Colorblind Racism

Meghan Burke

• Editorial: Polity
• Año: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781509524457
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Social Sciences
• Categoría: Demography

How can colorblindness – the idea that race does not matter – be racist? This illuminating book introduces the paradox of colorblind racism: how dismissing or downplaying the realities of race and racism can perpetuate inequality and violence. Drawing on a range of theoretical approaches and real-life examples, Meghan Burke reveals colorblind racism to be an insidious presence in many areas of institutional and everyday life in the United States. She explains what is meant by colorblind racism, uncovers its role in the history of racial discrimination, and explores its effects on how we talk about and treat race today. The book also engages with recent critiques of colorblind racism to show the limitations of this framework and how a deeper, more careful study of colorblindness is needed to understand the persistence of racism and how it may be challenged. This accessible book will be an invaluable overview of a key phenomenon for students across the social sciences, and its far-reaching insights will appeal to all interested in the social life of race and racism.

1
Introduction

“I’m not racist. I work with a very successful black man – and he’s great!” “It’s my grandparents’ generation who are the racists. Today anyone can make it if they try hard enough!” “I don’t understand why people play the race card. My family were Swedish immigrants and faced incredible hardships.” “All lives matter.” These common sentiments, and more, may, on the surface, seem innocuous – and perhaps even supportive. They seek to validate hard work, they express appreciation for immigrants and some individuals of color, and they purport equal opportunity and fairness – all hallmarks of the American ethos. And yet, each is reflective of what we call colorblind racism.

Colorblind racism asserts that there are no real problems with racism in our society, that challenges stem from individuals rather than our institutions and collective thinking and behavior. In this sense colorblindness is a defense of the status quo. It is also a defense of individuals who may sincerely believe that they operate without bias, or those who believe that no one has any more significant privileges or disadvantages than anyone else. It is the polite talk that isolates some people of color in majority-white spaces, or anyone who wants to talk about race, for fear of discomfort. It is the aggressive pushback to those who do discuss the realities of racism and systemic bias and violence in, for example, our criminal justice system.

It is all of these things and more, and it is a core feature of racism in the decades since the Freedom Movement more than fifty years ago in the United States – though it was also present before this time. While “traditional,” overt racism has never disappeared, and may in fact be on the rise as the far right is emboldened in many places around the USA and the world, covert, colorblind racism remains prevalent. It is the most popular way of talking and thinking about race in both major US political parties, in most schools, in our legal system, and in our conversations about race. It bends and changes to meet new contexts, but it remains, for now, entrenched. And as such, it is worth exploring what colorblind racism is, how it works, its connection to other forms of racism and studies thereof, its prevalence and manifestations, how it is being modified as times change, and how it is best studied and challenged. That is the purpose of this book.

Definition and Core Features

Colorblind racism typically refers to an assertion of equal opportunity that minimizes the reality of racism in favor of individual or cultural explanations for inequality. There have been several names and bodies of scholarship that have sought to explain the phenomenon; these are explored in a section below. Despite differing conceptualizations, all the related varieties of what we now typically call “colorblind racism” ground the ideology in a broader framework that maintains racial inequality and justifies the ongoing social, economic, and political advantages of being white. As Bonilla-Silva, Lewis, and Embrick (2004) note: “Racial outcomes … are not the product of individual ‘racists’ but of the crystallization of racial domination into a racial structure” (558). Colorblind racism, then, folds together ideology and its related material outcomes in a way that justifies racism and white privilege.

It also provides tremendous protection for those who actively harbor racist views, but seek to keep them hidden. This particularly protects the identities and privileges of whites: “One of the things that makes neoliberal racism so difficult to confront is that it takes the overt white supremacy of previous generations and repackages it in a language and context that offer ‘plausible deniability’ to those who profit from it” (Inwood 2015: 415). Whites who make use of colorblind ideology can therefore not only avert charges of being “a racist,” but also come to hold quite genuine, albeit inaccurate, perceptions of the social system. This both legitimates and creates complicity within these systems, allowing unequal systems to persist.

This will perhaps become clearer in an examination of the core features of colorblind racism. While there have been several names given to the phenomenon by scholars, and some slight variations in how the phenomenon is conceptualized and measured, common features seem to rise out of each. First, ideology is used reactively, as a means to justify the status quo of racial inequality and white dominance. This can happen through ignorance or denial, but the chief ideological function is always to diminish the explanatory power of racism, either in its legacy from the past or in its perpetuation today (see Feagin 2014). In essence, this feature asserts that the playing field is now equal because laws and policies have eradicated the mechanisms that produce structural inequalities, or because overt racism is less often sanctioned in public, and in many spheres of private, life.

This prevents us from being able to examine meaningfully the reality of ongoing racial inequality – something that few dispute, given family wealth structures, deep variations in neighborhood and school conditions, and more. All of these, and many other indicators, are easily measured and regularly demonstrated; the question becomes how they are understood and explained by the ordinary person – or sometimes by powerful people with interests that may be disguised from view. Either way, ignoring our often drastically different starting points towards achieving success, or the prevalence of ongoing forms of racism and bias that persist in everyday life, will necessarily justify inequality. This happens when we, instead, argue that the system itself is fair – that individual efforts and cultural traits are all that matter, or when we ignore or distrust the regular and patterned experiences of those who are marginalized by these systems, preferring inaccurate explanations that perhaps make us more comfortable or that come to be seen as common sense.

