit). Me and Dwayne was the only two blacks in the maintenance department. Me and Dwayne got the nastiest jobs they was. They go, “Go get them they’ll do it!” And they’d come get me and Dwayne. Me and Dwayne got the nastiest job.

Natalie, a data entry clerk in her twenties, addressed the matter of whether blacks experience significant discrimination with “I think some blacks do experience it.” When asked to give examples, Natalie, like most blacks,7 narrated a personal experience with discrimination. Yes . . . I agree with that because I have had . . . ah, store people that work in stores follow me around ah, “May I help you?,” you know, they do it in a way that you, if you weren’t paying attention, you wouldn’t think that they were following you but they are . . . but they are and they tend to follow black people more than they do . . . other people.

Consistent with her view on discrimination, Natalie believes that blacks are worse off than whites because of “racism.” Thus Natalie supports government intervention on blacks’ behalf as well as repara-

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tions. Her response to the question on government intervention on blacks’ behalf was as follows: Um yes, because they tend to have, they have programs for other people who ah suffered past discrimination. Um they help like Japanese people and stuff, so why can’t they help us? I mean, basically, their, the reason that we were discriminated against and people from Japan were discriminated against their own people by their own people, but we helped them out. Why they can’t help some black people like they do them?

Although most blacks believe that discrimination is central, the color-blind frame of minimization has affected the way some blacks think about discrimination. For example, most whites regard discrimination exclusively as old-fashioned, one-on-one racist behaviors by whites; thus they think it is declining in significance. Some blacks agreed with this view and, therefore, did not think that discrimination was that important. For instance, Carla, the executive secretary, answered the discrimination questions by stating, “I don’t experience ah, did you say racial [discrimination] discrimination, I don’t experience discrimination in daily life . . . maybe on one or two occasions but not. . . .” Other blacks, who regarded discrimination as overtly racist behavior, stated that only blacks who work with whites experience discrimination. Alma, a homemaker and part-time worker, answered the discrimination question as follows: Well, if they are, I mean, that’s kind of hard to say for everybody because on the average most people don’t be around another race every day in order to ah consider discrimination. But ah . . . probably a person that works on that’s ah mixed, you know, with whites and blacks . . . it’s well, ah, yeah those I’ve heard have the discrimination.

The Style of Color-Blind Racism and Blacks

In the previous chapter I suggested that the style of color blindness is characterized by obliqueness, indirectness, subtlety, and apparent ambivalence and often flat-out contradictions. Most of these elements are typical of color blindness, but others reflect the discursive climate of the post–civil rights era, which disallows the expression of

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racist and even racially direct sentiments and opinions. In this section I examine the impact of the style of color blindness on blacks.

Racist Terminology and Blacks Not a single black respondent used the most obnoxious racially derogatory terms (nigger, honky) to refer to blacks or whites. Although I suspect that both blacks and whites use racially derogatory terms in private to refer to each other, it is still noteworthy that no black or white respondent used these terms as legitimate terms during the DAS interviews. Only older white respondents used the term “colored” to refer to blacks and not a single one used terms such as “hillbillies,” “honkies,” or “white trash” to refer to whites. Only Scott, a 23-year-old white respondent, used the terms “white trash” and “hillbillies” to describe his own white neighbors.

Rhetorical Maze and Blacks In the previous chapter I documented how whites use a number of verbal pirouettes to avoid appearing racist. I specifically argued that color blindness involves a peculiar racetalk that includes various semantic moves as well as plain rhetorical incoherence in situations in which respondents feel they may sound racist. One might expect blacks to have the same concern, but my findings show otherwise and are consistent with previous work.8 In general, blacks call it as they see it. “Yes and no, but” and blacks. Whereas many whites stated their views through the rhetorical shield of “apparent ambivalence,”9 very few blacks did so. Most blacks clearly stated whether they approved of a policy or had white friends. I suggest that this is because blacks have nothing to hide or very little to lose in the contemporary racial order. Whereas in slavery or Jim Crow, blacks had to be “stage Negroes” if they wanted to survive, today, as a consequence of the new norms, it is whites who have to be “stage whites.”10 Positioned at the bottom of the racial order in the post–civil rights United States, blacks at least have the freedom to speak their minds. I offer below a few examples of how blacks answered questions on affirmative action as these were questions that led many whites to use the “Yes and no, but” strategy. As I already documented, blacks

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support affirmative action solidly. Jimmy, the social worker cited above, stated his support in no uncertain terms: Uh, I’m for it. Uhhh because I don’t see any other way that you can reverse the trend of being able to get a better education unless affirmative action is there. It’s like that power thing that white has to me and all. They’re able to do that, they’re able to be the majority in the better schools and colleges and blacks not being able to go there and being able to enroll wherever they want without affirmative action an’ all.

A potential area that could have brought some hesitations in blacks’ responses was the issue of “reverse discrimination.” Nevertheless, blacks were clear in their belief that this idea is nonsense. Jimmy claimed that whites who say this are “just hollerin’.” His response to a question about whether the decisions of a hypothetical company hiring a black over a white job candidate were discriminatory against whites11 was as follows: Yeah it’s discriminating against whites but in the sense that you already got all the power of a position and all. And it’s like you’re a hundred percent and all and if I say go down to 97 percent you’ll holla’ you’re discriminating against me and all. But, you know what I mean . . . you need some discrimination.

Although Jimmy interprets affirmative action as discriminatory, he believes it is necessary to improve blacks’ status. Malcolm, a construction worker in his forties, expressed similar views to Jimmy’s and in a similar straightforward manner as well. For instance, when asked about his view on affirmative action, he answered, “I’m for it.” His response to a follow-up question asking if he thought that this program was unfair to whites was the following: Well . . . racism affects all blacks but affirmative action affects a certain percentage of whites. So you really can’t compare. You know, like this, they call it anti- … discrimination or . . . you know, you know, you can’t compare the two.

Although most blacks answered questions without filtering their responses through the rhetorical maze of color blindness, a few answered questions by addressing both sides of the issue, in what I

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call the “yes and no” fashion. However, as I will show, these respondents, unlike whites, were not hiding polemical views and were not hesitating in stating their opinions. Instead, they were usually pointing out the contradiction between the way things ought to be and the way things are. For example, Tyrone, the unemployed worker whom I have cited before, answered the question on affirmative action as follows: Well one way I’m for it, one way I’m against it. Now, if everybody had equal chance, there’s no . . . nothing against the color of your skin or nothing, we wouldn’t need affirmative action. But by the way not giving people chances, we need it. You gotta have something, you know, to help.

Although his answer seems to have the “yes and no” element, he does not hesitate in stating that because the United States is not color blind, we need affirmative action. Furthermore, when whites used the “Yes and no, but” response, they added other clauses to signify ambivalence and insecurity (e.g., “I am not sure” or “I don’t know”) even when they were making a strong case one way or the other (see Chapter 5). Further evidence that Tyrone was not ambivalent or hiding his views on affirmative action discursively comes from his answer to the question of whether the hypothetical company discriminated against whites: How can they discriminate against whites when the employment is 97 percent white? That’s no discrimination! You got 97 percent white people and 3 percent of a different race.

In the same vein, when he was asked to explain why so many whites seem angry about affirmative action, Tyrone replied in a way that is consistent with his strong support for affirmative action: Well some of them figure out that they are not getting a fair chance. Some of them don’t like it just because it’s helping the blacks. But to me, you know, like I said, if we all had a fair chance, we wouldn’t need affirmative action. They ought to know. See, they not black and how can they say this is what they go through? They ain’t never been black. They ain’t never been through what we go through.

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“I am not prejudiced, but . . . ” and blacks. Although the “I am not prejudiced, but” move was use by many whites as a shield to safely express strong views on various racial matters, blacks in this sample hardly used it. For instance, the closest any black got to using the “I am not a racist, but” semantic move was Tyrone who said the following in response to the question, “Did you have any close white friends in school at all?”: Yeah [Oh, you did?] Yeah, I ain’t prejudiced against no color.

