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SCUXXX10.1177/2329496518804558Social CurrentsBonilla-Silva

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Social Currents

“Racists,” “Class Anxieties,”

1­–18
© The Southern Sociological Society 2018
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DOI: 10.1177/2329496518804558
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Democracy in Trump’s journals.sagepub.com/home/scu

America

Eduardo Bonilla-Silva1

Abstract
In this address, I challenge dominant narratives explaining the rise of Trumpism in America.
Specifically, I dispute four ideas that have emerged to account for Trump’s election. First, I
suggest that understanding his election as the product of the political activities of the “racists”
severely limits our understanding of racism as a collective phenomenon. Second, I question
the notion that Trump’s working class support was due to “class anxieties.” Third, I argue that
despite the rise in old-fashioned racism in Trump’s America, the new racism and its ideology of
color-blindness are still hegemonic. Last, I ask analysts and activists alike to realize that the fight
for democracy in the turbulent times we are living cannot be equated with an effort to return
to “politics as usual,” politics that have maintained the matrix of domination in place.

Keywords
Trump, Trumpism, white working-class, racism, class anxieties, democracy

Introduction colleague is wrong. Old-fashioned racists and

We are living, once again, in strange racial
times. When Barack Obama was elected presi-
dent, many Americans believed we had entered
the kingdom of postracialism, making me feel
like we were living in the upside-down world of
Alice in Wonderland (Bonilla-Silva and Dietrich
2011). That belief, thankfully, dissipated quickly
in large part due to the actions of Republicans in
Congress,1 the emergence of the Tea Party
(Zeskind 2012), and the tremendous energy
behind birtherism (Hughey 2012a). Now
Trump’s election has generated the opposite,
equally Wonderland-like belief: the idea that
old-fashioned racists are steering the wheel of
racial affairs in the nation. Thus, I was not sur-
prised when a colleague suggested to me chang-
ing the title of my book from Racism without
Racists to Racism with Racists. But my
Jim Crow–type racial practices are not respon-
sible for the current state of racial affairs in
America. Albeit old-fashioned racists—whether
the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) elements or its new
Alt-Right incarnation—are clearly emboldened
with Trump, contemporary racial domination
does not depend on their practices or beliefs.
To make my case about the current racial
juncture, I will offer some sociological obser-
vations about the Trump phenomenon and, in
doing so, will wrestle with some important
analytical, theoretical, and political issues that
1
Duke University, Durham, NC, USA
Corresponding Author:
Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, Duke University, 276 Soc/Psych
Building, 417 Chapel Dr., Box 90088, Durham, NC
27708-0088, USA.
Email: ebs@soc.duke.edu
2 Social Currents 00(0)
require urgent attention. I acknowledge that
making my claims will not be easy as the
Trump moment, like Trump himself, is messy,
unruly, fast-paced, and full of nuances.
Nevertheless, despite the convoluted nature of
the current political moment, I will do my very
best to be clear and, hopefully, convincing.
I title my remarks, “‘Racists,’ Class
Anxieties, Hegemonic Racism, and Democracy
in TrumpAmerica” as these four subjects are
central points in need of clarification if we
wish to get out of the rabbit hole we have fallen
into. Nevertheless, I must begin by tackling
two pressing things. First, I will explain why
we should not have been surprised by Trump’s
victory. Second, I shall provide a basic socio-
logical understanding of the “Trumpster” as a
member of his class and a product of the cul-
tural milieu of neoliberalism in America.
Why We Should Not Have
Been Surprised
Trump’s 2016 election shocked many, but the
conditions that made his election possible had
been brewing since the late 1960s. These con-
ditions, combined with his unappealing and
politically unwise electoral opponent, allowed
him to literally squeeze by.2 His election, as
Naomi Klein (2017:10) aptly argued, was the
“clichéd outcome of ubiquitous ideas and
trends.” Our shock, and the obsession with the
Trump carnival since the campaign, has
obscured our understanding of what made his
election possible and about what he is doing as
president. The task at hand is to “deprovincial-
ize” Trump (Rosa and Bonilla 2017) since
defeating or impeaching him only to have him
replaced by Mike Pence, Paul Ryan, or a neo-
liberal, Clinton-like Democrat would not rep-
resent real progress.
