Tax Laws In Eduardo Bonilla-Silva's Racism Without Racists

Another institution that played a role in creating a racial divide was the Supreme Court. In one court decision, in the case of Johnson v. McIntosh, the court ruled that Native Americans did not own the land they lived on unless they had bought it or received special agreement from Congress. In the case of Sunol v. Hepburn, the courts ruled that Christian Natives could not keep the land grants that were given to them by other governments.

Even though, the courts were complicit in creating a racial divide, the worst offender was Congress. Everyone has heard of the Jimmy Crow laws that negative affected African American in the south, but these were state laws. Congressional laws affected the whole nation and here are some lesser-known laws passed

On this book he describes the justification of this new non-racial racial ideology; he calls it “colorblind racism” (Bonilla).

Bonilla assumes that the colorblind ideology is focus on four parts: abstract liberalism, naturalization, cultural racism, and minimization of racism. This gives people the false notion of racial equality. Abstract liberalism, is based on the use of backwards ideas of “equal opportunity” and “economic liberalism” to “rationalize racial inequalities” (Bonilla). By using what Bonilla-Silva describes as the “language of liberalism,” whites can resist any change in the racial status quo, while seeming ethical and reasonable (Bonilla).

Changing attitudes towards race relations forced a change in the manifestation of racist ideologies. Bonilla-Silva also discusses the style of color-blindness. He asserts that due to the change in post-Civil Rights era thoughts on discrimination, whites had to change their language when talking about racism so as to promote white privilege in a non-racist manner. He argues that color-blind racism has “technical tools that allow users to articulate its frames”

If nothing else, Bonilla-Silva has shown that racism may not be completely eradicated from society, but its structure can change based on political and social events. Racism in the United States today is like a wolf in sheep’s clothing. One would be hard pressed to find a self-proclaimed racist, however, upon further inspection, most people harbor more racist beliefs than they are willing to admit. If tolerance and equality are the goals of racial education, book such as this are partially effective. By identifying some of the main ways that colorblind racism is shown, this book can generate discussions on racial inequality, as it exists in America today. However, the biased methodology and result reports do not encourage tolerance of different