Tyrone, unlike whites who used this move, did not follow this phrase with a diatribe against another race. Furthermore, Tyrone did not use this phrase to highlight fictive friendships with whites in order to safely voice antiwhite views. In fact, although Tyrone moves now in a fundamentally black world, he did mingle with whites when he was young because he was an army brat; his schools and neighborhoods were integrated. When the interviewer asked him about what kind of things he did with his white friends, he said that he “played ball, whatever.” He also complained later in the interview that when he moved from Syracuse to Detroit, his black neighbors would say antiwhite things and that he and his family would say, “Those people crazy, they don’t know (whites) ’cause they ain’t lived with ’em.” Similarly, I did not find a single black respondent who used the phrase “Some of my best friends are white.” Whereas whites used the analogous phrase to inflate their associations with blacks and, occasionally, to be able to say something very negative about blacks, blacks did not resort to this strategy. In terms of friendships with whites, blacks who did not have white friends had no problem stating it. For instance, Mark, the bus driver previously cited, when asked if he had close white friends in schools, responded: “At Renaissance I didn’t have any close white friends, I had some that . . . I interacted with that were associates and acquaintances.” Later in the interview, when Mark was asked if he had white friends on his current job, he answered, “I can’t say I have any friends, I have those whites that I associate with basically on the job.” Likewise, Alma, the homemaker and part-time worker who works in a racially mixed environment, has white acquaintances but does not inflate these relationships into intimate friendships:

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I had one ah . . . white friend. I guess that was when we first started because I helped her a lot, you know, with her work. And, you know, she took up with me and we were real close friends because I helped her a lot. Well mostly at work or on the phone but not socially as far as going places. Ah . . . I have another . . . ah, that’s another thing, I used to sell Avon. She was white and she moved out into I think Grosse Point and we pretty . . . But it’s still not a social life as far as going out together or anything but we are good friends.

Natasha, the young practical nurse, answered the questions on friendship with whites as did most blacks. When asked, “Did you have any close white friends in school?” she replied, “Ah no, I didn’t have any.” Regina, the homemaker, stated that she did not have white friends while growing up in no uncertain terms: “No, not down, not in Louisiana. No.” Rhetorical incoherence. When blacks were incoherent in their answers to race-related questions, it was either part of their usual style of communication or due to lack of knowledge of the issue at hand (e.g., on questions dealing with busing or affirmative action) rather than because of the racially sensitive nature of the subject. For example, whereas the issue of intermarriage led many whites to virtual muteness, blacks stated their views on this matter with much less hesitation. This follows my findings in the survey. Fifty-eight percent of whites and 88 percent of blacks stated that they approved of interracial marriage. However, when the question was “Suppose your own child married (a white/a black) person. Would you mind it a lot, a little, or not at all?” 58 percent of whites said that they would mind it “a lot” (26 percent) or “a little” (32 percent) whereas 84 percent of blacks said that they would not mind it at all. This suggests that blacks have more consistent views on this sensitive matter and may be less likely than whites to provide socially desirable answers. Whether blacks approved of interracial marriage and would do it themselves (8/17), approved of it but would never do it themselves (7/17), approved of it but pointed out problems the couples might face (2/17), or were opposed to these relationships (1/17), they stated their answers in a much clearer manner than white respondents. (The numbers add up to 18 rather than 17 because one respondent’s answer fits two categories.) Concerning the analysis, I need to add

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two caveats: First, I am interested in highlighting the form or style of their answers rather than in exploring the ultimate meaning of their answers. Second, as an analyst, I must point out the asymmetric interpretation of these questions for black and white respondents.12 For whites questions on interracial marriage may evoke visceral reactions based on racist readings of black bodies. But for blacks— particularly for older blacks, they may evoke a history of rejection, exclusion, and even the not-well-studied social and family training of avoiding these relationships to stay out of trouble. An example of respondents who had no problems with interracial marriage but would not do it themselves is Nel. Her answers to the interracial questions in the following exchange were very candid. [Interviewer: Ok, thank you. Now um can you tell me, I guess the um, you know, were the people that you um dated and married, were they, what, what race were they?] Black. [They were all black?] Yeah. [All right, thank you. Um, let see, now um, did you ever have any romantic interest in a, in a white person?] I never even dreamed, you know, thought of it. [Now why is that?] I don’t know. You’re talking ’bout like romance, no? [unintelligible] I really can’t answer that question.

Nel’s answers in this series of questions were, for the most part, very straightforward. Only in the last question, dealing with why she did not have any romantic interest in whites, did Nel not elaborate a satisfactory answer. Three of the four blacks who were asked this question answered it the same way Nel did, which is to say they were clear. Furthermore, the demeanor, tone, and rhetoric used by three of the four respondents do not suggest that they were trying to hide or distort their true feelings on this sensitive matter. Nel’s straightforward style, for example, materialized even when she was asked her opinion on interracial marriage. Her answer was simple: “I don’t think there’s anything wrong with it.” When the interviewer pressured Nel to explain this answer, she stated, “I don’t see anything, really, I don’t see any difference no more than the skin tone.” Although this answer could be interpreted as a baseless answer similar to that of most whites, Nel did not qualify her support for

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these marriages as most whites did. Moreover, Nel added the following personal information that bolstered the credibility of her answer: But now I have a brother who’s still (alive) and his wife (is not). And they was just so nice, ya’ know. They lived up in Minnesota but, but they were nice, you know. Maybe that’s why I don’t think anything about it, ya’ know.

The typical responses to the interracial questions were something like what Irma, a young conservative accounting clerk, answered. I, it doesn’t matter to me. If, if the persons (are) in love, then it don’t matter. [Would you yourself have considered marrying someone from a different race?] Yeah if I had, if the opportunity were, yeah I guess.

An extreme example of blacks’ “typical” response (blacks who are for interracial relationships and would do it themselves) is Carla, the executive secretary previously cited. She is also an example of how directly blacks answered this tough question. Her answer to the interracial question was “If you like it I love it.” Asked if she would consider marrying outside her race, she said, “Yes.” These answers are unusual for blacks but fit Carla’s answers on this and other subjects. For example, when Carla was asked if she ever had any romantic interest in people from other races, she said, “[I] always wanted to.” And when she was asked if she had ever been interested in whites, she said “Yes.” Blacks who opposed interracial marriage said so without much hesitation. For instance, Joe, the electronics mechanic cited above, opposed interracial relationships without missing a beat. [Interviewer: Did you ever have any white relationships?] No. [Did you ever have any romantic interest in a white person?] No. [And why would you think that is so?] My preference. [Is your spouse the same racial background as you are?] Yes. [People have mixed feelings about marrying outside their race. What is your view on this delicate matter?]

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Ugh, I feel people of the same race should stay together instead of interacting. [So you yourself would not considered marrying someone or would not have considered marrying someone of a different race?] I would say that. I would say that.

Joe answered these difficult questions the same way he answered all the questions throughout the interview: in a short, precise, and clean manner. The two blacks who qualified their support for interracial marriage by pointing out potential problems with these relationships did so in a manner different than whites. Compared to whites who qualified their support, blacks who did so seemed to be more open to these relationships. In fact, both respondents had been themselves in interracial relationships, which suggests they were more open to these relationships than whites when answering this question. For example, Jimmy, the social worker, dated a white woman for a long time and a Latina woman before marrying his current black wife. He indicated that he did not face problems in these relationships because they met in black neighborhoods and blacks, in his estimation, are more tolerant of these relationships than whites. However, despite this past, he now says that he would never get married to a white woman. If they really love each other, they can go for it and all. But, yeah I think they are gonna have a problem with it. And uh I think the problem is not going to be so much with [blacks]. Blacks tend to accept white-black relationships more so than whites do to me and all. We have a couple of interracial marriages in our church and all and they seem to get along well with it. And the church where I go is kind of more white-black mixed than most churches and all. But in general and all, I wouldn’t, I wouldn’t get married to a white person, but I don’t see nothin’ wrong with it though.

Although Jimmy’s answer sounds like those of some whites (free market view on love with some qualification), the fact that he dated twice outside his race makes his free market view more credible. Of all the blacks in this sample, I only found two who hesitated in a notable way on these questions. The hesitation of one of these respondents came when the interviewer asked him a question that was not part of the protocol. Malcolm, the construction worker

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whom I cited above, hesitated somewhat in his answer to the question, “Did you think you could see yourself having a romantic interest in another black person here?” Malcolm answered, “I probably would. I, I, if it happened like that, then I’d say either way.” The interviewer posed this rather unusual question to Malcolm because he described himself as a “solitary person” but stated that he had dated a few women while he was in the “service” in Germany and all of them were white. Color-Blind Storylines and Blacks

In the previous chapter I documented the salience of four storylines for color blindness, namely, “The past is the past,” “I didn’t own any slaves,” “I did not get a (job/promotion) because a black man got it,” and “If (Jews, Italians, Asians, etc.) made it, how come blacks have not?” These storylines help whites accomplish their ideological attack on blacks by providing emotional arguments to validate some important myths about race relations in the United States. Although color blindness has tainted and blurred the way blacks frame many issues, based on my analysis of the 17 interviews, it seems that blacks are not buying into these stories in any significant way. I could not detect any influence of the latter two stories even among the conservative black respondents. Nevertheless, the first two stories affected one black respondent directly and four indirectly. The first two stories, which tend to appear together, were used directly by one black respondent. Carla, the conservative executive secretary, answered the question on reparations in a manner similar to many whites: Ah, that became a topic in school. I, I don’t remember what I said but right now I feel that was so long ago that the people who are here now didn’t have anything to do with it. So I don’t feel it would, I mean, you can say you’re sorry but it’s not, it’s not going to take back what happened. Therefore, I don’t think it’s necessary.

