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Introduction. Eduardo Bonilla Silva Is A Professor At Duke

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Introduction Eduardo Bonilla Silva is a professor at Duke University where he teaches sociology. In his work, Bonilla Silva focuses on what he refers to as the new racism. The main postulate of this theory is that, instead of overt racism, which was the predominant social form in the 20th century – for example the Jim Crow laws – modern society switched to a covert form of racism shielded under the guise of color-blind, market led society. Under this theoretical framework, it is argued that whites do not engage in racism in an overt way, but rather exert their dominance through ignoring the issues within the minority groups and focusing only on the current social and political dogma. Patricia Hill Collins is a pioneer of Black Women’s …show more content…

Eduardo Bonilla Silva on racism The elementary emphasis of Bonilla’s work is focused around race and ideology within the frame of the society in the United States. Bonilla identifies the historical lines through which the construct of the modern liberal society was created, and which, under the pretext of liberty and justice created injustice and suffering to numerous minority groups, both in the United States and in Europe. Through the plight of the Native Americans, Black slaves, Mexicans, Asians and other minorities, Bonilla Silva paints a picture of the atrocities committed in the name of the liberal nation-state (Bonilla Silva, 2010).
Going to the not so distant past, Bonilla Silva argues that the Jim Crow laws only fortified the idea that white society is the only one that actually means something, and that the African-Americans suffer from innate flaws, citing genetic and moral inferiority, which was the main cause for their second-class status in society. From this, he argues, the modern state, and the predominant social group, white, draws its quasi-legitimacy and the current status quo in terms of racial relations, wherein the minorities exist in a make-believe system of null-oppression, mainly due to the fact that they are extended the same economic opportunities (in the view of the liberal state) as others (Bonilla Silva, 2010).
Continuing from the strides made by the Civil Rights

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