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 research has appeared in journals such as Sociological Inquiry, Racial and Ethnic Studies, Race and Society, Discourse and Society, American Sociological Review, Journal of Latin American Studies, Contemporary Sociology, Critical Sociology, Sociology of Race and Ethnicity, Research in Politics and Society, The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, The American Behavioral Scientist, Political Power and Social Theory, and Social Problems among others.
Among the many awards Bonilla-Silva has received are the 2007 Lewis Coser Award given by the Theory Section of the American Sociological Association for Theoretical-Agenda Setting and, in 2011, the Cox-Johnson-Frazier Award given by the American Sociological Association “to an individual or individuals for their work in the intellectual traditions of the work of these three African American scholars.” And in 2021, he received the W.E.B. Du Bois Career of Distinguished Scholarship Award, given by the American Sociological Association, and the Latinx History Maker, given by the Illinois Latinos Judges Association. He served as President of the Southern Sociological Society and the American Sociological Association in 2017-2018.
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, December 16, 2021 | 8:30 AM - 9:45 AM (CT)
What Makes ‘Systemic Racism’ Systemic
In this lecture, Professor Bonilla-Silva will explain why and how racism becomes systemic. After defining the concept, he will describe the nature of the dominant racial regime in the USA since the 1970s (the “New Racism”) and its accompanying ideology: color-blind racism. He will then argue that systemic racism is expressed in all institutions in the USA and will illustrate this with an examination of HWCUs (historically white colleges and universities). This discussion will allow him to explain how average, nice white people participate in a mostly habituated way in the reproduction of the racial order of things, which is how “systemic racism” becomes systemic. He will conclude suggesting lines of work to fight systemic racism at the organizational, individual, and collective levels.
