paradigm for thinking about race relations in post-civil rights America. According to this
ideology, a post-racial order lies in the near future for the U.S., and consequently, law
and public policy should make no explicit mention of race so as not to over-emphasize its
importance. As anti-racist scholars contend, however, the ideology of color-blindness
obscures the ways that racism, albeit a reconfigured racism, continues to shape American
society and politics. Donald Kinder and Lynn Sanders suggest that “compared with the
past American society has come a long way, surely. Race relations must be judged not
only against the nightmare of slavery and Jim Crow, however, but also against reasonable
constructions of what American democracy could and should be.”
vision of what an anti-racist democracy should look like must guide our criteria for
determining what constitutes racism today. As anti-racist struggles like the civil rights
movement shift the horizon for an anti-racist democracy, altering what we believe it is
possible to achieve, they force us to reexamine our current notions of racism and
injustice, encouraging us to transform those as well.
Not all anti-racist scholars agree, however, that racism has changed as a
consequence of the civil rights movement. A fundamental debate exists between those
scholars who argue that the civil rights movement modified the way that racism operates
in contemporary American society, on one hand, and those who assert that post-civil
rights racism is the same beast as it was before, on the other hand. According to Kinder
and Sanders,
“The idea of black inferiority is a deeply ingrained habit in America, but its
characteristic expression is fluid. In our century alone, the private meaning and
public form of racial prejudice have undergone two important transformations,
one reflected in the decline of the doctrine of biological racism, the other
provoked by the sweeping changes and turbulent events set in motion by the civil
rights movement and the urban riots of the 1960s. As a consequence of these
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Convention