Vogue Dissent

One change in the common version of the white frame was the removal of the idea of Jim Crow segregation as essential for white dominance and the adding of a linguistic veneer of “we are colorblind” rhetoric. In many ways, however, this new colorblind rhetoric has just papered over what are still blatantly racist views of Americans of color that have continued in most whites’ framing of this society. Over the decades since the 1960s, openly segregationist and white supremacist views have gradually become much less acceptable in the white population. Yet many of the old racist ideas and other racial frame elements, as I document below, have persisted in forms that are only modestly changed. In addition, public actions designed to bring change in the structures of racism, such as the great racial inequalities in economic and educational institutions, have been mostly limited to those necessary to maintain social order. When faced with civil rights protests and the need for some change in the racist system, as in cases like the Brown decision, white leaders have usually adopted modest interventions and institutional workarounds—that is, they have made changes in official or legal segregation, but at the same time have usually created weak enforcement mechanisms, which guarantee the continuation of the dominant racial hierarchy and much of its rationalizing frame.

Today the contemporary racial frame’s accent on most whites as “no longer racist,” “post-racial,” and “colorblind” provides some new language for what is in fact a very old view of whites as the most virtuous racial group, a viewpoint that has been part of the dominant frame since the seventeenth century. As we will see below, this white accent on now being colorblind has been shown by social science research to be misleading and often a coverup of the substantial levels of blatantly racist framing and action in which many whites still engage. Those who say they “do not see race” in fact usually do see it, and they frequently act negatively on what they see. Substantial social science research shows that much of the old racial frame remains influential in white thought and commentary on racial matters, both in public frontstage settings and in private backstage settings.

Racism is a systemic, societal, institutional, omnipresent, and epistemologically embedded phenomenon that pervades every vestige of our reality. For most whites, however, racism is like murder: the concept exists but someone has to commit it in order for it to happen.