What trends made Trump’s victory possi-
ble? First, Trump playing the “race (gender,
sexual orientation, etc.) card” was not a new
development in American politics. The
Republican Party has been playing it since the
late 1960s with their infamous “southern strat-
egy.”3 The original strategy of directly focus-
ing political attention on white voters’ interests
morphed in the 1980s and became subtler,
increasingly relying on “dog whistles.” This
was demonstrated when Nixon portrayed his
opposition against school desegregation not as
a racial matter but a way of mitigating the del-
eterious effects of bussing on children. Reagan
took the dog whistles to the next level during
his eight years as president, a practice that
began with him having his first presidential
campaign event in “Philadelphia, Mississippi
quite near where three civil rights workers had
been lynched earlier” (Davis 2017).4 Although
this racial strategy began with the Republicans,
the Democrats quickly emulated it. After los-
ing the 1984 election, the Democrats formed
the now defunct Democratic Leadership
Council (DLC). This organization advocated
moving the party to the center on issues of eco-
nomics and race, winning back white workers
by supporting policies such as welfare reform
and ending affirmative action (Schmitt 2011).
The election of Bill Clinton as president in
1992, after having chaired the DLC from 1990
to 1991, bolstered the Democrats’ move to the
right. Clintonism, as Nancy Fraser (2017)
argues, amounted to “progressive neoliberal-
ism” and changed the “historic bloc” the
Democratic Party had forged since the 1960s.
Another important trend we missed was the
decline in party affiliation and its impact on
politics. As of today, most registered voters
identify as independents (in the 40–45 percent
range according to Gallup),5 40 percent of eli-
gible voters do not vote (Skibba 2016), and of
those who vote for the two main parties, few
are attached to their party of choice’s platform
and are increasingly “candidate centered”
(Rapoport 1997). This political fluidity has
created the space for third-party candidates
such as Ross Perot in 1996 (Stone, Rapoport,
and Schneider 2004), and the within-party out-
sider campaigns of Pat Buchanan in 2000, and
Sanders and Trump in 2016.
Perhaps the largest trend we missed was
how the entertainment industry has shaped the
contemporary political order creating what
some call “the post-democratic era” (Street
2012), or what Christopher Lasch (1978) iden-
tified as the “cult of celebrity” where citizens
are treated like spectators, candidates behave
like celebrities, or candidates—like
Bonilla-Silva 3
Trump—are celebrities themselves. Sociologist
Lauren Langman (2012:521) has observed that,
“[i]n the new era of telepolitics . . . self-presen-
tations replace platforms and agendas,” which
fits Trump’s case perfectly. Nevertheless, this
trend began with Reagan in 1980,6 continued
with Clinton in the 1990s (his media interven-
tions were crucial), and culminated in the
Obama spectacle.7 In between these three pres-
idents, other prominent examples of this trend
were governors such as Arnold Schwarzenegger
and Jesse Ventura, mayors such as Clint
Eastwood (of Carmel, California), and senators
such as Al Franken.
Last, the populism we witnessed in 2016,
which remains strong in the body politic, has
been in place since at least the 1980s. It was
central to Reagan’s ascent (his “Reagan
Democrats”), Ross Perot’s success in 1992, Pat
Buchanan’s threat to the Republican main-
stream in 2000, and fueled the rise of the Tea
Party in 2008. But populism, unlike many
feared in 2016, has also exhibited radical pos-
sibilities. How can we forget the left-oriented
populism of Jesse Jackson in 1984 and 1988
(Zweig 2006), and of Sanders in 2016?
