Reading response: analysis and interpretation

¶ … Strange Enigma of Race in Contemporary America by Eduardo Bonilla Silva is a compelling and revelatory essay about the nature of modern America. However inflammatory Silva's statements may sound about the pervasiveness of racism in modern American society, Silva's essay is actually quite helpful in the manner in which it detaches racism from skin color. An individual may be Caucasian and not be prejudiced against minorities but may still enjoy 'white privilege' when he or she is able to pass through a neighborhood unmolested by the police or gets a favorable performance review because he or she subliminally seems to 'fit in' to the office culture. Racism is woven into the fabric of American cultural assumptions and the denial "but I'm not a racist" is not enough to eradicate racism from modern America. Racism is part of a social structure that must be changed, and ending racism requires more than becoming 'color blind' on a personal level.

"Our society is structured so that certain groups and segments of the population are set up to fail and these same groups are inherently placed at a disadvantage." Racism, even casual racism on the street as is sometimes shown to young black teens, especially men, can have a calcifying effect upon the self-esteem and upon the soul. Furthermore, the economic impact of previous racism is very real, and cannot be undone with a few years of affirmative action, much less 'color blind' treatment. An African-American child who grows up with inadequate food, within a failing education system, and with all of the physical stressors of urban poverty (a lack of safe places to play, poor role models, and fear of both criminals and the police) will not find the same ease of self-empowerment as a white child from a more affluent neighborhood. And when members of the privileged elite go to the nation's top schools, and proceed into the corridors of power of finance and government, they are capable of reinforcing aspects of the system that place others who are not 'like them' at a disadvantage.

America likes to envision itself as a society in which personal empowerment and self-advancement is limitless. It presents itself as a meritocratic society where there is a direct correlation between working hard and achievement. However, in the lived reality of most individual's personal experience, this is seldom the case. Examples abound of people who are working hard (working two part-time jobs, for example, or working full time and going to school full time at an inexpensive school, where they can afford tuition) who are unable to use these efforts as a platform of success.

While it is true that some minority groups -- Italians, Jews, and Asians -- have achieved material success, these groups have not suffered the same barriers as African-Americans, who faced legal sanctions for many years on their rights to vote, to literacy, and to self-empowerment. There has been an almost seamless shift from de facto and de jure Jim Crow in America to an insistence that race does not matter. Indeed, many of the former advocates of Jim Crow that are still alive vehemently oppose affirmative action in the name of American color-blindness, misapplying Martin Luther King Jr.'s famous "I have a dream speech."