White Supremacy and Racism in the Post-Civil Rights Era

By Eduardo Bonilla-Silva

Book Overview

Is a racial structure still firmly in place in the United States? White Supremacy and Racism answers that question with an unequivocal yes, describing a contemporary system that operates in a covert, subtle, institutional, and superficially nonracial fash on. Assessing the major perspectives that social analysts have relied on to explain race and racial relations, Bonilla-Silva labels the post-civil rights ideology as color-blind racism: a system of social arrangements that maintain white privilege at all levels. His analysis of racial politics in the United States makes a compelling argument for a new civil rights movement rooted in the race-class needs of minority masses, multiracial in character - and focused on attaining substantive rather than formal equality.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1588260046
• ISBN13: 9781588260048
• Release Date: August 2001
• Publisher: Lynne Rienner Publishers
• Length: 223 Pages
• Weight: 3.25 lbs.

Customer Reviews

Co-Winner of 2002 ASA Oliver C. Cox Award

This book was the co-winner of the 2002 Oliver C. Cox award given by the American Sociological Association. The book combines powerful theoretical chapters with substantive chapters describing the subtle and slippery yet effective post-civil rights' racial structure (he labels it "the new racism) and racial ideology (color blind racism) of the United States. This is a solid contribution to the area of race and ethnicity and an excellent choice for courses on racial and ethnic matters in the United States. Professors searching for a challenging book on the nature of contemporary racial discourse need not look elsewhere.

Award Winner

This book won the 2002 Oliver Cromwell Cox Award for the best sociology book on race (awarded by the American Sociological Association's Section on Racial and Ethnic Minorities).

Provocative, Innovative, and Insightful Book

Professor Eduardo Bonilla-Silva has written a provocative, innovative, and insightful book that will add much to our understanding of racism in the 21st Century. White Supremacy and Racism in the Post-Civil Rights Era is well-written, conceptually sound, and convincing. The study is well documented with quantitative data, in-depth interviews, and qualitative research on race relations. The book does an excellent job of discussing, summarizing, and critiquing several prominent works that minimize the prevalence and impact of racism. Because it offers comprehensive coverage of the "anything but racism" literature, it can serve as an excellent sourcebook. The book also offers new theoretical breakthroughs and powerful typologies that shed a great deal of light on how and why blacks, whites and others think about racial policy and racial inequality. Generally, it is written in a manner that is accessible to undergraduates and a general audience, but it is based on solid social science research that will meet the expectations of professional social scientists. I believe that no person interested in racial inequality , race relations and the changing nature of racial discourse in America should fail to read this work. Overall, this book, written by a scholar whose star is on the rise, makes important contributions to the growing social science literature on contemporary racism. It will be important reading for those concerned with how this issue will continue to manifest itself in the 21st Century.

Racism in the new era

This book presents us with a "smack you in the face" conceptualization of race and white supremacy in the U.S. Although uncomfortable for some, it sums up very accurately the way that racism has been transformed over time and how it continues to plague America.