Populism is a political vessel and can be reac-
tionary, like in Trump’s case, or progressive,
like in Jackson’s or Sanders’ case.
Toward A Sociological
Understanding of Trump
Sociologists do not engage in the psychologi-
cal analysis of individuals as the explanations
of social phenomena. But a social psychologi-
cal analysis of Trump is needed to counter the
media’s obsession, as well as some social
analysts’, with labeling him as “crazy.” The
first step necessary to understand Trump’s
behavior is recognizing the mentality of rich
folks. Trump is not a deviant member of his
class,8 but as Krugman (2016) argued in a
piece in the New York Times, this class is
pathological:
The affluent are, on average, less likely to exhibit
empathy, less likely to respect norms and even
laws, more likely to cheat, than those occupying
lower rungs on the economic ladder.
Krugman’s view is backed by research on the
top 1 percent. Overall, the research suggests
they are less empathetic, more narcissistic,
highly authoritarian, and more manipulative
than average people (Gershon 2015). Trump
undoubtedly fits these traits and may be on the
higher end of his class’s distribution (Johnston
2018). Just as an illustration, I cite a descrip-
tion of the eulogy Trump delivered at his
father’s funeral. All of Trump’s biographer
concurred that he adored his father and emu-
lated his style:
On June 29th, 1999, Trump gave a eulogy at his
father’s funeral at Marble Collegiate Church in
Manhattan. Others spoke of their memories of
Fred Trump and his legacy as a man who had
built solid, middle-class homes for thousands of
New Yorkers. But his middle son, according to
most accounts, used the time to talk about his
own accomplishments and to make it clear that,
in his mind, his father’s best achievement was
producing him. (Morris 2017)
Although Trump scores off the chart on the
DM5 for Narcissistic Personality Disorder
(Dodes 2017), we must appreciate that all rich
folks—Ross Perot, Steve Forbes, Bill Gates,
Mark Zuckerburg, Mark Cuban—are similar
psychological beasts. These men believe they
are gifted people who alone can solve the prob-
lems of the world using their unique talents.9
Therefore, their “pathological” psychologies
are better understood as class-related products,
“at least in part facilitated by the socioeco-
nomic and political conditions of neoliberal-
ism itself” (Tarnopolsky 2017). Trump’s folly
and delusions of grandeur are,
. . . characteristic of mania with the top 1 percent
in America and with neo-liberal policy makers
who even today think that the answer to
neoliberalism’s problems (e.g., stock market
bubbles which inevitably burst or social security
nets with no netting left in them) is simply more
neoliberalism. (Tarnopolsky 2017:110)
The second, and perhaps most important,
factor to understand Trump, is recognizing that
he is a media-entertainment-brand product
(Klein 2017). After a career in real estate, but
4 Social Currents 00(0)
one where he relentlessly tried his best to
become a celebrity (Johnston 2016), Trump
finally became a TV star in 2002 and had a
14-year run on The Apprentice and Celebrity
Apprentice (Lipman 2013). But no matter how
hard Trump attributes his success in TV or in
business to his intelligence and talent, his
celebrity status was not of his own making.
Rather, he became a household name because,
in the neoliberal era of capitalism, entrepre-
neurship and the entrepreneur are glamorized,
and “reinventing government” became a man-
tra to eliminate the supposedly “old, tired, sti-
fling effects of State bureaucracy” (Hay
2010:387). The Apprentice, for instance,
advanced “TV’s neoliberal grammar and con-
nectedness to impetus to downsize and reform
government” (Ouellette 2016:649) and embod-
ied in the notion of “cool capitalism . . .”
(McGuigan 2008). Reality TV, whether The
Survivor, The Bachelorette, or Trump’s shows,
sell the neoliberal moral economy of the indi-
vidual, rational, hungry, laissez-faire subject
struggling to get ahead (Hay 2010). If one
fails, as Trump loves to say, it is because one is
“a loser.”
