 "Photo: John-Patrick Workman")
Even before he started his presentation, professor Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, Ph.D., of Duke University received a round of applause from a jam-packed Crown Auditorium audience Tuesday.
The standing-room-only crowd erupted into cheers when Bonilla-Silva donned a lime green armband, showing solidarity with the event's co-sponsor, Loyola's Anti-Racism Movement.
He then presented his speech, entitled "It's Real! Racism, Discrimination, Color Blindness and 'Isolated (Racial) Incidents' at HWCUs [historically white colleges and universities]."
"Most whites believe wholeheartedly that racism has declined in significance and that if anything, it is racial minorities who are the ones racializing issues because we presumably play the race card," Bonilla-Silva, who described himself as black and Puerto Rican, said at the outset of his remarks.
"I argue forcefully that although race, racism and discrimination have changed in form and content, all are still very real and affect the lifetimes of all of us, whites and non-whites - our America," he continued, arguing for social mobilization and awareness of discrimination in all its forms.
Loyola sociology professor David Embrick, Ph.D., along with a group of students from A.R.M. and Campus Greens, organized the event.
Introducing his colleague, Embrick referred to Bonilla-Silva as "one of the central mentors in my life overall as well as my academic career" and a "significant influence in the way I think about race relations in the U.S."
Bonilla-Silvia's speech focused on the concepts of "new racism," which Bonilla-Silva argued is made of much more than the Ku Klux Klan, NeoNazis and Archie Bunkers that he said many people typically think of when they identify racism. Instead, he argued that new racism is more subtle and systemic in nature and that it "remains in place because it benefits whites as a social collectivity."
"[Racism] has changed from overt to covert; from in-your-face to 'Now you see it, now you don't.' From organized and state sanctioned to unorganized," he said.
He cited examples of "new racism" through examining statistics in a 2006 report from the Fair Housing Center of Greater Boston. The center, which conducted a test measuring the ability of both whites and minorities to find housing, concluded that testers experienced discrimination in 45 percent of cases and that whites were five to six times more likely to be told about available housing units than minorities.
Though he called for continued vigilance against blatant instances of discrimination, giving the examples of recent inflammatory remarks from Don Imus and Dog the Bounty Hunter, Bonilla-Silva used this housing example to explain that social movements need to mobilize around these more subtle cases of institutionalized discrimination.
"This means that we, people of color, must bring along a white friend to go shopping, buy a car [or] get a loan," he joked, drawing laughs from the audience in the first of many comical moments scattered throughout his speech.
At the university level, he explained that historically white universities and colleges promote white culture, symbols, demography, traditions and curriculum, but all the while avoiding labeling themselves as "white," which he says results in universities hypocritically parading themselves as "'universal' [sic] institutions of higher learning."
According to the April 24, 2007, issue of the Phoenix, Loyola's student body is 73.5 percent white and 26.5 percent non-white. Twenty-eight student groups are currently active on Loyola's Diversity Council.
"Loyola must acknowledge that as a historically white university, it has to change the way it does business," he said.
"All of you must continue to struggle to help this great university reflect in body and spirit America's new racial reality, to help create a Loyola where neither isolated racial incidents nor everyday confrontation exists," he said.
Bonilla-Silva also called for the creation of a permanent Anti-Racism Movement on campus, a "vigilant and militant" group to ensure that "Loyola, as a Catholic university, will do what it takes to fulfill its social justice mission."
Inspiring a standing ovation, he concluded his remarks by quoting slave-turned-abolitionist Frederick Douglass. "Power concedes nothing without a demand," he said before opening the floor to a question and answer session. "It never has, and it never will."
Senior Paul Nappier, who also had the opportunity to speak to Bonilla-Silva and a group of A.R.M. members before the event, appreciated both his insights and his humor.
"He was so clear and very succinct about the problems that we face," Nappier said, adding that he found his remarks about overt versus covert racism to be particularly illuminating. "It shows that we all have things that we can work on and how society shapes us," Nappier said.
Bonilla-Silva is the author of Racism without Racists: Color-Blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in the United States, which Embrick currently uses in his sociology classes at Loyola. His newest book, White Logic, White Methods: Race, Epistemology, and the Social Sciences, is expected to be released this summer.
2 comments