In front of one’s nose

With the election of Barack Obama as president of the United States, many prominent public figures declared that America had “entered a ‘post-racial’ era.” But as sociologists Eduardo Bonilla-Silva and David Dietrich argue in their March 2011 ANNALS article, “The Sweet Enchantment of Color-Blind Racism in Obamerica,” “racial oppression is still systematic in America.” Racist or “racial” practices today, though, are “subtle,” “apparently nonracial,” and “institutionalized.” Bonilla-Silva has termed this “new regime” of racism “color-blind racism.”  Color-blind racism no longer positions racism as individual-level prejudice but rather as whites’ “collective expression” of their “racial dominance.”

But how can color-blind racism pervade a country that has not too long ago elected a black man to the nation’s highest office? You may be asking yourself this very question. It is a question that Bonilla-Silva and Dietrich ask themselves, too, and one they answer. First, they write, Obama himself is a “cultural symbol” congruent with color-blind racism. Second, Obama’s personal political stance on race and how he has positioned himself therein are “in line with color-blind racism.” In regard to their second point in particular, Bonilla-Silva and Dietrich point to certain speeches that Obama gave while on the campaign trail as well excerpts from his book, The Audacity of Hope.  Bonilla-Silva and Dietrich conclude that the election of Barack Obama did not, in fact, send us merrily skipping into a post-racial era, but instead that, under Obama’s administration, “the tentacles of color-blind racism will [only] reach deeper into all the crevices of the American polity.”

If concerned citizens, particularly those of color who are entrenched in this “nationalist moment,” do not emerge from their slumber, Bonilla-Silva and Dietrich warn, “the color-blind racist drama will monopolize America.” For, as George Orwell wrote in 1946, “To see what is in front of one’s nose needs constant struggle.”