The second major feature that arises from the varying conceptualizations of what we now call colorblind racism is its complicity with neoliberal politics and ideologies. This has been traced in some of the most established contemporary theories of racism (see Omi and Winant [1986] 2015) and in the study of how we typically talk about them (Bonilla-Silva and Forman 2000). In fact, one of the early names given to colorblind racism in sociology was “laissez-faire racism” (Smith 1995; Bobo, Klugel, and Smith 1997). These neoliberal aspects of colorblind racism include Bonilla-Silva’s (2003) “abstract liberalism” frame, discussed in more detail below, which asserts the values of political liberalism: freedom and equality, typically favoring individual competition.

This is deeply connected to notions of meritocracy in the United States, which is both a cherished ideal and, as Heather Beth Johnson (2014) details in her book The American Dream and the Power of Wealth, a widely held perception of reality – even when people are simultaneously speaking about the privilege of intergenerational wealth or the realities of discrimination. Other useful analyses of the myth of meritocracy include McNamee and Miller (2009) and Callero (2013) – though there are, of course, countless other logical and empirical claims that also provide robust counterevidence to the notion that we live in a fair society with an equal playing field. Even so, the myth is salient for many, perhaps especially whites, who can derive a positive self-concept from the myths that surround beliefs about merit (see Unzueta, Lowrey, and Knowles 2008), and who sometimes respond to challenges to those beliefs with anger (see Cabrera 2014a).

The final core feature of colorblind racism is its ongoing use of racial stereotypes. This presents a paradox of sorts, given that colorblind racism is meant to deny racism. These stereotypes, however, are often presented as an objective measure of presumed reality (e.g. “Native Americans are alcoholics”), as something to be read positively (e.g. “Asian families teach the value of hard work and academic achievement”), or even sympathetically (Burke 2018) (e.g. “Black children can’t succeed because of chaotic home lives”). This core feature allows us to understand how racial myths, racial codes (Hill 2008), and racial storylines are deployed as a common-sense understanding of the contemporary racial landscape, working together with the other frames to advance racism by denying its legacy in bias and intent. While, again, many scholars have traced the emergence of this “new” form of racism, these three shared themes seem to emerge from all of them – providing a distinct form of racism that has worked in tandem with neoliberalism and a post-Civil Rights era.

Discussion Questions

• How familiar do these common themes of colorblind racism sound, from the ways that you’ve heard race discussed in everyday life?
• Who benefits from a widespread belief in colorblindness?
• What elements of racial inequality are hardest to explain without these “common-sense” notions about race and racism?

Early Studies of the “New” Racism

Much of the research in the post-Civil Rights era has been devoted to changes in the racial system in the United States, and grappled with language to mark the differences that scholars were noting between “traditional” racism – that which was overt and direct – and this “new” racism, which is more covert and abstract. Beginning in the 1970s, many new terms emerged for this phenomenon; an appendix provides a brief chronology of the terminology and associated authors that unfolded in academic scholarship during these years. While these studies are often noting some specific differences that necessitate, in their view, a new term, there is a way in which this collective body of scholarship on symbolic racism, modern racism, covert racism, new racism, and laissez-faire racism parsed out phenomena that now constitute the core themes outlined above. A more advanced study of the differences between these terms is possible; the appendix can provide a roadmap for such endeavors. And, even here, some important differences will be highlighted. Even so, an overview of scholarship around colorblind racism excavates the themes that came out of these decades of scholarship. Doing this both acknowledges where the research has been focused and helps us to understand how the scholarship has crystalized around “colorblind racism” as the most widely used framework today. This brief overview will also help us to appreciate why sociologists (and many others) prefer a framework that pairs those beliefs and their expressions with real social outcomes.

What we now call colorblind racism seems to have first been identified by social psychologists. In 1970, Joel Kovel named the “aversive” racist as “the type who believes in white race superiority but does nothing overt about it” (1970: 54), placing it as a transitional type between the “dominative” racist and a non-racist. Kovel’s analysis is deeply psychoanalytical, depending on notions of an unconscious hatred or resentment, and does not seem to have gained much traction for empirical study. After all, our unconscious drives are by definition buried from view and one’s own awareness. They are, however, sometimes reflected in attitudes of resentment, and psychology as a discipline has paid close attention to these racial attitudes and how they may best be measured – for example, in the development of a modern racism scale (McConahay, Hardee, and Batts 1981).

These measures and scales begin to give us a picture of how attitudes about race may operate in tandem with political behavior and correlate with other belief systems, but many sociologists find them limiting. After all, a focus on individual beliefs and attitudes, using a scale that parses “racists” from non-racists, will fail to see how we can all participate in systems of racial inequality, and even sincerely operate on the basis of faulty knowledge when doing so. Further, in his critique of psychological frameworks for studying racism, Bonilla-Silva (1997) argues that:

If racism is not part of a society but is a characteristic of individuals who are “racist” or “prejudiced” – that is, racism is a phenomenon operating at the individual level – then (1) social institutions cannot be racist and (2) studying racism is simply a matter of surveying the proportion of people in a society who hold “racist” beliefs. (467)

And so, while individual attitudes and beliefs are also important in sociology, they are not alone sufficient for understanding how and why racial inequality persists; this involves much more than prejudice. Even so, these early studies – largely psychological, but also coming from political science and some other sociologists – give us a picture of some of the early themes that characterize this “new” racism, and connect to how we now understand colorblind racism.

Abstract Values

The first among these themes is that manifestations of racism – or in some cases, simply talk about racism – takes on an abstract nature that is focused on values and morality rather than specific tr...

Índice

• Cover
• Table of Contents
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1: Introduction
• 2: Colorblindness in Historical Context
• 3: Colorblindness in Divergent Contexts
• 4: Contested Colorblindness
• 5: New Directions
• Appendix: Scholarly Timeline
• References
• Index
• End User License Agreement