Although these stories and their logic affected very few blacks directly, four blacks were indirectly affected by them. For example, Natasha, the young practical nurse, answered the question on reparations as follows:

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Yeah, I think so um-humm. But are there any of those people around? Would it go to that, to those surviving family members?

Although Natasha supports reparations, she seems affected by the idea that only people who were directly affected by slavery can demand compensation. This idea, mentioned by many white respondents, operates under the assumption that discrimination is a matter of a long distant past that does not affect blacks’ life chances today. If discrimination happened in a long distant past, then the blacks who were affected by it are long gone and reparations and other forms of government intervention on blacks’ behalf are unnecessary. Another example of indirect influence of these stories is Edward, the unemployed 41-year-old man, who answered the question on reparations in the following way: Oh bullshit, no, no! I think that America needs to think about its people and the American people are all kind of folks.

Edward states an idea that many whites say when they use these stories: the idea that since everyone has suffered in the United States, no one deserves “preferential treatment.” Conclusion

In this chapter I examined the extent and manners in which colorblind racism affects blacks. First, I showed that blacks, for the most part, do not subscribe wholeheartedly to the topics of color blindness. Furthermore, I suggested that blacks have oppositional views on many important issues. For example, they believe that discrimination is a central factor shaping their life chances in the United States, support firmly affirmative action, and are very clear about whites’ advantageous position in this society. However, I also documented that some of the frames and ideas of color blindness have had a significant indirect effect on blacks. For example, the frame of abstract liberalism has shaped the way many blacks think about and explain school and residential segregation in the United States. Second, I documented that the style of color-blind racism has had very limited impact on blacks. Whereas whites hesitate and use double-talk to state their views on racial matters, blacks tend to state their views clearly and without much hesitation even when the topic of discussion is interracial marriage. Finally, I suggested that only two of the

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four storylines of color blindness have had some impact on blacks. Although most of the impact of these stories was indirect, the fact that 5 of the 17 blacks were directly or indirectly affected by these stories suggests that the ideological transmission belt is working well. What is the significance of my findings? On the one hand, they reveal in some detail how blacks disagree with whites on some central racial issues. Unlike whites, blacks realize that racism is structural and that power and differential access to rewards is at the heart of the U.S. racial game and, therefore, they strongly support programs such as affirmative action despite the relentless ideological campaign against them. I therefore concur with those who claim that blacks and whites have different views on most racial issues.13 On the other hand, my findings reveal quite clearly that blacks have adopted directly (e.g., free market rationale and laissez faire racism) and indirectly fragments of the color-blind racial ideology. For example, although one would expect blacks to have a strong anti–culture of poverty bent, I found that many of them buy into substantial parts of this argument. Since blacks have adopted fragments of color blindness, the development of an all-out oppositional ideology or “utopia”14 against white supremacy will be very difficult. Thus, I believe that the ideology of color blindness is a dominant ideology because it binds whites together and blurs, shapes, and provides the terms of the debate for blacks. In the final chapter of this book, I will tackle forthrightly the political repercussions of my theory and empirical findings. For example, what is the relevance of studying racism in a structural manner? What are the advantages of using the ideology framework instead of the attitudinal approach to examine the views of racial actors? What are the sociopolitical consequences of the new racism for blacks and what is the best strategy to fight it? What is the import of color-blind racism? If blacks are affected by color-blind racism, how can they fight this new ideology? These are some of the questions that I will attempt to answer in the final chapter. Notes 1. Lee Siegelman and Susan Welch, Black Americans’ View of Racial Inequality: The Dream Deferred (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1991); Lipset, American Exceptionalism: A Double-Edged Sword (New York and London: W. W. Norton, 1996); Kinder and Sanders, Divided

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by Color: Racial Politics and Democratic Ideals (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1996); Schuman et al., Racial Attitudes in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997). 2. Although it is beyond the scope of this chapter to assess behavioral matters, it is worthwhile to point out that over 70 percent of white respondents stated that they lived in neighborhoods that had fewer than 10 percent blacks at the time of the interview. 3. Poulantzas, Political Power and Social Classes (London: Verso, 1982), p. 223. 4. Blacks subscribed to traditional laissez faire views (not racerelated) in the survey at rates similar to those of whites. For example, 94 percent of blacks and 95 percent of whites agreed with the statement “Any person who is willing to work hard has a good chance of succeeding.” Similarly, 59 percent of blacks and 71 percent of whites agreed with the statement “Most people who don’t get ahead should not blame the system; they have only themselves to blame.” For similar findings, see Lawrence Bobo and Vincent Hutchings, “Perceptions of Racial Group Competition: Extending Blumer’s Theory of Group Position to a Multiracial Social Context,” American Sociological Review 61 (1996): 951–972. 5. Similar findings can be found in Hochschild, Facing Up to the American Dream (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995). 6. This explains why even black conservatives such as Robert Woodson and Colin Powell have issued statements about the centrality of discrimination in America and some, such as Powell, have publicly supported affirmative action and other similar programs. 7. Most blacks reported personal examples of old-fashioned discrimination in stores; with coworkers, supervisors, police; and in encounters with individual whites. 8. Blacks’ straight talk on racial matters can be seen in Blauner, Black Lives, White Lives (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of Los Angeles Press, 1989); Rubin, Families in the Fault Lines (New York: HarperCollins, 1994); and Michelle Fine and Luis Wise, The Unknown City: The Lives of Poor and Working-Class Young Adults (Boston: Beacon Press, 1998). 9. See van Dijk, Communicating Racism: Ethnic Prejudice in Thought and Talk (Newbury Park, Beverly Hills, London, and New Delhi: Sage Publications, 1987); and Bonilla-Silva and Forman, “‘I Am Not a Racist but . . .’: Mapping White College Students’ Racial Ideology in the USA,” Discourse and Society 11, no. 1 (2000): 51–86. 10. David R. Goldfield, Black, White, and Southern: Race Relations and Southern Culture, 1940 to the Present (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 1990). 11. The scenarios were varied (equal qualifications, white slightly more qualified, and decision based on past discrimination by company) to examine the strength and consistency of respondents’ views on this sensitive issue. 12. This is an interpretative problem that plagues survey research. The interpretation of the survey questions and the meaning of the answers often

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hinge on the respondents’ race. Thus, for example, when whites and blacks both agree that discrimination is still important in America, they mean totally different things (see Chapter 5). 13. Dawson, Behind the Mule: Race and Class in African American Politics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994); Kinder and Sanders, Divided by Color: Racial Politics and Democratic Ideals (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1996). 14. Van Dijk, Ideology (London: Sage, 1999), p. 182.

