In this article, I describe the racial order of America in the post–Civil Rights era. First, I discuss what racism is all about and emphasize the centrality of conceiving the phenomenon in a structural way. Second, I argue that the “new racism,” or the set of mostly subtle, institutional, and seemingly nonracial mechanisms and practices that comprise the racial regime of “post-racial” America, has all but replaced the old Jim Crow order. Third, I describe the racial ideology of color-blind racism and its component parts (i.e., frames, style, and racial stories) and contend that, like the racial order, this new ideology is slippery and has a “beyond race” character. Fourth, I explain that the Obama moment is part of the new racism, color-blind period and justify my claim empirically. I conclude this essay pondering if people of color will wake up and realize that the new, more “civil” way of maintaining and justifying racial things is a more formidable way of maintaining racial domination.
AlthusserL. (1972). Ideology and ideological state apparatuses. In Lenin and philosophy and other essays. New York, NY: Monthly Review Press.
5.
BalibarE.WallersteinI. M. (1991). Race, nation, class: Ambiguous identities. New York, NY: Verso.
6.
BoboL. D.KluegelJ. A.SmithR. A. (1997). Laissez-faire racism: The crystallization of a kindler, gentler, antiblack ideology. In TuchS. A.MartinJ. K. (Eds.), Racial attitudes in the 1990s: Continuity and change (pp. 15-44). Westport, CT: Praeger.
7.
Bonilla-SilvaE. (1997). Rethinking racism: Toward a structural interpretation. American Sociological Review, 62, 465-480.
8.
Bonilla-SilvaE. (1999). The essential social fact of race. American Sociological Review, 64, 899-906.
9.
Bonilla-SilvaE. (2001). White supremacy and racism in the post-Civil Rights era. Boulder, CO: Rienner.
10.
Bonilla-SilvaE. (2003). Racial attitudes or racial ideology? An alternative paradigm for examining actors’ racial views. Journal of Political Ideologies, 8(1), 63-82.
11.
Bonilla-SilvaE. (2008). Look, a Negro: Reflections on the human rights approach to racial inequality. In HatteryA.EmbrickD. G.SmithE. (Eds.), Globalization and America: Race, human rights & inequality (pp. 9-22). Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.
12.
Bonilla-SilvaE. (2013). Racism without racists: Color-blind racism and the persistence of racial inequality in America (4th ed.). Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.
13.
Bonilla-SilvaE.BaiocchiG. (2008). Anything but racism: How sociologists limit the significance of racism. In ZuberiT.Bonilla-SilvaE. (Eds.), White logic, White methods: Racism and methodology (pp. 137-152). Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.
14.
Bonilla-SilvaE.DietrichD. (2011). The sweet enchantment of color-blind racism in Obamerica. Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 634, 190-206.
15.
Bonilla-SilvaE.HerringC. (1999). The underrepresentation of sociologists of color and its implications. Footnotes, 27(3), 6.
16.
Bonilla-SilvaE.RayV. (2009). When Whites love a Black leader: Race matters in Obamerica. Journal of African American Studies, 13, 176-183.
17.
BrooksR. L. (1990). Rethinking the American race problem. Berkeley: University of California Press.
CovielloD.PersicoN. (2013). An economic analysis of black-white disparities in NYPD’s stop and frisk program (NBER Working Paper No. w18803). Retrieved from http://www.nber.org/papers/w18803
DeNavas-WaltC.ProctorB. D.SmithJ. C. (2012). U.S. Census Bureau, Current Population Reports, P60-243: Income, poverty, and health insurance coverage in the United States: 2011. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office.
25.
DietrichD. R. (in press). Rebellious conservatives: Social movements in defense of privilege. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan.
26.
DoaneA. W.Bonilla-SilvaE. (Eds.). (2003). White out: The continuing significance of racism. New York, NY: Routledge.
27.
DomhoffW. G. (2013). Who rules America? The triumph of the corporate rich (7th ed.). New York, NY: McGraw-Hill.
28.
D’SouzaD. (1995). The end of racism: Principles for a multiracial society. New York, NY: Free Press.
29.
Du BoisW. E. B. (1899). The Philadelphia Negro: A social study. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania.
30.
DurkheimE. (1912). The elementary forms of religious life. London, England: George Allen & Unwin.
31.
EssedP. (1991). Understanding everyday racism: An interdisciplinary theory (Vol. 2). Newbury Park, CA: SAGE.
32.
Fair Housing of Greater Boston. (2005). You don’t know what you’re missing: A report on discrimination in the Greater Boston home sales market. Retrieved from http://bostonfairhousing.org/DontKnow.pdf
33.
FeaginJ. R. (2000). Racist America: Roots, current realities, and future reparations. New York, NY: Routledge.
34.
FeaginJ. R.SikesM. P. (1994). Living with racism: The Black middle-class experience. Boston, MA: Beacon Press.
35.
ForbesJ. D. (1993). Africans and Native Americans: The language of race and the evolution of Red-Black peoples. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
36.
FrankenbergE.JacobsonR. (2011). Trends—School integration polls. Public Opinion Quarterly, 75, 788-811.
37.
