Professor Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, Ph.D.
Eduardo Bonilla-Silva is the James B. Duke Distinguished Professor of sociology at Duke University. He received his BA in Sociology with a minor in Economics in 1984 from the Universidad de Puerto Rico-Río Piedras campus. He received his MA (1988) and PhD (1993) from the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He worked at the University of Michigan (1993-1998), Texas A&M University (1998-2005), and has been at Duke University since 2005.
He gained visibility in the social sciences with his 1997 American Sociological Review article, “Rethinking Racism: Toward a Structural Interpretation,” where he challenged analysts to study racial matters structurally rather than from the sterile prejudice perspective. His book, Racism Without Racists (6th edition appearing late in 2021), has become a classic in the field and influenced scholars in education, religious studies, political science, rhetoric, psychology, political science, legal studies, and sociology.
To date he has published five books, namely, White Supremacy and Racism in the Post-Civil Rights Era (co-winner of the 2002 Oliver Cox Award given by the American Sociological Association), Racism Without Racists: Color-Blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in the United States (2004 Choice Award and again in 2015), White Out: The Continuing Significance of Racism (with Ashley Doane), in 2008 White Logic, White Methods: Racism and Methodology (with Tukufu Zuberi and also the co-winner of the 2009 Oliver Cox Award), and in 2011 State of White Supremacy: Racism, Governance, and the United States (with Moon Kie Jung and João H. Costa Vargas).
His most recent work include an article titled, “‘Racists,’ ‘Class Anxieties,’ Hegemonic Racism, and Democracy in Trump’s America,” in Social Currents (2018), “Feeling Race: Theorizing the racial Economy of Emotions,” in the American Sociological Review, (2019), “Color-blind Racism in Pandemic Times,” in the Sociology of Race and Ethnicity (2020), “¿Aqu no hay racismo: Apuntes Preliminares sobre lo racial en las Américas,” in Revista de Humanidades (2020), “On the Racial Fantasies of White Liberals in Trump’s America and Beyond,” in Amerikastudien / American Studies: A Quarterly (2021) and “What makes ‘Systemic Racism’ Systemic?” in Sociological Inquiry (2021). He is working on papers to (1) reorient the work on microagressions, (2) on how to theorize racial formations in the Americas and the Caribbean, (3) on the import of normative, habituated behavior in the reproduction of systemic racism, and (4) on explaining why people in Latin America do not interpret overtly racist images as racist.
Thursday, March 23, 2023 | 8:30 AM - 9:45 AM (CT)
Integration Blues: How Racism Structures “Integrated” Educational Settings
Integration is an ill-defined concept. For most, it is just a matter of “structural diversity”; the more people of color in an organization, the better the organization is in terms of equity. But after years of integration (“spatial cohabitation” better describes what we have), we are still having racial issues in all kind of organizations, including educational settings. In general, people of color complain that they are not truly integrated and feel alienated and excluded. In this talk, Bonilla-Silva will explain why we are having the “integration blues” with a focus on schools. First, he will discuss what is “systemic racism” and explain how individual whites (from progressives to conservatives) are deeply shaped by what he calls the “white habitus.” Second, he will briefly describe the nature of the “new racism”—the set of post-Civil Rights era arrangements and practices that reproduces racial domination. Third, after this conceptual and historical mapping of the terrain, he will describe HWCUs (historically white colleges and universities) and provide an overview of how racism structures differentially the life chances of white and non-white children in integrated schools. At the end, he will conclude with a number of suggestions to move our reform efforts towards what he labels as “deep diversity.”