7 Conclusion: New Racism, New Theory, and New Struggle

The master defense against accurate social perception and change is always and in every society the tremendous conviction of rightness about any behavior form which exists. —John Dollard, Caste and Class in a Southern Town (1949), p. 368

In this book I had two major goals: one theoretical, one analytical. My theoretical goal was outlining the basic contours of a materialist—albeit not a class-based—or structural interpretation of racism to help analysts better grasp the nature of racial dynamics. My analytical goal was examining the nature of the post–civil rights racial structure and ideology in the United States. As part of the theoretical agenda, I argued that the monumental changes that transpired in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries led to the development of racialized social systems organized by the logic of white supremacy—awarding “whites” a better social, economic, and political “racial contract”1 over people racialized as “nonwhites.” This alternative framework is materialist because racism is not regarded as the irrational ideas of a few deranged individuals but as a phenomenon anchored in whites’ rational defense of their collective social, political, economic, and psychological advantages.2 Thus, in essence, this framework turns upside down the commonsense view on what racism is all about. Rather than regarding racism as erratic ideas that lead people to dis193

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criminate or be “racist,” this framework presupposes that it is the institutionalized nature of racial inequality that drives people to develop behavior that reproduces and ideas that justify racial inequality. From the perspective developed in this book, activists struggling against racial oppression and analysts wishing to understand how racial matters operate in any setting must have as their primary goal understanding a society’s racial structure. This means that they must investigate the practices and mechanisms that produce and reproduce racial inequality in a society. As an example, I examined in Chapter 4 the set of post-1960s social, economic, political, and social control arrangements that help maintain contemporary racial inequality and argued that a new racial structure—a new racism—has emerged. The racial practices associated with the new racism, in sharp contrast with those typical of Jim Crow, are sophisticated, covert, and apparently nonracial. Whether in banks, stores, universities, politics, or in the streets, white supremacy tends to be maintained as an elusive phenomenon.3 As part of this new racism, a new racial ideology has surfaced: the ideology of color-blind racism.4 This ideology is characterized by a focus on culture rather than biology as well as by the abstract extension of elements of liberalism to justify racial inequality. I label this new ideology as color-blind racism because this term fits better the political language of the post–civil rights era. The analysis of survey and interview data from the 1998 Detroit Area Study revealed that color-blind racism has four central frames, namely, abstract liberalism, biologization of culture, naturalization of racial matters, and minimization of racism. The analysis of the data clearly shows that white Detroiters use these frames in a loose-jointed manner to explain (and ultimately justify) the racial status quo. My work on college students (described briefly in Chapter 5)5 as well as my analysis of the Detroit data revealed too that this new ideology has produced a peculiar linguistic style and storylines that shield whites from the terrible possibility of being labeled racist.6 If whites find themselves in a rhetorical corner or need to provide an emotionally charged argument to back up a racially problematic claim, they can use a variety of available rhetorical constructions or insert any of the four storylines documented in Chapter 5 to get out of the bind. If color-blind racism has become the most salient post–civil

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rights racial ideology,7 what has been its effect on blacks? Answering this question was my task in Chapter 6. Color-blind racism has shaped the way a significant number of blacks frame important racial issues. Although blacks have developed oppositional views on almost all the major racial issues of our time, color-blind racism has had a small direct and a large indirect effect on the way many of them think about racial issues. For example, although most blacks do not accept explanations that blame the victim to account for blacks’ position in the United States, too many accept elements of the cultural rationale (e.g., “Some of us are lazy”), thus preventing a total rupture with color-blind racism on this crucial matter. Likewise, many blacks believe that residential and school segregation is either the result of choice or rooted in natural human processes. This position leads a significant segment of the black community to oppose or not see a point in having government programs to guarantee racial integration. Although most blacks believe that whites are to blame for the limited level of integration in the United States and demand equal funding for their schools and equal access to all housing markets, by rejecting government intervention they limit the likelihood of any of these outcomes from happening.8 Consequently, I contend that colorblind racism has become the dominant racial ideology in the post–civil rights era since it has captured the hearts and minds of most whites and blurred and confused the hearts and minds of many blacks. Responses to Skeptics

The theory and analyses advanced here are an anathema to many whites (and to color-blind minorities as well as honorary whites). Agreeing with my theory and substantive claims implies recognizing that all whites receive unearned benefits by virtue of being white and thus develop “defensive beliefs.”9 Naysayers will rebuke my claims by arguing that they are not “racist,” by stating that I am making a fictitious category—that of race—“real,” or by marshaling survey work showing whites’ tolerant racial attitudes or data comparing the status of blacks in the past with their status today. Some may even suggest that blacks are “racist too” or that the racial gap in the United States is fundamentally shaped by blacks’ own cultural practices. Lastly, a group of commentators will point out that my analysis

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is “divisive,” arguing, “Wouldn’t it make more sense to develop an argument based on class as the unifying factor?” Although political disputes are never settled with data or rational arguments, I will attempt to answer each of the counterarguments. First, from a structural point of view, race relations are not rooted in the balance between “good” (nonracist) and “bad” (racist) whites or even in the struggle between “racist” actors (conscious of their racial interest) and “race militants” (conscious of the need to oppose the racial status quo). The reproduction of racial inequality transpires every day through the normal operation of society. Like capitalists and men, whites have been able to crystallize their victories in institutions and social practices. This implies that they do not need to be individually active in the maintenance of racial domination. Instead, by merely following the everyday rituals of the postmodern, whitesupremacist United States—living in a segregated neighborhood, sending their children to segregated schools, interacting fundamentally with their racial peers, working in a mostly segregated job or if in an integrated setting, maintaining superficial relations with nonwhites, etc.—they help reproduce the racial status quo. Of course, this does not mean that some actors in any racialized social system are significantly more prejudiced than others. My point is that the reproduction of white supremacy does not depend on individual racist behavior. Second, although all social categories are “constructed,” after they emerge they become real in their consequences. The fact that race, as with all social categories, is fluid does not mean that it does not become a social fact.10 Crying that you are not white, or male, or black, or female does not change the fact of your social reality as white, male, black, or female. Even those who claim to be “race traitors” (see endnote 22) receive advantages (many of which are invisible to them) just because of the racial uniform they wear every day. The mean streets of the social world have a way of letting you know rather quickly what you are rather than what you think or theorize you are. Hence, Tiger Woods may insist that he is not black but Fuzzy Zeller’s joke when he won the Augusta Open was based on stereotypes about blacks and not on “Cablasians.”11 Third, as I pointed out in Chapters 3 and 5, survey data on whites’ attitudes may be conveying a false sense of racial tolerance and harmony. The combination of socially acceptable speech and old questions that no longer tackle our contemporary racial dilemmas has

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produced an artificial increase in racially tolerant responses among whites. Nonetheless, the same whites who state in surveys that they have no problem with blacks and do not care if blacks move in their neighborhoods and that it is great to have children from all racial backgrounds interacting in schools have very limited and superficial relationships with blacks, live in white neighborhoods and move when blacks move in, and they have objected for over 40 years to almost all of the government plans to facilitate school integration. Fourth, as far as the issue of black progress, I pointed out in Chapter 1 and in Chapter 4 that it is undeniable that blacks are better off today than during the slavery or Jim Crow period of race relations. Nevertheless, by solely focusing on blacks’ gains in the post– World War II era, analysts miss the boat because the appropriate way to measure the standing of a racial group (or any other group) in any society is to compare the statistics and status of that group with those of the majority group. When analysts do this comparison in the United States they find that blacks have not improved that much over the past 30 years.12 Therefore, my point is not to deny that blacks have improved their standing in the United States but to draw attention to the new mechanisms that have emerged to maintain white privilege and which account for much of the contemporary blackwhite gaps. Fifth, those who insist that blacks are poorer than whites because of their cultural practices ought to consider the power dimension in the racial equation. Although blacks can be prejudiced (many are antiwhite, anti-Latino, or anti-Asian), since racial inequality is based on systemic power and blacks do not have it in the United States, they are not “racist” in this systemic sense. There is no theoretical reason why blacks (the socially constructed group of people that has endured 500 years of white supremacy) could not become “racist” in this sense. However, substantively, this is an extremely unlikely event. Given the global nature of white supremacy, it is almost impossible for an antiwhite or “black supremacy” order to operate successfully. Even in African countries where whites have lost political power (e.g., South Africa, Namibia, and Congo), the dictates of the global white supremacy (I borrow the term from Charles W. Mills) and the economic might of Western nations limit these regimes and severely constrain their possibilities. Furthermore, as I will argue below, the most likely route for racial change in the future is coalition politics between the various racial minority groups and

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progressive whites, a path that significantly reduces the chance for the emergence of an antiwhite regime in the United States. Lastly, for those who believe that I am fostering divisions among workers (or women) by pushing a racial analysis, I reply that the divisions I discuss and substantiate empirically have existed in the world for 500 years. Although white capitalists and workers have different class interests, they have similar racial interests since both benefit from white supremacy. Of course, it is possible to claim that the white working class would be better off if they joined forces with their nonwhite brethren against capitalists. However, since this would entail white workers ignoring their immediate racial interests, this occurrence has rarely happened and, when it has happened, it has not endured. Nevertheless, my theory did not exclude race and class as central factors shaping modern social systems. In fact, I argued that around all these social categories structures of domination have emerged (racialized social system, patriarchy, and capitalism) that “function as parallel and interlocking systems.”13 The burning political question is what is to be done. How can we build a coalition to deal with these interlocking systems? What Can Be Done?

