Racism Without Racists 5ed: Color-Blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in America, Fifth Edition

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Most of the people who didn’t call “Jamal” were probably unaware that their decision was motivated by racial bias, says Daniel L. Ames, a UCLA researcher who has studied and written about bias. Results: We find that among white Americans, more than a quarter express traditional racist attitudes, whereas more than half endorse more contemporary and implicit forms of racist ideology. Each of these types of racism helps us explain profound disparities related to COVID-19. And because the group life of the various racially defined groups is based on hierarchy and domination, the ruling ideology expresses as "common sense" the interests of the dominant race, while oppositional ideologies attempt to challenge that common sense by providing alternative frames, ideas, and stories based on the experiences of subordinated races. But those disparities are invisible to many whites, who often see themselves as victims of discrimination, writes Jamelle Bouie of Slate magazine in a recent essay, “The Gulf That Divides Us.” Ferguson is like countless multiracial communities, they say: calm on the surface but seething with racial disparities beneath.

The other group got scrambled sentences that didn’t contain words like this. After the experiment was ostensibly over, the experiments timed how fast the participants moved as they left the lab. Participants who unscrambled sentences containing words that suggested elderly people walked more slowly than the participants in the other group. As people talk about what the grand jury’s decision in Ferguson means, Bonilla-Silva and others say it’s time for Americans to update their language on racism to reflect what it has become and not what it used to be. Olson M, Zabel K. Measures of prejudice. In: Nelson D, ed. Handbook of Prejudice, Stereotyping, and Discrimination. Psychology Press; 2016:175-211. the most important strategy for fighting "new racism" practices and the ideology of color blindness is to become militant once again. Changes in systems of domination and their accompanying ideologies are never accomplished by racial dialogues-the notion of "Can we all just get along?" or "workshops on racism"-through education, or through "moral reform"23 alone. What is needed to slay modern-day racism is a new, in-your-face, fight-the-power civil rights movement, a new movement to spark change, to challenge not just color-blind whites but also minority folks who have become content with the crumbs they receive If you ask someone on the hiring committee, none of them are going to say they’re racially biased,” Ames says. “They’re not lying. They’re just wrong.”

The court recently took up a fair housing case in Texas where the conservative majority could very well rule against the concept of “disparate impact,” a legal approach that doesn’t try to plumb the racist intentions of individuals or businesses but looks at the racial impact of their decisions. The explanation for why people have implicit attitudes that differ from their explicit attitudes is controversial, but it’s widely accepted that it has a lot to do with the stereotypes that are prevalent in a culture.

Or, in the words of another commenter who wrote about white flight, “As real as the push and pull factors may be, building stronger communities and reducing implicit and explicit bias requires us to journey beyond our comfort zones.” From their perspective, it looked as though they were making a judgement based on what qualifications they thought were required for police chief. They weren’t really: they were making a judgement based on gender, and justifying it, based on a confabulated theory about what qualifications were required for police chief. When they looked at their judgements, they saw a plausible story about qualifications.

The more we assume that the problem of racism is limited to the Klan, the birthers, the tea party or to the Republican Party, the less we understand that racial domination is a collective process and we are all in this game.” They were asked whether the number of people with jobs had gone up, down, or stayed about the same,” Ross wrote. “Many, looking straight at the graph, said down.” Purpose: Racism is an essential factor to understand racial health disparities in infection and mortality due to COVID-19 and must be thoroughly integrated into any successful public health response. But highlighting the effect of racism generally does not go far enough toward understanding racial/ethnic health disparities or advocating for change; we must interrogate the various forms of racism in the United States, including behaviors and practices that are not recognized by many as racism.