Daniel Cohen

Discussion Blog Post #2

In the present day, after centuries of social reform, it is tempting to declare racism over. In a sense, it is, at least overtly. Public figures who say racist things in public are ostracized, programs are in place to allow the disenfranchised (who are often of a racial minority) to pay for college, and the President of the United States, at the time of this writing, is a black man.

However, in ”E Pluribus Unum or the Same Old Perfume in a New Bottle” Eduardo Bonilla-Silva writes about his prediction of America’s racial future. He predicts a “triracial stratification system similar to that of many Latin American and Caribbean nations. Specifically, I contend that the emerging triracial system will be comprised of ‘whites’ at the top, and intermediary group of ‘honorary whites’—similar to the coloreds in South Africa during formal apartheid, and a nonwhite group or the ‘collective black’ at the bottom,” where there will be a delusion that the US has moved beyond race as a system that is so strong that it drowns out actual efforts to promote racial equality (179).

All in all, I consider it to be a very interesting prediction, but it seems unlikely to happen in our modern political climate. There are people who legitimately believe we have moved beyond race, but there are also many traditional racists in the United States, and in recent times the nation has experienced a resurgence of civil rights protests with the rise of Black Lives Matter.

In response to Bonilla-Silva’s argument, I think of my own racial and ethnic life. Ethnically, my family are Ashkenazi (Eastern European) Jews. However, we are so separated from Jewish society that we are effectively white Americans. As a very young child, I was not even aware what race was. My first experience with race was when I read picture books in elementary school about Dr. Martin Luther King. These picture books, as I remember them, presented the Civil Rights Movement as “First, there was racism. That was bad. Then, Martin Luther King showed up. Then, bad, bad racism went away.” I was left with the impression that racism was ancient history rather than merely a suppressed problem. For several years, I took this to heart. Of course, in high school I came to understand racial issues far more clearly, but the point stands that I spent much of my life blissfully unaware of race in the present day. And that alone means that Bonilla-Silva has a point.