How can racial inequality coexist with the prevailing narrative of “colorblindness”?
Many have made the largely convincing case that “colorblindness” is the dominant racial ideology of the post-Civil Rights era in the United States. Whites tend to hold the opinion that “race does not matter that much today, so let’s move on.” According to this logic, everybody, should be colorblind and is already for the most part, and race should not be the basis of efforts to lessen racial inequalities. This perception of the state of racism writ large in the U.S. is ostensibly corroborated by the general declivity in anti-Black attitudes among whites over the past half-century.
In my estimation, “colorblindness” prevails as our national narrative because it operates at relatively shallow depths.
Yet the social position of Blacks relative to whites has not improved evenly or greatly, and in some respects has worsened over the past several decades. Literally from birth to death, Blacks continue to face vast inequalities. At birth, in 2007, Blacks could expect to live 4.8 years fewer than whites; while the infant mortality rates for Black babies was more than double the rate for white babies in 2005.
Residential segregation of Blacks, far more extensive than for any other racial category, persists at high rates, if declining slowly over time, while school segregation after a brief period of decline, has rebounded to the levels of the late 1960s. Meanwhile, unemployment rate for Blacks has been intractably around twice as high as that for whites regardless of the state of economy and the Black median household wealth is preposterously low—only 5% of the median wealth for white households as of 2010.
Even more alarming than the steep escalation in the overall rate of incarceration in recent decades, the racial composition of prisoners changed from 70 percent white in the mid-twentieth century to almost 70 percent Black and Latina/o by the century’s end; the number of Blacks in prisons and jails rose from 98,000 in 1954, the year of the Brown v. Board of Education ruling, to 882,300 in 2007. Other similarly dismal disparities could be inventories seemingly without end.
How, then, do these racial inequalities coexist with the supposedly dominant ideology of “colorblindness”? After all, the spatial and social separation of Blacks and all relatively inferior housing, schools, access to jobs and health care, public accommodations, and so on that go with it do not make for a “colorblind” reading of the schemas at work.
In my estimation, “colorblindness” prevails as our national narrative because it operates at relatively shallow depths—as ideology but, even as ideology, principally in public discourse. In the wake of the Civil Rights Movement, political discourse, above all, takes “racial equality” to be an indisputably desirable principle, and most whites, across the political spectrum, espouse a rhetoric of “equal opportunity” and “colorblindness.”
Other public discourses such as academic, journalistic, and legal, are similarly carefully devoid of overt denigration of Blacks and other peoples of color. Most public opinion surveys at least since the 1970s, confirm that the vast majority of whites do not view Blacks as inherently inferior.
Digging below, or merely scratching the surface of this lofty princple, however, reveals the persistence of anti-Black schemas that belie the discourse of “colorblindness.” Perhaps in the quest to identify a wholly new post-Civil Rights form of racism, many analysts tend to gloss over the glaring continuities.
One example of these continuities emerges in a recent study about employer perceptions of Black male job applicants. Asked generally about employment problems of Black men, most New York City employers, in in-depth interviews, blame Black men themselves for their “lack of work ethic, motivation, and personal responsibility,” poor attitude and self-presentation, and “threatening or criminal demeanor.” Yet these general assessments soften when the employers speak of their own personal experiences with applicants and employees: more than half and two-thirds cite no racial differences in the quality of applicants and employees, respectively.
Still, in real-life settings, employers make distinctions that often disfavor Blacks in hiring, as the audit studies show. They do so tacitly, neither explaining nor revealing intentions. What is clear from the studies is that employers’ reflective responses in abstract cases, do not tell us much about how they behave in practice. The surveyed opinions of the employers, in response to hypothetical vignettes, approximate “colorblindness.” Delved into in more depth, however, the vast majority of them ascribe negative judgments about Black men to explain their disadvantaged position in the labor market.
Generally, when people are probed to reflect on their own experiences with individuals or consider abstract cases, they largely disavow the salience of race. However, in the absence of curious third party researchers provoking this reflection, people’s performative practices undergo less self-scrutiny, and these practices produce starkly unequal outcomes, from which we can infer an underlying “deeper” logic that presumes Black inferiority.
With the notion of depth and the related distinction between reflective and performative practices, we can reconcile the seemingly contradictory coexistence of the prevailing narrative of “colorblindness” and the simultaneous continuation of stark racial stratification. Conceptualizing racism as a largely structural or systemic issue, as a lingering apparatus inherited from a bygone era, directs our attention to social hierarchies with material inequalities; What it draws our attention away from is the cultural and semiotic dimension of social life that must inevitably undergird this structure—the tacit ways in which racism operates on individual levels, on a daily basis. Why the colorblind credo rings false for many is because it fails to recognize this cultural cognitive dissonance—the dissonance between Americans’ professed values of racial parity, and the deeper logics that sustain racial discrimination.
This post is adapted from Moon-Kie Jung’s forthcoming book, Beneath the Surface of White Supremacy.
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