This is a qualitative study detailing the links between racial discourse and social action. Specifically, this article provides evidence for the ways in which a white habitus is reproduced in a racially diverse community, despite the best intentions of its community members. This is chiefly due to the influence of national color-blind ideologies and the diversity discourse that follows. Because this ideology and discourse are individual in nature and centered on a white norm, it chiefly produces consumption-driven actions for individuals and collective action that protects those with racial privilege. While prior studies have detailed the influence of this ideology on racial attitudes and examined the contours of diversity discourse generally, this study utilizes the racial formations approach to make concrete links to social outcomes in a diverse community. These findings are particularly significant given the hope vested in racially diverse communities as the nation itself becomes more diverse.

Sociologists have recently begun to recognize the need to more deeply examine the mechanisms of contemporary colorblind racism, to move beyond frame identification and glean new insights. This is important because as racial dynamics evolve, so will the ideologies and discourses that surround them. This article considers how we might be able to untangle ideology, racism, discourse, and the material realities of our wider social systems. It also introduces the themes in this Special Issue that parse ideals from ideologies, that consider individual subjectivities as they emerge in different social contexts, and that examine strategies for grappling with the realities of racism. This allows us to trace the connections between colorblind ideology and racism more broadly, giving us traction to potentially use this knowledge to sharpen our resistance to racism.

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.

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We consider a realistic suicide substrate reaction which can be represented by four rate equations for the concentrations of the various molecules as functions of time. We present a general procedure to obtain accurate, approximate solutions analytically in terms of the rate equation parameters. This systematic technique provides more accurate approximations to the exact (numerical) solutions than other approximate methods which have been proposed based on a pseudo-steady state hypothesis.