Before one can suggest a political strategy, one has to know who the enemy is and what tools it uses. My argument throughout this book has been that whites, despite their class and gender differences, form a collectivity that defends—sometimes openly but mostly by following the normal racial etiquette of the United States—the racial status quo. This, if you will, is the “logic of [contemporary] racism.”14 This means that today as well as yesterday, the struggle for racial equality will be a hard one. The “enemy” is the majority of people in the United States who will resist change fearing that they will lose their material “wages of whiteness.”15 Nevertheless, the fact that change has happened in the past is evidence that change is possible in the future. How can that be, given that whites are a numerical majority in this society? Change has happened because of four interrelated factors. First, subordinated races have always resisted their domination. During slavery they rebelled both openly and covertly.16 During the apartheid period of race relations, blacks and other minorities organized formidable protest move-

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ments to fight white supremacy.17 Blacks also rebelled spontaneously and often violently to effect change.18 Second, no significant systemic change happens in a vacuum. In Althusserian language, change is overdetermined.19 Although resistance may be a more or less permanent feature of societies “structured in dominance,”20 pathbreaking changes only occur when multiple factors combine at one historical juncture to produce a political space for open and radical contestation.21 For instance, changes in the agricultural economy, the international political system, and population changes, among others, provided the historical conditions for the civil rights rebellion in this country (see Chapter 4). Third, all racialized social systems produce ideological dissidents or “race traitors”22 among the members of the dominant race. In the United States, for instance, there has always been a small group of whites willing to fight for racial justice “until the last consequences.” John Brown and the abolitionists, many Communists in the 1920s and 1930s, and the young and heroic whites who joined the Civil Rights Movement in the sixties are examples from our past that clearly show the potential for working with whites today. Lastly, whites’ internal stratification along class and gender lines has always provided political cracks for coalition-building. Although all whites receive the wages of whiteness, most women receive, comparatively speaking, low wages and have an objective social standing close to that of the “black majority.”23 This is the objective reason why white workers and women have on occasion broken ranks.24 Yet, although our most likely allies among whites are working-class folks and women, the coalition will not happen automatically as many Marxists and feminists believe (see below). If the “enemy” is whites as a collective, what social tools do they use to keep their advantageous position? I argued that white supremacy is maintained through two main social tools: the sophisticated racial practices of the new racism and the even more complex ideology of color blindness. These are formidable tools to maintain racial oppression because, unlike the tools of white supremacy in the past, they are not based on virulent behavior. How can we even talk about racism when most whites formally accept the equality of the races and the principle of equal opportunity, do not support white supremacist organizations, and are less likely than ever to support old stereotypes about blacks? How can we label “racist” a bank officer denying loans to black applicants because they are considered credit risks, colleges denying admission to blacks because they score

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low on admission tests, clerks in stores asking black customers, “May I help you?,” or a president who says about affirmative action, “Mend it but not end it” (a phrase supplied to Clinton by one of his black advisors) or that he is a “compassionate conservative”? Although all these matters are highly racialized in their effects and often in their methods, they have the virtue of appearing race-neutral or color blind. This is precisely the dilemma faced by blacks today: how to fight a monster that cannot be clearly seen. Whereas in the civil rights era black leaders were able to successfully challenge Jim Crow by throwing back at whites the images of their own brutality (e.g., showing the image of chief “Bull” Connors letting dogs loose on black children), the nature of racial practices today is such that this mirror strategy would not work. Nevertheless, wherever there is domination—even the new kind of domination—there is resistance and a space for contestation. Organizations such as the Urban Institute and the Housing Urban Development Corporation have developed the audit strategy to assess the impact of contemporary discrimination as well as to document how it is accomplished. Journalists such as Lawrence OtisGraham have done undercover research to show how race affects blacks’ life chances. For example, Otis-Graham, a Yale-trained lawyer, joined a private club in New York as a waiter and was able to document the racist language and behavior of elite whites. Investigative news shows such as Prime Time, Nightline, and 20/20 have documented how blacks get shortchanged in a variety of social settings and organizations. For example, in the oft-mentioned episode of Prime Time titled “True Colors,” two confederates with identical characteristics but for their phenotype were sent to East St. Louis to assess whether they were treated differently. The black applicant endured discrimination in stores (poor or no service at all), job market (was told that there was nothing available), shopping (was quoted a much higher price for a car), trying to get a cab (was not picked up), and renting an apartment (was told that the unit had been already rented) (see Chapter 4). However, the black applicant realized the extent and particularities of the discriminatory behavior only when he compared notes with his white counterpart. Finally, and more significantly, blacks evince an understanding of the two faces of racism in the contemporary United States: the old and the new. Many of the black Detroiters in my study pointed this out explicitly (see Chapter 6). Furthermore, recent struggles led by

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the NAACP and by Jesse Jackson suggest that the civil rights establishment may be reassessing its strategies. Rather than focusing only on fighting “racists,” the NAACP and Jesse Jackson have raised as public issues the racial components of the SAT test and its deleterious effects on black youth and have criticized the decision of a school in Decatur, Georgia, to expel black children for “misbehaving.” They have also begun the much-needed fight against the “hightech lynching”25 going on in the United States: the death penalty. What this all means in practical terms is that since the new racism and its accompanying racial ideology are subtle and complex, the struggle against them must be subtle and complex too. For researchers, the analytical task is developing research strategies to hurdle the obstacles posed by the new forms of racial oppression. For instance, the audit strategy can be adapted26 to uncover differential treatment (modern discrimination) in a variety of situations and organizations. Another possibility is to combine research strategies (e.g., surveys and interviews) to cross-examine whites’ views and behavior on racial matters. It is also time to develop new research agendas such as the ethnography of whiteness and sensibilities to the data we gather. It is somewhat surprising that very few social scientists have ventured into suburbia with a focus on understanding the white racial formation.27 Whereas social analysts have done an enormous amount of work on poor, inner-city blacks, there is almost nothing written on “the souls of white folks.”28 We have failed to examine the cognitive, emotional, and practical effects of living in “white ghettos.” 29 Likewise, we need to dig beyond the surface if we want to truly understand how whites feel and think about racial matters. Researchers cannot continue interpreting survey data showing racial tolerance among whites in a naive way. The over 90 percent of whites who claim to have no problem with blacks moving “into their neighborhood,” with having a “black for dinner,” or with the goal of integration does not match real life given that residential segregation and isolation are still extremely high, few whites invite blacks for dinner in their homes, and real social integration is happening too slowly.30 There is another research strategy that can aid the fight against new racism. White scholars ought to design projects to investigate whiteness from within, that is, to report what whites say about blacks in family gatherings, in bars, in Friday afternoon beer-drinking gath-

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erings, and in other private white spaces. Although whites who engage in this research will be accused of disloyalty, the following phrase from the manifesto of the New Abolitionists has the answer to this accusation: “Treason to whiteness is loyalty to humanity.”31 For activists the agenda is nothing less than monumental: organizing a mass movement against the new racism. Activists must realize that nothing will happen until people mobilize and force change. However, nothing will change unless we understand how this new monster operates and shows its ugly but (mostly) smiling face. To achieve this goal, activists will have to sacrifice a lot and do some creative thinking as the tactics of the past are not suitable for this fight. What is needed are specific tactics geared toward showing the workings of the new racism. Whereas in the past young cadres were trained in the tactics of nonviolence (sit-ins and so on), today they will need to be trained on how the new racism works and on how to elicit new racist behavior from whites. For example, the cadres of the new movement may view new racist behavior by relying on auditlike strategies. They can send white and black cadres to restaurants, stores, banks, and other organizations and videotape what happens to generate the smoking gun so desperately needed to rally people in a movement. The arguments and data I have presented in this book point to the need for a new kind of struggle and a new kind of civil rights movement. The civil rights movement of the past was fundamentally focused on extending to blacks the formal benefits of citizenship. This, for the most part, was accomplished. However, by downplaying the centrality of the “savage inequalities” 32 between blacks and whites in terms of wealth, income, education, and housing and by ignoring the new forms of racial exclusion, the movement was bound to fail in the goal of achieving full racial equality. Furthermore, despite the fact that there are examples of the established civil rights movement realizing the need for a new agenda, because that movement has become institutionalized, it has very few degrees of freedom. For instance, although Jesse Jackson and other civil rights leaders have finally begun to tackle some important new racism issues, most of these leaders are beholden to the Democratic Party. If a new civil rights movement aspires to be truly new and massive, it must go back to the grassroots and have independence from the two major parties. The agenda of the new civil rights or human rights movement, as

