New Frontiers in the Study of Color-Blind Racism

Abstract

It is well established that the dominant ideological framework for discussing race in the contemporary United States is that of color blindness—that is, the notion that racial inequality is best understood as deriving from individual or cultural traits as opposed to systemic racism. This ideology permeates institutions and interpersonal interactions, thus upholding racial inequality. Although identifying this framework has been a crucial project for the study of contemporary racism, the scholarship has become stagnant, most often identifying the presence of the ideology or its central discursive frames without offering other important insights. It is time to return to our materialist roots in the discipline, recentering our studies of contemporary racism on the ways that individuals embedded in complex social relations make sense of race and racism beyond mere frame identification. Doing so will raise and begin to answer important questions about the complexity of modern racism and how we might best be able to challenge it.