Anti-Racists?

      

     Color-blind racism is a new racial ideology in which whites have developed powerful explanations, which have become justifications, for contemporary racial inequality that exculpate them from any responsibility for the status of people of color. Most whites rely on this ideology to articulate their views, present their ideas, and interpret interactions with people of color. Because whites believe discrimination is a thing of the past, minorities’ claims that they are being racially profiled, are interpreted as excuses. Whites do not have a problem with their own racial segregation because they do not see it as a racial phenomenon.

Racial progressives are people in which do not follow this pattern. They do not go with the flow of color-blindness. These racial progressives are made up of mostly young, working-class women. For example, Bonilla-Silva interviewed a student at WU named Beth. She grew up in a lower-middle-class neighborhood. Her four friends she mentioned were all of a minority ethnicity. She described herself as “very liberal” and supported interracial marriage strongly. She understood that discrimination affects the life chances of minorities and even supported programs compensating minorities for past discrimination.  An example of a racial progressive in the category of Detroit area residents is an unemployed woman named Sara. She was raised in Detroit in a low-income neighborhood and said the diversity in her neighborhood was a bunch of different people. Her friends correlated to that because she had one Arab friend, one black friend, one white friend, and one Mexican. She has had an affair with a black guy. She believes blacks experience daily discrimination and doesn’t believe that blacks are lazier than whites. She was one of few whites to acknowledge the fact that the company was 97% because of racism.

        These racial progressives were found to be more likely to support affirmative action and interracial marriage, have close personal relations with minorities and blacks in particular, and understand that discrimination is a central factor shaping the life chances of minorities in this country.  Bonilla-Silva has argued that whiteness is “embodied racial power” because all actors socially regarded as ‘white’ receive systemic privileges just by being white whereas those who aren’t white are denied those privileges. The interaction between race and gender has a lot to do with the U.S. being historically antiblack, antiminorty. White male workers have been historically supporting the racial order. White masculinity has provided white men with economic and noneconomic benefits. Bonilla-Silva has pointed out that contemporary racialized capitalism has created a situation in which white women and racial minorities increasingly share similar class conditions in the workplace. These racially progressive women used their own experiences of discrimination as women as a lens through which to they can comprehend minorities’ racial oppression.  

      Throughout history, there have been plenty of women that have been classified as racial progressives. One woman is Lillian Eugenia Smith (1897-1966) who was a writer and social critic of Southern United States. She was a liberal unafraid to criticize segregation and work toward dismantling Jim Crow laws.

http://www.conspireforchange.org/?page_id=7