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Malcolm X preferred to call it, must be struggling for equality of status among the races. That is, blacks and other racial minorities must strive for the extension of the substantive benefits of citizenship.33 This agenda was foreshadowed by Martin Luther King who, just weeks before his assassination in 1968, said “What good is it to be allowed to eat in a restaurant if you can’t afford a hamburger?”34 Although some of the old organizations and leaders seem to be moving in the right direction, I believe that the movement will need new leadership. The new leadership must take seriously the plight of the black majority as well as the plight of the black middle class.35 This new leadership must also take seriously the need to work with other racial minorities such as Puerto Ricans, Mexican Americans, Native Americans, and Asian Americans. 36 Hence, the new civil rights movement must have a multiclass, multiracial minority group agenda. This new movement must also be less ritualistic (e.g., avoid old strategies, slogans, and issues) and more open to coalitions with progressive white organizations than nationalist groups such as the “Nation of Islam” have been in the past 30 years. For this task it is vital that young people —a group that has already created a powerful, albeit contradictory, hip hop counterculture—join the new movement. They, after all, are the ones in the best position to suggest ideas about how to mobilize and communicate with the masses of young people in the United States.37 Although that world we live in may not be “postmodern” (too many people are still suffering the effects of modernity), no one can deny the argument of postmodern analysts about the centrality of images in this new world. If dominant groups are able to create a simulation of reality or “hyper-reality,”38 dominated groups must counter it with their own vision of reality and utopias. Thus, rather than joining in the vilification of rap music and rappers, as so many mainstream civil right leaders and Minister Farrakhan have done, we must use hip hop as the cultural foundation to, in the words of Public Enemy, “fight the power.”39 After all, it is the hip hop generation that most likely will lead the fight against modern racism and, therefore, it is a waste of time to expect them to rally behind the words of the old Negro spiritual “We shall overcome” or use the style and tactics of Martin Luther King.40 Regarding the issue of coalition-building with progressive white organizations, the new civil rights movement will need to do lots of work. A generation of black youth, but also Latino and Mexican

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American youth, has grown with little practical political contact with progressive whites. And, in the case of black youth, the separatist influence of Minister Farrakhan and others has left an unmistakable antiwhite mark. The new movement, therefore, will have to rediscover the art of politics: coalescing with as many people as possible to advance the struggle. Although I do not foresee whites joining in mass a movement for racial justice in the near future, there are plenty of race traitors waiting to be mobilized in campuses and workingclass communities as well as in the new labor unions—unions for which racial minorities and women are the backbone. Therefore what is needed is a strategy that fundamentally addresses issues of race, class, and gender in the black community, which by extension will have an appeal beyond black America.41 We must convince our logical allies (people of color) and our potential allies (progressive and liberal whites) that the new racism is as rotten as the old one. Then and only then will we be able to fight effectively the apparent “racism lite” and the seductive lullaby of color-blind racism. Notes 1. See Charles W. Mills, The Racial Contract (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1997). 2. My theorization was originally published in the pages of the American Sociological Review in 1997 (“Rethinking Racism: Toward a Structural Interpretation,” 62: 465–480). That same year, Charles W. Mills published The Racial Contract and two years later his Blackness Visible. Both of us have developed very similar arguments independent of each other. 3. For two recent similar analyses, see Brooks, Rethinking the American Race Problem (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and Oxford: University of California Press, 1990); Robert C. Smith, Racism in the Post–Civil Rights Era: Now You See It, Now You Don’t (New York: State University of New York Press, 1995). 4. I do not claim originality in discovering this ideology (e.g., William Ryan and Joel Kovel made similar claims over twenty years ago) or in pointing out many of its themes (e.g., many have been discussed by Philomena Essed, authors in the symbolic and modern racism traditions, and more recently by Lawrence Bobo and his associates). 5. See Bonilla-Silva and Forman, “‘I Am Not a Racist but . . .’: Mapping White College Students’ Racial Ideology in the USA,” Discourse and Society 11, no. 1: 51–86. See also my forthcoming book Color Blind Racism or How Whites Justify Contemporary Racial Inequality from Rowman and Littlefield.

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6. For a very similar argument, see David Wellman, “The New Political Linguistics of Race,” in Socialist Review 16 (1986): 3–4. See also Wellman, “From ‘New Political Linguistics’ to Affirmative Action Minstrels,” Socialist Review 26, nos. 1–2 (1996): 147–154. 7. I acknowledge that color-blind racism is not the only racial ideology at play in the contemporary United States. Indeed at no time in modern history has one ideology (racial or otherwise) ruled completely the ideological universe. For example, traditional Jim Crow racist ideology is alive and well and gaining new adepts at alarming rates. For an analysis of this ideology today, see Jessie Daniels, White Lies: Race, Class, Gender, and Sexuality in White Supremacist Discourse (New York and London: Routledge, 1997). 8. On housing, see Yinger, Closed Doors, Opportunities Lost: The Continuing Costs of Housing Discrimination (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1995). On educational matters, see Orfield and Eaton, Dismantling Desegregation: The Quiet Reversal of Brown v. Board of Education (New York: The New York Press, 1996). 9. See John Dollard, Caste and Class in a Southern Town (New York: Doubleday/Anchor Books, 1949 [1937]). 10. This was part of the rationale for my recent debate in the pages of the American Sociological Review. See Mara Loveman, “Is ‘Race’ Essential?” American Sociological Review 64, no. 6 (1999): 891–898. See also my reply, Bonilla-Silva, “The Essential Social Fact of Race.” 11. It is a custom that the winner of the U.S. Open in golf chooses the dinner menu for the next year. Fuzzy Zeller joked that he did not want to eat “fried chicken and water melon” for dinner. 12. Martin Carnoy has made a similar claim in his Faded Dreams (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994). 13. Patricia Hill Collins, “Toward a New Vision: Race, Class, and Gender as Categories of Analysis and Connection,” pp. 478–495 in Joan Ferrante and Prince Brown, Jr., The Social Construction of Race and Ethnicity in the United States (New York: Longman, 1998), p. 481. 14. I borrow this phrase from Ellis Ernest Cashmore, The Logic of Racism (London: Allen & Unwyn, 1987). 15. Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (London and New York: Verso, 1991). 16. The classic writing on this is Aptheker, Anti-Racism in U.S. History (New York: Greenwood Press, 1992). For an update with an eye in the present, see Cedric J. Robinson, Black Movements in America (New York and London: Routledge, 1997). 17. See, for example, Marable, Race, Rebellion, and Reform (Jackson, MS, and London: University of Mississippi Press, 1991). 18. See Frances Fox-Piven and Richard A. Cloward, Regulating the Poor: The Functions of Public Welfare (New York: Pantheon Books, 1971). 19. Althusser, “Ideología y Aparatos Ideológicos del Estado,” in Escritos (Barcelona, Spain: Editorial Laia, 1974). 20. Hall, “Race Articulation in Societies Structured in Dominance.” 21. Analysts of social movements (e.g., Charles Tilly, Doug McAdam, Aldon Morris) and revolutions (e.g., Barrington Moore, Jr., Theda Skocpol,

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Peter Evans) agree in that fundamental social change has historically transpired in periods wherein national and international crises have converged. 22. I borrow the concept from Noel Ignatiev and John Garvey, eds., “Introduction: A Beginning,” in Race Traitor (New York and London: Routledge). 23. I borrow the term black majority from Manning Marable and like him I refer to the working-class and poor black masses who total over 80 percent of all blacks. 24. For a few examples, see the essays in part II of David R. Roediger, Towards the Abolition of Whiteness: Essays on Race, Politics, and Working Class History (London and New York: Verso, 1994). 25. This phrase was made famous by Clarence Thomas in his deposition before the Senate Judiciary Committee. 26. A problem with this strategy for researchers in academia is that we are required to procure the consent of research subjects before embarking on the actual research. Obviously, if we inform our prospective subjects that we are going to examine whether they discriminate against blacks, they would either not consent to participate in the project or behave differently. Furthermore, Human Subjects Review Boards are not likely to support this kind of research mostly because of their concern with lawsuits against universities. 27. For a noteworthy exception, see Rieder, Carnasarie: The Jews and Italians of Brooklyn Against Liberalism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985); and John Hartigan, Racial Situations: Class Predicaments of Whiteness in Detroit (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999). 28. This phrase comes from Du Bois. 29. For an early notable exception, see Joseph Barndt, Liberating Our White Ghetto (Minneapolis, MN: Augsburg Publishing House, 1972). For a more recent example, see Beverly Daniel Tatum, “Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?”: And Other Conversations About Race (New York: Basic Books, 1997). 30. This double-talk and double-life of whites has led many blacks into separatist positions. See, for example, Roy L. Brooks, Integration or Separation?: A Strategy for Racial Equality (Cambidge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 1996). 31. See Ignatiev and Garvey, Race Traitor. 32. I use Kozol’s term here. Kozol, Savage Inequalities: Children in the United States’ Schools (New York: HarperPerennial, 1991). 33. I take for granted that gender issues and considerations will be part of this new citizenship agenda. Coalitions with feminist organizations and the central role played by black and other minority women in radical and progressive politics will guarantee that gender issues are included in the agenda. 34. As cited by Wilson, The Declining Significance of Race: Blacks and Changing American Institutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), p. 162.

