University Times

What would a Barack Obama presidency mean for this country’s racial divide, asked a national expert on U.S. race relations in a lecture here.

“The election of Obama as president is not likely to be a watershed moment in our history,” said Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, professor of sociology at Duke University and author of four books.

“Obama’s election will reduce rather than expand the racial conversation, and the election of Obama without the backing of a real social movement may mean that race matters may become more rather than less problematic for people of color,” said Bonilla-Silva, who spoke Oct. 16 on “Racism, Discrimination, Colorblindness and Race Matters in ‘Obamerica,’” in a lecture hosted by Pitt’s Center on Race and Social Problems.

(In the interest of full disclosure, Bonilla-Silva said he had already cast his vote for Obama and believes that the Illinois senator is a shoo-in to win the presidency.)

“For most of us, racism means the KKK (Ku Klux Klan) or whites’ active racial prejudice,” said Bonilla-Silva. When radio shock-jock Don Imus makes racial slurs on the air, “we reflexively think: That is racism. And what is wrong with interpreting these overt events and behaviors as racist?”

The problem is two-fold, he said. By casting only overt racial events as racism, “we fail to appreciate that we — all of us — participate in racism as a system, some of us as its beneficiaries and some as its victims,” he said.

If racism were limited to the actions of a few white people, it would have been eliminated in America a long time ago, Bonilla-Silva maintained.

“But the system we humans created around the invented category of race is still with us, because it is anchored in real practice and behaviors that produce positions of relative privilege for some and subordination for others. Therefore, the cost of racism as a system is material, rather than psychological. Systemic racism remains in place because it benefits whites socio-economically,” he said.

Today’s racism is more subtle, institutionalized and non-racial in appearance. “By focusing our attention on overt racial events, or moral judgment or political action, we ignore real racism, we cloud efforts to highlight racial matters in everyday life and we help to extend the notion of America as a country that is no longer racist, except for ‘isolated incidents.’”

That is the kind of prevailing attitude, Bonilla-Silva said, that believes racism is extinct: “Racism? What racism? We just elected a black man as our president. What more do you people want?”

Obama himself has reinforced this idea by saying that he doesn’t see a white America and a black America, only the United States of America, Bonilla-Silva noted. “I want to go up to Obama and tell him, ‘You need my glasses. We still have a white America and a black America.’”

Bonilla-Silva labeled the dominating practices that preserve racial inequality in contemporary America as the “new racism.”

“By this I mean the apparently ‘beyond-race’ character of most public racial practices,” he said. “This new system that emerged in the late 1960s and ’70s has all but replaced the Jim Crow-style discrimination of yesteryears. We still have some of that type of discrimination, but I submit that is not the way we maintain racial inequality.”

Up until the civil rights movement, racism was sustained by racial terrorism, by legislation in both the North and the South, by the federal certification of separate-but-equal segregation and by the active participation of the federal government, which transferred billions of dollars to whites for the construction of roadways to access white suburbia, Bonilla-Silva said.

When these practices became illegal in the post-civil rights era, one would expect discrimination to halt, over time.

“Yet, this is not the case. How can this be?” There is still de facto segregation in schools and housing, he said, adding that banks, other lenders and realtors still discriminate on the basis of race, and racial profiling is a fact of life in America.

“Social scientists have documented that the high level of housing segregation is not because people of color want to self-segregate, as so many whites believe, nor is it due to poverty, as some people argue,” Bonilla-Silva said. “Residential segregation remains a problem because discrimination in the housing and lending market is still part of American life. Report after report shows how little we have improved in this area, and how new banking discrimination is the driving force behind our current situation of residential apartheid.”

A recent Harvard study, for example, said that probability alone cannot explain the existence of residential segregation in Massachusetts. The main reasons for continued segregation, the report contends, include behavior by realtors, who show whites different neighborhoods from minorities; lenders who give subprime loans disproportionately to blacks and Latinos, and the lack of enforcement of Fair Housing laws, Bonilla-Silva said. “Interestingly, the discriminating tactic most used was providing differential information about available housing units, such as when units would become available,” he said. “They found whites were five-six times more likely to be told an earlier availability date.”

These discriminatory housing and banking practices exemplify new-style discrimination, because they are hard to detect and even harder to label racial unless one has a “smoking gun,” he said.

“How can we prove new-style discrimination by bankers, realtors or lenders? In the case of banks, one would need access to all the loans approved to demonstrate that race matters,” Bonilla-Silva said.

“Similar practices have been documented in other areas of life. So this implies that in order for a person of color to prove discrimination, he must bring a white friend along to go shopping, buy a car, get a loan, rent an apartment, buy a house — to do almost anything in America.”

