ABSTRACT
Through the fog of a color-blind ideology one perceives the outline of a picture of a post-civil rights era where race is no longer viewed as a major obstacle to social, political, and economic participation. According to Eduardo Bonilla-Silva (2003), a new racial ideology has emerged in our country that, in contrast to Jim Crow racism (or the ideology of the color line), avoids direct discourse about race — but safeguards racial privilege. According to this view, racism is no longer a structural problem of society but now has been reduced to the attitudes and behaviors of particular individuals, thereby masking an insidious form of racism. Moreover, as Bonilla-Silva asserted, color blindness “is as effective as slavery and Jim Crow in maintaining the racial status quo” (p. 272). Those who favor a color-blind society fail to see that race, especially skin color, has consequences for a person s status and well-being. That blindness to skin color and race remains a “privilege” available exclusively to White people highlights the reality that color blindness only serves to perpetuate and institutionalize the very divisions between people that it seeks to over-come. 1