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35. Black Marxist Manning Marable now recognizes the important role of the black middle class in the struggle for liberation and the fact that they suffer enormously from the racial caste system. See Marable, How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America (Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 2000). 36. This part of the coalition-building process will be hard for two reasons. First, many of the nonblack racial minorities have had a negative experience with blacks in coalitions. For too long blacks saw these coalitions as a way of adding others to their struggle and assumed that replacing white faces with black faces was the goal. Second, white segments of the Latino community and large segments of the Asian American community have achieved an intermediate “honorary white” status and will not be easily swayed into joining coalitions with blacks. 37. See Kelley, Yo’Mama’s DisFUNKtional: Fighting the Culture Wars in Urban America (Boston: Beacon Press, 1997). 38. Jean Baudrillard, Simulations (New York: Semiotexte, 1983). 39. Public Enemy, Fear of a Black Planet (Island Label, 1990). 40. My point here is not that hip hop is perfect. The popular cultural expression of the young black masses is “neither wholly liberating nor unmitigatingly depraved.” Clarence Lusane, Race in the Global Era (Boston, MA: South End Press, 1997), p. 87. But this is the fate of all oppositional cultures. They are always contradictory and infused with elements of the various systems of domination. Filtering out—or mitigating the effects of—these various systems will be the task of the new leadership of this movement. 41. I reverse the argument of those who see a black liberation movement, or so-called identity politics, as reactionary. For these analysts, advocating black liberation is divisive and hence they urge “universalistic” agendas and politics. For a critique of this view, see Kelley, Yo’Mama’s DisFUNKtional. For a similar claim to mine, see Bush, We Are Not What We Seem: Black Nationalism and Class Struggle in the American Century (New York: New York University Press, 1999).

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Index

Abstract liberalism: and government interventions, 73; as “reasonable racism,” 67–68, 141; white racial ideology of, 142–147, 161, 169–173, 176 Adorno, Theodore, 60 Affirmative action: blacks’ versus whites’ views on, 77, 167; critiques of, 6, 7; storylines of color blindness and, 158, 159; Supreme Court standards of, 120; and white racial ideology, 142–144, 154–155, 170–171, 180–181 African Americans, hegemonic domination of, 37 Allport, Gordon, 60 Antiwhite (black supremacy) order, emergence of, 197–198 Arrest and incarceration of blacks, 104–105 Audit strategy, 200–201 Barth, Frederick, 42 Bell, Derrick, 2, 10–11, 13 Bell Curve, The (Murray), 5 Benedict, Ruth F., 21, 197 Biologization of culture rationale, 3–4, 5, 8, 160–161; blacks’ accept-

ance/rejection of, 173–175, 195; whites’ use of, 147–149 Black nationalism, FBI offensive against, 110 Black Panthers, 110 Black Power (Ture and Hamilton), 26–27 Black power movement, 27, 51n25 Blacks’ status and progress, 1–14, 197; and black progress thesis, 1–3; blacks’ versus whites’ views on, 77; class-based explanations of, 6–8; conservative and neoconservative views on, 1–8; cultural rationale for, 3–4, 5, 8, 147–149, 160–161, 173–174; demographic analysis of, 9–10; discrimination and, 151–153; economic, 111–117; indicators of, 5; liberal’s and social democrat’s views on, 6–8; middle class, 1–2; nihilism and, 8; “pesoptimist” position on, 8–10; and racial progress debate, 13; radical scholarship on, 10–11; social analysts views’ on, 1–11; victim-blaming and, 5–6; U.S. racial structure’s role in, 11–12 Black viewpoints: dominant ideolo-

217

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Index

gy’s impact on, 76, 168–189; oppositional and counterculture, 76–77 Blacks and Whites: Narrowing the Gap (Farley), 9 Blaming the Victim, 137 Blauner, Robert, 28–30 Blumer, Herbert, 61 Bonacich, Edna, 24–25 Bradley, Bill, 8 Buckley, William F., 8

Conservative/neoconservative racial analysis, 1–8 Cox, Oliver C., 23–24 Criminal justice system: black arrest and incarceration rates in, 104–105, 109; death penalty application in, 106–108; police brutality and discrimination in, 105–106, 108–109 Cultural rationale. See Biologization of culture rationale

Capital Jury Study, 108 Carmichael, Stokely, 110 Chesler, Mark, 26 Civil rights movement, 199; agenda, reassessment of, 201, 202–204; FBI and, 109–110 Civil rights regulations, 120 Class: coalition politics and, 199, 204; and minority status, 6–8, 89; modern social systems and, 198; racialized social systems and, 38–39, 42–43, 47; and racism, in Marxist theory, 23–25; in shaping of black experience, 12 Class-based policies, 120 Clinton, Bill, 8 Coalition politics, 197–198 Colonialism: and institutional racism, 26; and internal colonialism framework, 27, 28–30, 34 Color-blind racism, 67, 140–162, 167–189, 194; black culture viewed as deficient in, 147–149, 173–175; and blacks’ views on race, 168–189, 195; central frames of, 141–153; as dominant ideology, 189; and Jim Crow/racist terminology, 153–154, 179; liberal justifications for, 67–68, 141–153, 169–173, 176; and minimization of racism, 151–153; and naturalization of racial matters, 149–151; storylines of, 70, 157–161, 187–188; stylistic/rhetorical elements of, 68–70, 154–157, 178–187, 194; theory, counterarguments to, 195–198; use of term, 12

Death penalty, 106–108, 201 Detroit Area Study on White Racial Ideology (DAS) (1998), 140–161, 167–168 Discrimination, post–civil rights, 94–99; blacks’ views on, 151, 177–178; in labor market, 98, 113–115, 119, 144; and “reverse discrimination,” 30–31, 90, 180; Supreme Court standards of, 119; whites’ minimization of, 77, 151–153, 155. See also Racism Dominant class ideology, 62–64, 168–169. See also White racial ideology D’Souza, Dinesh, 5, 16n22 Economic inequality, 111–117 Economic liberalism, 141 Education: as cure for racism, 29, 46–47; discrimination in, 96–98. See also School segregation and busing Electoral politics, 103 Employment audit, 115 Employment discrimination. See Labor market discrimination Faces at the Bottom of the Well (Bell), 10–11 Farley, Reynolds, 8–9 Feagin, Joe R., 32–33 Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), 109–110 Free market rationale, 73, 78, 80

Index

Gender: coalition politics and, 199, 204; racialized social systems and, 38–39, 42–43, 47; research and, 39–40 Glazer, Nathan, 4 Government interventions, 6, 73, 176; civil rights and, 93, 109–110 Hacker, Andrew, 2 Hamilton, Charles, 26–28 Hate crimes, 118 Hate groups, organized, 118 Hip hop counterculture, 203 Housing industry, discrimination in, 95–96 Housing Urban Development (HUD), 119–120, 200 Hunter, Robert, 5 Ideology: definitions of, 62–63, 137; political nature of, 63–64. See also Racial ideology Income and earnings, black-white differentials in, 112–113 Institutional racism, 26–28 Interracial friendships: blacks’ views on, 182–183; statistics on, 3, 98; whites’ self-reports of, 153–154 Interracial marriage: blacks’ views on, 183–187; low rates of, 98; whites’ views on, 143, 145–147, 149, 155–157 Jackson, Jesse, 201 Jim Crow system: abolition of, 92; biological racism in, 147, 148; racetalk and storylines in, 68–69, 70, 157; racial ideology in, 71–72, 76, 78, 92; social control of blacks in, 91–92, 104; terminology, contemporary whites’ use of, 153 Job discrimination. See Labor market discrimination King, Martin Luther, Jr., 109–110, 203 Ku Klux Klan, 118 Labor force: industrialization’s impact on, 93–94; inequality, measure-

