With a colorful PowerPoint presentation and a booming voice, Duke University sociology professor Eduardo Bonilla-Silva shared his thoughts last Thursday about the concept of grammar as it organizes society’s perceptions of race in contemporary America.
Bonilla-Silva’s speech in Love Auditorium was titled “The Invisible Weight of Whiteness: The Racial Grammar of Everyday Life in America,” which is drawn from a book project in progress with the same name that covers topics such as self-image, popular media, crime, politics, and universities.
Kate Briscoe ’12, who read one of Bonilla-Silva’s books — Racism Without Racists: Color-Blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in the United States — for her sociology course Power, Race and Privilege, was delighted that the author had come to campus.
“I enjoyed the lecture immensely and from the packed auditorium, I think people were interested in what he had to say,” she said. “His theories on color-blind racism are fascinating,” adding that she felt Bonilla-Silva’s topics were relevant to issues of race and privilege in America today.
Using modern examples like the television shows Glee and The Office, and movies like 21, Bonilla-Silva argued that even when producers try to incorporate diversity, there is still a gross under-representation of minorities.
He also explained the idea of “universal” roles — those with whom everyone is supposed to identify — and says that whites are the only ones allowed those roles, creating a “cinematic racial order.”
Bonilla-Silva argued the deep ramifications of such structural flaws in our cultural awareness. “Because like air pollution, it is hard to see,” he said, “but it poisons us and affects sense of self: our bodies, hair, skin, eyes.”
In fact, he differentiated the effects based on race, saying that racial grammar shapes
whites more than people of color. “It prevents whites from truly empathizing with color,”
he said, adding that this is detrimental because then human solidarity doesn’t happen.
His suggestion for the future is to organize the movement of racial liberation. He argued that nothing would happen unless there is a radical push to stir things up, change the game, and to have the “grammar of America changed to reflect the views of all of us.”