Bonilla-Silva said he has been subjected to racism, including being profiled as a likely thief in upscale stores, despite being well-off financially. “I navigate America with my charming Puerto Rican accent and my beautiful dark color, which means as I navigate America I suffer discrimination as much as any dark person,” he said.

“How do we prove discrimination is happening if people don’t call you the ‘N word’? I believe the overt, in-your-face, ‘you people are inferior to us’ racial discourse of the past has been for the most part replaced by a more elusive racism that I call colorblind racism.”

This new racism allows white people to manufacture non-racial explanations for discrimination, he said. Born of abstract liberalism — a belief system that maintains that laws ensure justice — colorblind racism assigns non-race factors to discriminatory practices. “In fact it is the dominant political tool for whites to explain and ultimately justify contemporary racial inequality,” Bonilla-Silva said.

If one believes, for example, the U.S. society is a meritocracy, and that all jobs are awarded on merit because it is illegal to do so otherwise, that ignores data that show as many as 80 percent of jobs are obtained through informal networks.

“By ignoring the significant discrimination in the labor market, whites can safely conclude that finally racism is over,” Bonilla-Silva said.

Then, seemingly out of nowhere, came this black man, Barack Obama.

“In a little over a year, we’ve all been mesmerized by Obama’s speeches, we’ve all seen on TV crowds cheering, ‘Obama!’ ‘Obama!’ and ‘Yes we can, yes we can.’”

If we elect him, does that mean, as many liberals and conservatives contend, that we have seen the end of racism or at least its decline? Bonilla-Silva asked.

“Obama, his campaign, his success is the outcome of 40 years of racial transition in America from the Jim Crow racial regime to the new racism. I have concerns about what is beneath the Obama phenomenon.”

Those concerns include that Obama does not represent a true social movement. “Lacking a social movement with an active agenda, Obama’s rise to the top may become problematic because we cannot predict what he will do if he’s elected president,” he said.

Second, there is no guarantee that Obama’s central message — change — will be advanced in any of the critical issues of the campaign, health care, jobs, immigration, racism, the wars or the Palestinian question, Bonilla-Silva said.

“Third, Obama has reached the level of success in a large part because he has made a strategic move to adopt a post-racial persona and political stance. He has distanced himself from most leaders of the civil rights movement; he has avoided the term ‘racism in this country,’ except in his race speech. Obama said in a separate speech in Selma, Alabama, that we were 90 percent of the way to racial equality. I say: Are you out of your mind?” Bonilla-Silva said.

“My biggest concern is that he and his campaign mean and invoke different things, depending on his supporters. For whites, Obama means the end of racism. He’s the ‘magic Negro.’ Obama is pushing personal responsibility, sweet code words for whites. Whites see a different kind of black man.”

Even 40 percent of whites who do not support Obama take it as is positive sign that a black man could become the president, Bonilla-Silva noted.

“In contrast, for blacks, Obama is the symbol of possibilities. He’s their Joshua, no matter what he says or does, no matter which person we get as president,” he said.

“Accordingly, when I debate the Obama phenomenon with people of color and white allies, I mention that Obama receives 46 percent of his money from corporate America — several hundred million dollars — and that he gets more money from Wall Street than John McCain, and that, in this respect, he’s following along the footsteps of George Bush. He’s playing the same game: That’s the way you win in electoral politics.”

Worse yet, Bonilla-Silva said, the majority of Obama supporters believe he will turn left politically once he is elected, something for which there is little evidence. “Coming from Puerto Rico, I know that black leaders should not be judged by the color of their skin or by the content of their politics,” he said.

“If Obama is elected, we will continue on the path toward symbolic unity. That teaches the wrong message, that elections drive social change. I’m not advocating to never participate in federal elections. My position is: We use the electoral process to advance our agendas, but we cannot trust political parties that are bought by corporations. We need social movements to ensure that the political parties do the right thing, or else we’re just buying into the system,” Bonilla-Silva said.

No real progress has been made in this country without a social movement behind it, he maintained, citing the anti-Vietnam War, the suffragette and the civil rights movements.

“I trust social movements more than politicians. As I tell my students: If you want deep change in society, if you wish for social justice in our America, you all must commit yourself to a struggle and become activists. Democracy cannot be reduced to voting every four years, which is exactly what the fat cats want. Democracy needs participation. It is a permanent struggle.

“But, if Obama is elected, I have the audacity to hope that progressives will rekindle a variety of social movements that will produce the politics, practices and leaders that will bring the real change we need and deserve,” Bonilla-Silva said.

“The task before us is to marry such a movement in the hope, idealism and frustrations that are out there.”

—Peter Hart