219

ment of, 9–10; and Marxist theories on racism, 23–25; occupational mobility/segmentation in, 113–114 Labor market discrimination, 98, 111–117, 119; white managerial views in, 116–117; and white privilege, 28–29; whites’ views on, 144 Latin American racial formations, 39 Lewis, Oscar, 5, 6 Liberal theory, 6–8. See also Abstract liberalism Losing Ground (Murray), 4–5, 15n17 Malcolm X, 110, 205 Marshall, Thurgood, 141 Marxism: class ideology and racial phenomena in, 50n17, 63–64; racism and, 23–24, 25, 57n95 Mass mobilization. See Political mobilization Mead, Lawrence, 4 Meritocracy, 143 Middle class, black, 93; assessment of, 1–2; growth of, 111–112 Moynihan, Daniel Patrick, 5, 6 Murray, Charles, 4–5 Myrdal, Gunnar, 71, 93 National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), 201 Nationalist power-sharing strategy, 28, 51n28 Naturalization rationale: blacks’ views and, 175–176; whites’ use of, 149–151 Neoconservatives, racial project of, 30–31 New Right, racial project of, 30–31 Occupational racial inequality, measurement of, 9–10 Omi, Michael, 30–31 Otis-Graham, Lawrence, 200–201 Political liberalism, 141 Political mobilization, 43, 103; black power movement, 27, 51n25; civil rights movement, 199, 201,

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Index

202–204; and coalition-building, 28, 197–198; and demise of Jim Crow, 94; necessity of, 29, 52n36; and systemic change, 197–204 Political representation of blacks: conservative and unrepresentative black appointees in, 101–102; electoral politics and, 105; mayoral, 102–103; structural barriers to, 100–101 Poverty (Hunter), 5 Prejudice, defined, 22 Prime Time, 200 Race Matters (West), 7, 17n37 Racetalk, 61, 68–70; rhetorical shields and incoherence in, 154–157 Racial attitudes: and contemporary ideological constructions, 79; in qualitative versus survey research, 59–61; of whites versus blacks, 59–60. See also Racial ideology; Racism Racial classification, 40–42 Racial contestation, 43, 65–66 Racial discourse, and racialized orders, 42 Racial formation: defined, 30; theory, 30–31, 34; white, 201 Racial Formation in the United States (Winant and Omi), 30 Racial ideology: collective versus individual nature of, 61; defined, 11–12; as interpretive repertoire, 66–70; paradigm, dominant frames in, 66–70; rationalization of inequality in, 71–72; research design and, 79–80; social functions of, 70–79; social system and, 43–44; systemic/global nature of, 76–77; tenets of liberalism and, 67–68. See also Color-blind racism Racial inequality: blacks’ alternative frameworks of, 72; justification of, 71–72; normalization of, 77–79; and power through consent, 76 Racial mythologies, 65 Racial progress, black versus white views on, 167

Racial projects, 30–31, 52n42 Racial stereotypes, 47 Racial stratification, resistance to, 13 Racial structure, post–civil rights: class impacts on, 12; criminal justice system in, 104–105, 108–109; emergence of, 90–94; interracial social interaction of, 94–99; of Jim Crow period, 90–92; labor market discrimination in, 114–115; minorities’ inclusion in, 67, 90; racial economic inequality in, 111–117; representation in, 100–103; reorganization of, 12, 66, 118; social control of blacks in, 103–111; state as enforcer of, 104–105; urbanization and industrialization impacts on, 92–94; wealth disparity in, 116 Racialized social system: class and gender effects in, 42–43, 47; changing nature of racism in, 45; conflict and protest in, 43; defined, 37; dominant social groups’ ideology in, 62–63; framework of, 44–48; hierarchy in, 37–38; historical development of, 42; overt versus covert racism in, 46; power through consent in, 76; race relations in, 11–12; and racial categories, 40–42; racial dynamics in, 42–43; racial ideology in, 43–44; research implications, 47–48 Racism: of blacks, 197; class dynamics and, 25; definitions and theories, 21–36; ideological grounding of, 23–24, 25, 26, 27, 30, 31, 34, 52n45, 89; as individual prejudice, 21–22, 29, 34, 60; institutionalist perspective on, 26–28, 34; internal colonialism perspective on, 27, 28–30, 34; as legacy, 56; mainstream idealist view of, 21–22, 33–36; Marxist perspective on, 23–25, 34, 35, 36; material (group interest) foundation of, 22, 29, 32–33, 193–194; moral dilemmas and psychological costs of, 33; overt versus covert, 35–36, 46,

Index

58n108; racial formation perspective on, 30–31, 34; racialized social system approach to, 37–44; rationalist view of, 35; “reverse,” 30–31, 90, 180; as societal waste, 32–33; and split labor market, 24–25; static view of, 34–35; structural/systemic view of, 32, 89–90. See also Racialized social system Racist America: Roots, Current Realities, and Future Reparations (Feagin), 32 Reparations: blacks’ views on, 73, 187–188; whites’ views of, 159 Research: class and gender controls in, 39–40; interview data in, 139; labor market discrimination, 115; methodological individualism in, 60; new racism and, 119–120; qualitative, 59–61; racial ideology paradigm in, 79–80; survey, 59, 60–61; systemic change strategies in, 201–202 Residential segregation, post–civil rights: blacks’ versus whites’ views on, 76–77, 167; blacks’ views on, 73, 195; costs of, 95; and fair housing audits, 95–96; and white racial ideology, 68, 145, 149, 150, 171– 173, 176 Russell, Gregory D., 107–108 Ryan, William, 137 Scammon, Richard, 1, 2 Schaefer, Richard T., 21 School segregation and busing, 67–68; blacks’ versus whites’ views on, 77, 167; and white racial ideology, 149–151, 171, 175–176 “Sincere fictions,” of white racism, 33 Slavery: blacks’ versus whites’ views on, 77–78; contemporary racism and, 36; and racialized social systems, 38, 42; storylines and, 158 Social control agencies, new racism and, 103–111 Social Democrats, 6–8 Social mobilization. See Political mobilization

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Social segregation, and white racial ideology, 149–151. See also Residential segregation Social stratification, in institutionalist perspective, 27 Southern Christian Leadership Conference, 109–110 Sowell, Thomas, 4 Storylines, dominant, 70, 157–161; and blacks’ race-related views, 187–188 Subordinated groups: ideology of, 63, 72; in systems of racial subjugation, 76 Supreme Court: affirmative action standards of, 120; discrimination standards of, 119 Systemic change: and coalition politics, 199, 203–204; documentation and audits as tools for, 200; new activist agenda in, 201, 202–204; research strategies for, 201–202 Szymanski, Albert, 23 Thernstrom, Stephan and Abigail, 2–3 Ture, Kwame, 26–28 Underclass, 29; deviant view of, 6–7, 16n30 Urban Institute, 115, 119–120, 200 Van den Berghe, Pierre, 21 Vera, Hernán, 32–33 Wattenberg, Ben, 1–2 Wealth differentials, black-white, 116 Welfare reform, 8 West, Cornel, 6, 7–8 “White ethnic” groups (U.S.), 41 White privilege, 28–29, 37–38 White racial formation, research and, 201 White racial ideology, 140–189; blacks’ internalization of, 76–77; changes in content of, 138–139; discrimination in, 151–153; and divisions within dominant race, 64–65; interactivity of, 64–66; justification and normalization of

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Index

racial inequality in, 71–72, 77–79; resistance to, 72–73. See also Color-blind racism White Racism: The Basics (Feagin and Vera), 32, 33 White supremacy: definition and use of term, 11, 19n54; global, 42; maintenance of, 199–200. See also Color-blind racism; Racism

White working class, 198, 199, 204 Whites: elite, influence of, 64–65; as ideological dissidents, 162, 199 Wilson, William Julius, 6–7, 8, 12, 89 Winant, Howard, 30–31, 52n45 Women, coalition-building and, 162, 199, 204 Woodson, Robert, 5

About the Book

Is a racial structure still firmly in place in the United States? White Supremacy and Racism in the Post–Civil Rights Era answers that question with an unequivocal yes, describing a contemporary system that operates in a covert, subtle, institutional, and superficially nonracial fashion. Assessing the major perspectives that social analysts have relied on to explain race and racial relations, Bonilla-Silva labels the post–civil rights ideology as color-blind racism: a system of social arrangements that maintain white privilege at all levels. His analysis of racial politics in the United States makes a compelling argument for a new civil rights movement rooted in the race-class needs of minority masses, multiracial in character—and focused on attaining substantive rather than formal equality. Eduardo Bonilla-Silva is assistant professor of sociology at Texas A&M University.

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