Last, Trump might be a “f------ moron,” as
his former Secretary Tillerson reportedly
labeled him (Kaplan 2017), but he is unques-
tionably a charismatic and entertaining man.
As Hall, Goldstein, and Ingram (2016:72) have
argued,
. . . Trump’s campaign to become the Republican
nominee was successful because it was, in a
word, entertaining—not just for the white rural
underclass, not just for conservatives, but also
for the public at large, even those who strongly
oppose his candidacy. Whether understood as
pleasing or offensive, Trump’s ongoing show
was compelling.
Trump’s entertainment value, which fits per-
fectly with how style trumps substance in late
capitalism, explains why he is constantly high-
lighted by the media—a fact Trump10 flaunts
often. Media executives know that Trump
brings drama to their stories, and drama sells.
For example, former CNN President Jon Klein
recently said, “You can’t outdo the Trump era
for drama. The real world is now delivering
what every screenwriter can only hope to
deliver” (Battaglio 2017). The drama Trump
has brought to politics has financially benefit-
ted all members of the “media-industrial com-
plex” (Kardas 2017). CNN’s “average daytime
audience,” for example, “was up more than 50
percent (in 2016), and its prime-time audience
70 percent,” which earned the station “nearly
$1 billion . . . the most profitable year in CNN’s
history” (Mahler 2017). Not surprisingly, Les
Moonves, chair of CBS, stated in a crude yet
clear way that although Trump’s candidacy
“may not be good for America . . . it’s damn
good for CBS” and added, “[t]he money’s roll-
ing in and this is fun” (Collins 2016).
On the Racists
Since Trump came down the escalator of
Trump Plaza in 2015, social scientists and
commentators regressed to the troublesome
comfort of the prejudice problematic. They
succumbed to the old narrative of racism as the
problem of the “racists,” embodied exclusively
in southern, “poorly educated,” rural, working-
class white folks. It is perhaps time to “kill the
racists” (the concept) as this notion precludes
understanding of America’s “race problem” as
not a matter of a few rotten apples but a rotten
apple tree.11 Focusing on “the racists” prevents
us from analytically and politically tackling
the collective practices, mechanisms, institu-
tions, and behaviors that reproduce racial dom-
ination (Bonilla-Silva 1997).
But there is more. Because we focused so
intensely on the presumed “racists,” we
ignored the fact that educated, middle- and
upper-middle-class whites also supported the
Trumpster. As Kim Moody (2017) observed in
The Jacobin,
The blue-collar narrative also obscures the
centrality of other social classes in the Trump
coalition, as well as the fact that many members
of the white working class supported Sanders in
the primaries and Hillary Clinton in the
presidential election. And, in its singular focus
on job losses as an animating grievance, the
blue-collar narrative gives an impoverished
account of the dynamics of nationalist populism
and its larger relationship to neoliberalism.
Bonilla-Silva 5
The only segment of the white community that
supported Hillary was white women with post-
graduate education (58 percent for Clinton), as
even women with a college degree voted for
Trump (49 to 46 percent) (Fiorina 2017).
Hence, blaming poor, less educated whites for
Trump’s victory is wrong.
Let me add one more important element to
the equation here: the assumption that “rac-
ism” means supporting Republicans and vot-
ing for Trump is flawed. Since when has voting
Democrat implied that people are “beyond
race?” Have we forgotten the Clintons’ game
of racial distancing, or Bill Clinton’s punish-
ment of poor black mothers on welfare that led
to his so-called “welfare reform” in the 1990s?
And what about the DLC’s efforts of moving
the party to the center in part by distancing it
from people of color, or Obama acting as the
“deporter in chief,” as Univision’s Jorge
Ramos (2017) labeled him? Excluding some
actors from analysis is problematic as all actors
of a racialized social system are raced albeit,
and this is important, not exactly in the same
way (Bonilla-Silva 2015). Therefore, by obses-
sively focusing attention on the “racists,” we
gave a pass to whites who voted for the
Democratic Party or stayed home. We must
acknowledge that voting Democrat or self-
identifying as an “independent” or a member
of the “Green Party” is not tantamount with
being “beyond race (or gender or sexual orien-
tation for that matter).”
