Contemporary racial inequality persists without explicit racist laws or intentions

Evidence

The institutional arrangements of contemporary American society are far more complex than in the past. Patterns of distribution of resources, power, and privilege are no longer allocated on the basis of laws, or explicit government and corporate institutional policies and actions, that privilege whites over people of color. Nor are the attitudes and actions of individuals towards people of color as explicitly stated as they used to be. Moreover, with the crude infrastructure of racism gone, and with the ubiquitous evidence of success by significant sections of communities of color, the prevailing discourse of equality and inequality has a “persuasiveness” that is resilient (Goldberg, 1990a:309). In this context a simple concept of racism no longer works. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 1907

Categorization

• DEFINE: Introduces the central premise that post-civil-rights inequality requires abandoning simple concepts of racism for a more complex framework.
• QUESTION: What exactly is the ‘persuasiveness’ of the equality discourse, and how does it function as an obstacle to antiracist analysis? Worth chasing Goldberg 1990a.
• XREF: connects to: Formal colorblindness preserves racial inequality in privatized, unnamed form. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 129; Civil-rights laws reduced blatant racism but left subtler discrimination intact; White exclusionary neighborhoods remain segregated without formal Jim Crow laws — Cyra Akila Choudhury, Racecraft and Identity in the Emergence…, 510 (+5 more)