Racism Without Racists: Color-Blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in America

This chapter is arranged more formally than the previous chapter (as Bonilla-Silva promised it would be). In it, he makes a case that racial inequality still exists by using a mixture of quantitative and qualitative data. He is frequently critical of studies that only use the former, as data alone can be too blunt or can tell the wrong story. The chapter contains some humor, but it is less confrontational than other sections of the book. It is a chapter devoted less to solving the problems he outlines than to proving the problems exist.

He opens with a brief introduction. After the election of Barack Obama in 2008, many white people congratulated themselves into believing that the election of a Black president meant that the US had moved beyond race. When Donald Trump was elected, many white people felt emboldened to behave in more overtly racist ways while claiming, like Trump himself, that they were the least racist people in the world. Trumpism has allowed white people to point at Trump supporters as examples of “bad white people” contrasted with themselves as “good white people.” It has also led some to erroneously believe the US has entered another period of constant overt racism rather than the