Research What Racism is as a Social Structure

In the following essay, I will talk about racism as a social structure using sociological concepts and perspectives. I will talk about racism, how it is produced and how it is considered or conceived. I will talk about how Bonnila-Silva argues about New racism, how whites denied it, how racism is still happening and how it will keep on happening and providing evidence from different sources.

What is racism? According to Silva (2015), racism is a belief that a particular group of people is better than the other group of people based of their race. Race is discrimination of other people based on their skin colour. Blacks are totally different from whites in many things, and they are restricted to many things for example: blacks have to do Bantu education, whites had they schools, toilets and shops where blacks were not allowed to enter. People believe that other people are the best because of their skin colour or what they have. “White working-class males voted for Trump because he claimed that he would create good-paying jobs for blue-collar workers”. Bonnila-Silva (2015) argues that racial domination projects produces racism (example, colonialism, slavery and labour migration. Silva (2015) argues that racism should not be considered as idealist fashion but considered materialistic. “That is, that racism is above anything, about practices and behaviours that produce a racial structure, a network of social relations at social, political, economic, and ideological levels that shapes the life chances of the various races”. According Bonnila-Silva (2015) the content of racial categories emerges when time goes over struggles and manifold processes, race do not fall under group association in secondary category. Bonnila-Silva (2015) states that even though race is classified as socially produced classification scheme (for example people who are Blacks, Whites, Indians, or something that can change over a long period from place to place), race is part of important groups since W.I. Thomas and Dorothy Thomas stated long time ag.

According to Bonnila-Silva (2015) blacks and whites are different in many things in social life and there is isolation between them, this happens in the new racism. Bonnila-Silva (2015) states that there is enough evidence that shows the rate of inequality but there is no way to present it. Bonnila-Silva (2015) states that “If prejudice is declining, how can they explain the contemporary level of racial inequality and the Black–White attitudinal divide on so many race-related matters?”. Tatum (2017) states that, in northern states people would not vote apart from Rhodes Island, these who would vote are the ones who were taken as having best stake in that particular society. Bonnila-Silva (2015) state that:

For about 20 years, I have been claiming that the end of Jim Crow racism did not mean the end of systemic racism, I have argued that the virtual end of Jim Crow in the 1970s did not mean the “end of racism” or even the “declining significance of race”. Instead, I claim that a new system emerged that I labeled the “new racism.” By this I mean the system or racial structure characteristic of the post-Civil Rights era comprised the following elements: the increasingly covert nature of racial discourse and practices, the avoidance of direct racial terminology, the elaboration of a racial political agenda that eschews direct racial references, the subtle character of most mechanisms to reproduce racial privilege, and the reticulation of some racial practices of the past.

There are many ways people are discriminated in, Bonnila-Silva (2015) states that, discrimination such as navigating by realtors is experienced by blacks and Latinos, they are told different stories of housing units available and getting loans net of their credit worthiness. According to Bonnila-Silva (2015), as for blacks to enter the labour market in their wage earning and occupational mobility it is hard, because of the challenges that come through, whites earn more income than blacks in levels of education.

The overall unemployment rate in October 2012 was 7.9%, yet Whites unemployment was 7%, while Latinos was 10% and Blacks 14.3%.16 These income differences can be attributed to unequal levels of educational attainment, as well as lesser rates of return to Blacks for their education and labour-market experience, and their concentration in the South. Bonnila-Silva (2015) concluded his argument by stating that there is an orderly way in which racial inequality is produced (i.e. in America racial structure is still taking place), however dominant practises that produce racial inequality are disappearing gradually.

Accordingly, given the character of contemporary discrimination, people of colour must bring along a White friend to go shopping, get a loan, drive a car, or walk in the streets to prove discrimination! In addition, the new (racial) order of things has placed the community of scholars and activists fighting against racism at a disadvantage as most still focus their attention on Jim Crow-type events. What we need is to understand that since the new system works differently, we need to change our research focus and even our politics or else our efforts will become increasingly irrelevant.

According to Bonnila-Silva (2015) he called the new dominant racial ideology by the name colour-blind racism, others called it the new prejudice laissez-faire racism, competitive racism, or called it symbolic racism. Bonnila-Silva states that, white people states that people cause segregation because of the mental they have of saying that particular things are for these kind of people “self-segregate”, and they cannot force people to do things they do not want to do, for example school segregation, white people say good things so that they cannot look as racists. Bonnila-Silva (2015) argued that:

Racial domination may even work better in blackface. Barack Obama, rather than representing “change we can believe in,” is a typical post-Civil Rights minority politician — a politician who is electorally oriented, is not the product of social movements, joins the party of choice while in college, and moves quickly through the party ranks.

Racism has been all over our nation, and it is not that easy for it to come to an end, it is just diminishing, it will occur for many years.

In this essay I talked about racism as a social structure using sociological concepts and perspectives. I talk about racism, how it is produced and how it is considered or conceived. I talked about how Bonnila-Silva argues about New racism, how it occurs, how whites denied it, how it is happening and how it will keep on happening with evidence from different sources.

References

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