We seem to forget that, in 2008, white
Democrats supported Clinton over Obama by a
whopping 40 percent points (Huddy and Carey
2009). In fact, the racial gap was the largest
among all potential gaps in the 2008
Democratic presidential primary (Fisher 2011).
Throughout history, whites in both parties have
had similar racial views (Sides, Tesler, and
Vavreck 2016), albeit a gap among whites in
racial tone and intensity has emerged since
Obama’s election (Pew Research Center 2017).
Furthermore, the measures used to separate
white “racist” Republicans from white “racial
liberals” are crude, incapable of capturing
tonalities in racial animus, and not geared
toward identifying variance in whites’ racial-
ized standpoints. For instance, researchers
documented that “believing that Obama was a
Muslim” (Klinkner 2016) or scoring high on
“racial resentment” and “racial animus” (Tesler
2016b) were the best predictors of support for
Trump. I have no doubt these findings are
right. My qualm with this type of analysis is
that the measures miss the “softer,” color-blind
ways in which white Democrats express their
racial views. Given that most whites express
their racial views in color-blind fashion, this is
analytically and politically a self-defeating
approach.12
Finally, why were we surprised about
whites supporting a Republican presidential
candidate? As Steve Phillips from the Center
for American Progress reports, “The majority
of whites have voted Republican in every elec-
tion over the past 50 years” (Phillips 2016).
President Carter was the last Democrat who
received significant support from whites (48
percent), and Hillary Clinton’s level of support
(37 percent) was not the lowest recorded in
recent history (Mondale in 1984 received only
34 percent of the white vote) (Roper Center
2016). The data also reveal that Trump’s level
of white support (58 percent) was not the high-
est either (Romney received 59 percent in
2012, Bush’s father 60 percent in 1988, Reagan
66 percent in 1984, and George W. Bush 58
percent in 2004).
The demonization of poor whites as “the
racists,” a practice in which social scientists
have played a large role (from Dollard’s frus-
tration-aggression theory in the late 1930s to
Adorno’s “authoritarian personality” in the
1950s to today’s focus on racial animus), must
stop. Even if we are right, we cannot just aban-
don millions of people13 and expect to build a
new society. The task at hand is to forge a
political praxis to engage, rather than ignore or
vilify, the white masses.
Racism as Expression of Class
Anxieties
Another problematic narrative that emerged in
the 2016 campaign was that white workers’14
support for Trump was an expression of their
“class anxieties.” Even though I am critical of
assuming “white-workers” are the only “racists”
6 Social Currents 00(0)
in America (Wellman 1977), interpreting their
political views as pure expressions of their class
location is equally inaccurate. Unfortunately,
many of our own, including Professor Arlie
Hochschild (2016), contributed to this narrative
with her book Strangers in Their Own Land.15
She and others such as Justin Gest (2016), J. D.
Vance (2016), Joan C. Williams (2017), and
Katherine Cramer (2016) among others urged us
to be empathetic toward the class-based plight of
white workers, a segment that clearly has lost
ground in the last 10 to 20 years. Although it is
true that working class whites have lost ground
and that progressives should be empathetic, all
these authors say precious little about their
racialized, gendered, and xenophobic conscious-
ness. More problematic, all ask for empathy for
their white brethren, but exhibit little under-
standing and empathy for the plight of poor
black and brown folks, a group whose situation
has worsened relatively to whites as Paul
Campos (2017) documented in an article in the
New York Times:
In 2015, the most recent year for which data are
available, black households at the 20th and 40th
percentiles of household income earned an
average of 55 percent as much as white
households at those same percentiles. This is
exactly the same figure as in 1967. Indeed, five
decades of household income data reveal a
yawning and uncannily consistent income gap
between black and white Americans across the
economic spectrum. Fifty years ago, black
upper-class Americans had incomes about two-
thirds those of white upper-class Americans,
while the black middle-class—those in the 60th
percentile—earned about two-thirds as much as
its white counterpart. Those ratios remain the
same today.
