Today's racism related to economics, Duke professor says

By: Darrell Laurant | Lynchburg News and Advance
Published: December 04, 2009

Now that we have a black president, a relentless emphasis on multiculturalism, and Oprah Winfrey, does that mean the United States is in full recovery from the disease of racism?

Not necessarily, cautions Duke University professor Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, who spoke at Randolph College’s Smith Hall Theater on Thursday night as part of Lynchburg’s Community Dialogue on Race & Racism.

“People will say, ‘You’ve got a black president. What more do you want?’” Bonilla-Silva said. “And the answer will be, ‘I want employment.’”

The problem, from Bonilla-Silva’s academic and personal perspective, is that racism has been misidentified. Like a social virus, it has mutated from overt racial hostility to something almost on autopilot. The title of one of his six books on the subject says it all: “Racism Without Racists.”

Explicit, overt racism is now out of fashion. Indeed, all signs are that we are moving closer to becoming a colorblind society in many ways. But, said Bonilla-Silva, racism is really more about economics than “whether we can sit down and have a beer with each other.”

The economic inequities between black and white have changed little over the past few decades, Bonilla-Silva continued. And it is the acceptance of these inequities that provides the core of the new racism. Instead of “you’re not as good as we are,” it has become “you’re as good as we are, but you’re not going to get any of what we have.”

In Puerto Rico, where Bonilla-Silva went to undergraduate school, there is a move afoot to remove any reference of race in the census.

“That sounds like a good thing,” Bonilla-Silva said. “There are no black Puerto Ricans — we’re all Puerto Ricans. But when you stop identifying people by race, how can you take that census information and determine whether one group of people is falling behind? You can’t.”

Moreover, he said, there is no society on earth that has yet solved the problem of racism.

Leslie King, an assistant city manager and community liaison for the Community Dialogue, said Bonilla-Silva’s presentation was part of a continuing effort to probe beneath the surface and deal with difficult questions.

“I’m proud to live in a city,” she said, “where we are willing to wrestle with these issues to find our mutual humanity.”