Repositioning Race: Prophetic Research in a Postracial Obama Age

1. Race Matters in “Postracial” OBAMERICA and How to Climb Out of the Rabbit Hole

1 • Race Matters in “Postracial” OBAMERICA and How to Climb Out of the Rabbit Hole1 EDUARDO BONILLA-SILVA WITH TRENITA BROOKSHIRE CHILDERS Duke University In this curious moment when many believe the election and reelection of a Black man as the 44th president of the nation are clear and convincing evidence of racial progress, race matters have in truth become more complex and problematic for most of us. The new racial order that has emerged—the “new racism”—unlike Jim Crow, reproduces racial domination mostly through subtle and covert discriminatory practices that are often institutionalized, defended with coded language, and bonded by the racial ideology of color-blind racism. Compared to Jim Crow, this new system seems genteel, but it is nonetheless extremely effective in preserving systemic advantages for most Whites and keeping most people of color at bay. This chapter examines how contemporary racial trends in Obamerica are affecting Amerikan sociology. (I spell America with a “k” to denote some racial progress—we used to be “Amerikkka.”) After all, sociology and sociologists are embedded in 23 24 • Eduardo Bonilla-Silva with Trenita Brookshire Childers social relations and thus reflect in many ways, despite our methodological objections to the contrary, social forces. More significantly, it is fundamental that we correctly understand how this curious moment is affecting sociologists of color, their organizations, as well as how it may shape our future in sociology. The “Postracial” Obamerica Moment We live in peculiar times that resemble the upside-down world Alice entered when she fell down the rabbit hole. In the wonderland I have called “Obamerica,”2 most Whites, and some people of color, believe Barack Obama’s presidential election in 2008 and his subsequent reelection in 2012 confirmed that ours is now indeed a color-blind nation. In the tradition of prophetic research, I am on record3 criticizing not only this problematic view, but also more controversially, the “hopeychangey ”4 politics that allowed someone such as Obama to become president. Obama’s success is neither the product of social movement politics nor of Whites’ racial altruism, but a direct expression of the fundamental racial transformation that transpired in America in the 1960s and 1970s. This racial transformation continues a political history of encoding white supremacy into social institutions through discriminatory practices, including in healthcare delivery, the criminal justice system, housing, the labor market, and the family. These practices of “the new racism” draw on the coded lexicon of color-blind racism (“those urban people” or “those people on welfare”) to both preserve white privilege and deflect charges of racial discrimination. It is crucial that we take a moment to trace the origins of this new racial regime. This order came about as the result of various social forces and events that converged in the post–World War II era: (1) the civil rights struggles of the 1950s and 1960s; (2) the contradiction between an America selling democracy abroad and disenfranchising and discriminating against minorities at home that forced the government to engage more seriously in the business of racial fairness; (3) Black migration from the South that made Jim Crow less effective as a strategy of social control; and (4) the change of heart of so-called enlightened representatives of capital who realized they had to retool the racial aspects of the social order to maintain an adequate “business climate.” The most visible positive consequences of this process are well-known: the slow and incomplete school desegregation that followed the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision; the enactment of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the Race Matters in “Postracial” OBAMERICA • 25 Housing Rights Act of 1968; and, the haphazard political process that brought affirmative action to life. Unfortunately, alongside these meaningful changes, many Whites developed very negative interpretations of what was transpiring in the nation.6 The concerns they expressed in the late 1960s and early 1970s about these changes gelled into a two-headed beast in the 1980s (Caditz 1976). The first head of the monster was Whites’ belief that the changes the tumultuous 1960s brought represented the end of racism in America . Therefore, because they believed racism had ended, they began regarding complaints about discrimination by people of color as both baseless and a product of their “hypersensitivity” on racial affairs. The second head of the beast meant that a substantial segment of the White population...