The Problem of Racism in “Post-Racial” America
In this chapter, Eduardo Bonilla-Silva and Liann Yamashita explain the danger of conceptualizing racism as something based primarily in individual actions instead of as a system that we all participate in, whether as victims or as benefactors. Bonilla-Silva and Yamashita outline “new racism” practices in housing, banking, and everyday life and explain how these practices reproduce existing racial inequalities. Finally, they examine color-blind racism in America and explore the various strategies White Americans use to discuss race in a color-blind manner. These include abstract liberalism, in which the impact of discrimination is ignored and arguments to maintain the racial status quo are argued in “moral” terms, cultural racism, which posits that racial disparities are the fault of minority groups, and verbal strategies such as rhetorical incoherence. Bonilla-Silva and Yamashita conclude by explaining why racism is so difficult for many White people to talk about and demonstrate the necessity of becoming anti-racist to effectively counteract racism in all its forms.
