The Emperor’s New Clothes

The victory of the American Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s ensured black people’s political equality and improved their economic and social conditions. Against such background the American "new racism" took root and flourished in the post-Civil Rights era. In a way more subtle and implicit it has made its way into the American public life, embodying in the white society’s belief that racism is no longer a significant social issue in America. In particular, Barack Obama’s presidential election became the pretext under which many American whites claim that America has entered the post-racial era in which racial problems are no longer the subject that perplex the American society and that America has already transformed into a color-blind society where racism has all but gone. Nevertheless, Obama’s triumph failed to mitigate inter-racial conflicts and clashes, as cases of racial discrimination keep emerging during his presidency. In addition, in contemporary America, the blacks still lag far behind their white counterparts in terms of income, employment, education, housing, health care, crime, etc., which attests to the fact that the American society has still a long way to go before entering a true post-racial era.This thesis goes through the vicissitudes the traditional American racism has undergone in a systematic fashion before making comparison and analysis on the persistent black-white inequalities in the abovementioned aspects with the help of latest data and cases. It finds that after the Civil Rights Movement, many American white people feel reluctant to acknowledge the racial discrimination and prejudices they have been imposing on the blacks and other racial and ethnic minorities explicitly or implicitly, and that they are selectively blind to race and skin color. At the same time, they refuse to admit that the social and economic inequalities between them and the blacks are not relevant to racism; they simply attribute that to the free labor market and the black people’s cultural and behavioral deficiencies, and some even contend that the inequalities are a naturally occurring phenomenon of social process. These beliefs are referred to by the black sociologist Eduardo Bonilla-Silva as "color-blind racism", the core value theory of "new racism".The conclusion of the thesis reveals the true essence of "new racism" in the United States and explores its impact on both blacks and whites. It holds that "new racism" is just "the emperor’s new clothes"; that is, their collective denial of the existence of racism, blindness as well as deafness to, or even deliberate evasion of racial issues as an effort to preserve white people’s racial interests and white supremacy has resulted in the blacks’ continued suffering from discrimination. The possible solutions to the elimination of racism in the United States could be black self-help, the promotion of racial integration in schools and neighborhoods, the promotion of diversity in schools and workplaces, and further support for Affirmative Action programs, through which America will be transformed into a "color-blind racial equality" nation in the true sense. Emphasis is laid on the federal and state governments’continuing to adopt preferential policies to support black people in America in housing, education and employment at the end of the paper.