Outside the Lines With Rap Genius - OTL 42: Michael P. Jeffries Excerpt #1 - Racism Without Racists lyrics

SameOldShawn: I was reading through an excerpt of it on Rap Genius, and I saw this concept that really tied in in a lot of ways to ways I think about race and the public conversation about racism, encapsulated in three neat words. I was hoping you could talk about it. It was "racism without racists." I was wondering if you could talk about that Michael P. Jeffries: This is a great idea. That work actually comes from the work of Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, who's a professor at Duke. And the basic idea is that we live in this age where it's no longer okay to just admit that you dislike people of color, to say offensive things. So individual racists seem to have vanished from our consciousness, from our society But racism, as a system that limits peoples' choices and privileges some people while penalizing others in different ways, and influences the way we see people in our day-to-day lives, racism still exists. So we have this strange situation where we're trying to deal with and talk about and dismantle racism without targeting individual racists