The end of formal racial subordination eliminated the structural basis for blatant biological racism

Evidence

These sorts of changes—though certainly, in part, the result of prejudice, as the symbolic racism researchers have effectively argued—are also driven by alterations in the economic, political, and social context. The image of blacks as permanently and categorically inferior to whites has been shorn of its economic, political, and social underpinnings. blacks are no longer enslaved. Slave labor is not crucial to any aspect of the economy, and slavery is reviled throughout the world. blacks are no longer segregated and discriminated against under the majesty of law as was the case during the reign of Jim Crow; nor do they engage in the symbolically humbling behaviors (e.g., passivity and accommodation) required under Jim Crow. On the contrary, their legal right to full citizenship has been codified through legislation, legal interpretation, and the actions of administrative agencies. Moreover, blacks have more effective political power than they had in earlier periods. In view of these facts and the discrediting of notions of biological racism, it is understandably less common to find that the predominant mode of accounting for racial inequality involves genetic thinking and blatantly segregationist sentiments. — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology, 3420

Categorization

• ADDENDUM: Parallels the structural argument in the ‘Grafting & Growth’ essay about how institutions and material infrastructure shape belief; here the material conditions of slavery and Jim Crow underwrote racism’s ideological forms.
• XREF: connects to: Nativism abandoned ideological conversion for permanent racial exclusion once radical threat dissolved — John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of…, 1580; Post-Cold-War racism showed class analysis alone cannot explain structural inequality — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 1357; Race relations is a false category masking underlying white racism — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 672