From Traditional to Liberal Racism: Living Racism in the Everyday

Abstract

This article examines hundreds of entries in student journals collected at a university in the Mountain West and captures a striking contradiction between an articulated understanding of racism as "a thing of the past" and the reality of a persistent and pervasive racism. This qualitative study documents everyday racist events taking place in the life of students. These events are coded into either a traditional or modern "liberal" category to demonstrate the link between past and present race projects. The authors conclude that the contemporary "colorblind" discourse of the liberal era suggests an ongoing race project centered on the maintenance of white privilege. The mediating role institutions play between individual and structural relations of inequality implicates the university in the maintenance of white privilege.

The invader, the enemy within and they-who-must-not-be-named: how police talk about minorities in Italy, the Netherlands and France

“…The first uses critical discourse analysis to reveal closeted racism. This is the project of Teun van Dijk (1992), implemented by, among others, Bell and Hartmann (2007), Bonilla-Silva (1997, 2006, Myers and Williamson (2001) and Zamudio and Rios (2006), which aims to study discourse and to show how hesitations, contradictions, inconsistencies and nervous laughs are evidence of inner racism. Discourse analysis allows us 'to delve beneath the surface of initial answers to reach the deep structure and cultural commonsense' (Bell and Hartmann 2007, 898).…”

Thinking Critically about Difference: Analytical Tools for the 21st Century

“…Our reconceptualization of these tools developed in the process of analyzing data drawn from student journals for a project that demonstrated the link between the liberal discourse of colorblindness and traditional racist assumptions (see Zamudio & Rios, 2006). The absence of critical thought demonstrated in the journals in some instances and expressed in other instances struck us as worthy of examination.…”

“…The question we then asked was: What conceptual tools did students either possess or lack when analyzing difference? In a recursive process using the work of the critical theorists that see the possibility of education as emancipatory (Darder, 2002;McLaren, 2003) as well as our own work grounded within students' actual journal descriptions (Zamudio & Rios, 2006), we drew out four key pedagogical constructs and developed a conceptual understanding for each. We briefly summarize the conceptualization of these key concepts below.…”

“…The links between historical and contemporary forms of oppression are most commonly found in the contemporary race projects that define colorblind racism (Zamudio & Rios, 2006) and in societal symbols (Brislin, 1988). As seen in the student journals, words rooted in historical discrimination are used to denigrate minority students.…”

Developing a critical consciousness: positionality, pedagogy, and problems

“…(259) The period of anti-discrimination legislation that we conceive of as the post-civil rights era spewed forth a new dominant form of racism rooted in the assumption of color-blindness or race neutrality to justify historically-rooted and politicallymaintained relations of domination. As Zamudio and Rios (2006) explain, 'relying on liberal principles as central to the color-blind race project works to deny the existence of structural disadvantage of people of color while simultaneously obscuring the structural advantage or embedded racial privilege of whites' (9). While civil rights legislation worked to dismantle the most blatant forms of discrimination, it did so only when it converged with the interests of white elites (Bell 1980).…”