Colorblind Racism and Everyday Racial Attitudes

By the end of the twentieth century American racial attitudes, as measured by standard survey instruments, had undergone what sociologists called a 'great transformation.' In 1944, 55% of white Americans polled by the National Opinion Research Center endorsed the view that whites should have priority for available jobs; by the 1990s that figure had fallen close to zero. In 1958, only 4% of white Americans approved of Black-white marriage; by the 2010s more than 80% did. On virtually every principle of formal racial equality, whites now expressed the consensus that the civil rights movement had fought to establish: equal rights, equal opportunity, no legal discrimination, no state-enforced segregation.

And yet the structural patterns remained sharply unequal. Black-white wealth gaps widened rather than narrowed through the 1980s and 1990s. Residential segregation, measured by indices of dissimilarity, barely moved in most large metropolitan areas. Schools resegregated after a brief decade of court-ordered integration. Incarceration rates diverged dramatically. Police killings, infant mortality, life expectancy, and access to healthcare all preserved pronounced racial gaps. How could a society whose citizens overwhelmingly endorsed racial equality as a principle produce such unequal outcomes?

The Puerto Rican sociologist Eduardo Bonilla-Silva posed this question as the animating puzzle of his book Racism Without Racists: Color-Blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in the United States, first published in 2003 and now in multiple updated editions (most recently the sixth edition, 2022). Bonilla-Silva's answer: what looked like the disappearance of racism at the level of expressed attitudes was in fact the emergence of a new racial ideology — color-blind racism — that could justify and reproduce racial inequality without the overt racial animus of the Jim Crow era. To understand the puzzle required studying not just what people said they believed about race, but how they spoke about race in everyday life, what explanations they offered for racial inequality, and what cognitive moves these explanations performed.

Bonilla-Silva's method combined survey data with in-depth interviews. He and his collaborators conducted the 1997 Detroit Area Study and a subsequent 1998 survey of college students at three universities, supplementing closed-ended questions with longer interviews in which respondents were asked to elaborate on their views. The interview transcripts, closely analyzed, revealed recurrent patterns of rhetoric, hesitation, disclaimer, and semantic maneuver that a survey alone could not capture. When white respondents were asked about affirmative action, interracial marriage in their own families, or the causes of Black-white inequality, they did not express hostile racism but displayed a structured ideological repertoire that Bonilla-Silva argued served the same function: justifying racial inequality while asserting the speaker's own non-racism.

The framework has since become one of the most cited in American race sociology, and the book has been used as a canonical teaching text for undergraduate and graduate courses. Its contribution is distinct from but complementary to Omi and Winant's racial formation theory: where Racial Formation focuses on macro-level projects, Bonilla-Silva focuses on the everyday ideological work through which racial arrangements are reproduced.