GillespieA. (2012). The new Black politician: Cory Booker, Newark, and post-racial America. New York: New York University Press.
38.
HallS. (Ed.). (1997). Representation: Cultural representations and signifying practices. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE.
39.
HenricksK.ByrnesB.BrockettV. (2014). Celebrating a return to Jim Crow? A reflexive analysis and methodological query on measuring segregation. Critical Sociology, 40(1), 89-109.
40.
Hordge-FreemanE.MayorgaS.Bonilla-SilvaE. (2011). Exposing whiteness because we are free: Emancipation methodological practice in sociology departments. In StanfieldJ. H. (Ed.), Rethinking race and ethnicity in research methods (pp. 95-122). Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press.
KatznelsonI. (2005). When affirmative action was White: An untold history of racial inequality in twentieth-century America. New York, NY: W. W. Norton.
49.
KinderD. R.SandersL. M. (1996). Divided by color: Racial politics and democratic ideals. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
LadnerJ. A. (Ed.). (1973). The death of white sociology: Essays on race and culture. Baltimore, MD: Black Classic Press.
52.
LoewenJ. W. (1995). Lies my teacher told me: Everything your American history textbook got wrong. New York, NY: New Press.
53.
LuiM. (2006). The color of wealth: The story behind the U.S. racial wealth divide. New York, NY: New Press.
54.
MarableM. (1983). How capitalism underdeveloped Black America: Problems in race, political economy and society. Boston, MA: South End Press.
55.
MarxK.EngelsF. (1975-). Volumes 5 (The German ideology) and 48 (Correspondence) In Collected works of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels (50 vols.). New York, NY: International Publishers.
56.
MasseyD. S.DentonN. A. (1993). American apartheid: Segregation and the making of the underclass. London, England: Harvard University Press.
57.
McIntoshP. (2013). White privilege: Unpacking the invisible knapsack. In RothenbergS. R. (Ed.), Race, class, and gender in the United States: An integrated study (pp. 165-169). New York, NY: Worth.
58.
MillsC. W. (2003). From class to race: Essays in white Marxism and black radicalism. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.
59.
MitchellW. J. T. (2012). Seeing through race. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
60.
MorningA. (2011). The nature of race: How scientists think and teach about human difference. Berkeley: University of California Press.
61.
MoscoviciS. (1982). The coming era of social representations. In CodolJ. P.LeyensJ. P. (Eds.), Cognitive analysis of social behavior (pp. 115-150). The Hague, Netherlands: Nijhoff.
62.
National Urban League. (2013). State of Black America: Redeem the dream: Jobs rebuild America. New York, NY: Author.
63.
ObamaB. (2006). The audacity of hope: Thoughts on reclaiming the American dream. New York, NY: Crown Publishers.
OliverM. L.ShapiroT. M. (2006). Black wealth/White wealth: A new perspective on racial inequality (2nd ed.). New York, NY: Routledge.
67.
PagerD. (2007). The use of field experiments for studies of employment discrimination: Contributions, critiques, and directions for the future. Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences, 609, 104-133.
68.
PagerD.QuillianL. (2005). Walking the talk? What employers say versus what they do. American Sociological Review, 70, 355-380.
69.
PagerD.ShepherdH. (2008). The sociology of discrimination: Racial discrimination in employment, housing, credit and consumer markets. Annual Review of Sociology, 34, 181-209.
70.
PainterN. I. (2010). The history of white people. New York, NY: W. W. Norton.
71.
ParkerC. S.BarretoM. A. (2013). Change they can’t believe in: The Tea Party and reactionary politics in America. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
72.
PettigrewT. F. (1994). New patterns of prejudice: The different worlds of 1984 and 1964. In PincusF. L.ErlichH. J. (Eds.), Race and ethnic conflict (pp. 53-59). Boulder, CO: Westview Press.
73.
PiccaL. H.FeaginJ. R. (2007). Two-faced racism: Whites in the backstage and frontstage. New York, NY: Routledge.
74.
PinkneyA. (1984). The myth of black progress. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.
75.
PomerM. I. (1986). Labor market structure, intragenerational mobility, and discrimination: Black male advancement out of low-paying occupations, 1962-1973. American Sociological Review, 51, 650-659.
76.
RobinsonR. (2000). The debt: What America owes to blacks. New York, NY: Dutton.
77.
RodríguezD. (2010). Suspended apocalypse: White supremacy, genocide, and the Filipino condition. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
78.
SchreerG. E.SmithS.ThomasK. (2009). Shopping While Black: Examining racial discrimination in a retail setting. Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 39, 1432-1444.
79.
SchumanH. (1997). Racial attitudes in America: Trends and interpretations. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
80.
SearsD. O. (1988). Symbolic racism. In KatzP. A.TaylorD. A. (Eds.), Eliminating racism: Profiles in controversy (pp. 53-84). New York, NY: Plenum Press.
ThomasW. I.ThomasD. S. (1928). The child in America: Behavior problems and programs. New York, NY: A. A. Knopf.
85.
TillotsonM. (2011). Invisible Jim Crow: Contemporary ideological threats to the internal security of African Americans. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press.
