The Abandoned Promise of Civil Rights

Abstract

Fifty years after the civil rights movement, ethnic and racial disparities persist and have even widened across a number of socioeconomic indicators. When compared against whites, nonwhites today fare about the same or worse than their counterparts of the past in educational and occupational attainment, income and earnings, wealth, unemployment and underemployment. How can we understand the failure of racial and ethnic minority groups to attain socioeconomic parity with non‐Hispanic whites following one of the most progressive eras of American race relations? Contemporary economic and political approaches are often considered separately and offer different explanations. What they share in common, however, is a tendency to downplay the salience of race as a significant factor that conditions the life chances of nonwhites in the post–civil rights era. This article introduces a critical race perspective to redirect this conversation. This approach starts from the premise that the social structure of the United States is highly stratified by race, which conditions racially unequal outcomes. In the post–civil rights era, color‐blind racism is the hegemonic ideology, discourse, and practice, which justifies persistent racial inequality. The development of a color‐blind ideology reflects this historical moment and the larger political and economic context; thus, its development is consistent with the political shift toward neoconservatism and the economic transition to neoliberalism. Taken together, these social forces foster the reproduction of a racialized social system characterized by persistent racial inequality that is observed in the post–civil rights era.