John Staddon’s latest Martin Center column continues to develop themes introduced earlier this week. Staddon worries about the emergence of a destructive force in sociology.
The best way to grasp how sociology has managed to make color-blind racism (CBR) seem believable is to study its Newspeak (to continue the Orwell theme).
Whiteness
To many modern sociologists, color blindness is a racist weapon that works, somehow, through whiteness, a scheme of thought invisible to most whites, but revealed by CBR sociology. …
… “Whiteness” is employed as a method of maintaining control over other groups by the “dominant culture.” Hence, “challenging white hegemony” is a major motif for “whiteness studies.” According to Bonilla-Silva, only race traitors (an odd term, since they seem to be the only non-racist whites)—“whites who do not dance to the tune of color blindness”—can escape from whiteness. Color blindness is part of the whiteness strategy and is therefore racist. …
… Above all, in the CBR universe, whiteness is a bearer of privilege. The term itself adds nothing new: white privilege is just the same as black un-privilege: to discriminate against blacks is to privilege non-blacks. But the word is another way to make whites feel bad. …
… Racism
In CBR social science, the existence of racism tends to be just assumed, proved by numerical disparities, or verified by anecdote, including ridiculous examples such as the admission by a white male interviewed by Bonilla-Silva that “He is not attracted to black women.” If none of that works as proof, racism is related to a wider “systemic” problem.
In off-the-record comments made at an Atlantic staff meeting, Ta-Nehisi Coates, perhaps the most visible black writer on these issues, repeatedly affirmed that if, say, The New Republic was at one time 100 percent white, then it was racist. Apparently, racial disproportion proves racism. The fact that only 1 percent of Caltech’s student body is black, is, therefore, evidence of racism in Coates’s view.
