Racism Without Racists: Color-Blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in America

A quotation from Joseph Barndt explaining that white people do not see their world as being a ghetto opens the chapter. In the 1960s, observers noted that so-called ghettos led Black people to live a so-called culture of poverty, an idea that came into vogue again in the 1970s and 1980s by both conservative and liberal commentators. These commentators argue that Black people who live in segregated areas of extreme poverty have developed a cultural outlook that prevents them from developing personal responsibility, produces pathological behavior, or creates a sense of despair. Still others have argued the opposite: that such neighborhoods allowed Black people to develop a unique style, an oppositional identity, or a code of the street. Regardless of the accuracy of these positions, it cannot be denied that living in only Black neighborhoods has led many Black people to develop a group cohesion and identity. So, if that is true, Bonilla-Silva posits using logic, it must be true that white people develop even greater group cohesion and identity since they live in even more segregated neighborhoods. The isolation white people voluntarily put them in creates what he labels a “white habitus,” “a racialized, uninterrupted socialization process that conditions and creates” the “taste, perception, feelings, and emotions” of white people as well as their views on race (245).