The current economic anxieties of the white
working-class reflect that their income has
grown slowly or regressed slightly compared
with that of their elite white brethren, making
them feel they are becoming black-like.
Furthermore, whites whose incomes fall
between the 20th and 60th percentiles experi-
enced wage stagnation or a decrease in their
advantage vis-à-vis blacks (Campos 2017). As
blacks have been the “symbolic index” of
status for whites (Marable 1983), this minor
decrease in relative standing has fueled their
backlash. Hence, what Hochschild and others
construe as mostly class anxieties is perhaps
best regarded as whites’ “identity crisis”
rooted, although not singularly, in their racial
concerns. As Sides, Tesler, and Vavreck
(2017:35) point out,
As the United States changes demographically,
socially, and culturally, Americans’ political
identities are increasingly driven by competing
understandings of what their country is and
ought to be—a multicultural society that
welcomes newcomers and embraces its growing
diversity, or a more provincial place that recalls
an earlier era of traditional gender roles and
white Christian dominance in economic and
cultural life.
But why do analysts keep interpreting
Trumpism as either the product of white work-
ers’ “class anxieties” or the political expression
of their deep-seated racism? This Manichean
view of white workers is due to theoretical and
practical reasons. I will not delve here into the
practical reasons for this deficient analysis—
the fact that since the 1980s, the Left stopped
doing political work with the working class and
put almost all their political eggs in the
Democratic Party—but will explore some of
the theoretical reasons. In general, we have
done very little work on the race-class nexus,
instead assuming that analyzing racialization or
class formation separately will allow us to
understand whites or workers. In truth, because
subjectivity is multifaceted, it cannot be prop-
erly understood discretely. White workers are
white and workers—and much more—hence
their interests reflect these multiple intersecting
locations (Roediger 2017).
In addition, researchers have not examined
very well the specific fractions of the white
working class that supported Trump. (For a
very interesting interpretation of the working
class and analysis of their electoral behavior,
see Allison Hurst’s March 2017 post in
Working-Class Perspectives, “Fractions within
the Working Class.”) For example, workers in
the Rust Belt did not, as the postelection
Bonilla-Silva 7
narrative suggests, vote massively for Trump.
As Kilibarda and Roithmayr’s (2016) analysis
shows,
Democrats lost 950,000 white voters from 2012
in the five Rust Belt states that Trump won, but
Republicans gained only 450,000 additional
voters. The rest stayed home or voted for
someone other than the major-party candidates.
(As cited in Walley 2017:234)
The typical white working-class Trump
voter was not the most “left behind” worker.
By large, Trump’s core supporters were not
only older, southern, and economically stable
but also extremely concerned about the future
of their children and the direction of the coun-
try. Furthermore, as Hurst has suggested, the
working class in the United States can be
divided into at least five fractions, and some
have a “contradictory class location” (Wright
1978). The other white Trump supporters, as
Christine Walley (2017) argues, have a more
complicated race-class positioning that
requires a finer analysis. Kim Moody (2017)
addressed the politics involved as follows:
Clearly, while Trump’s campaign had strong
racial and anti-immigrant themes, there are,
alongside the frankly prejudiced people who
enjoyed watching Trump break the discursive
taboos around race and gender in U.S. political
campaigns, many voters who are capable of
voting for a black man in one election and a
white racist in the next. This is not to say that
these voters are free of racial prejudice or have a
strong critique of white privilege but that, at the
level of voting at least, their racial preference is
not a foregone conclusion.
This fact—that a nontrivial number of white
working class voters switched from Obama to
Trump—is important as it makes possible for
developing political strategies to gain them back
and even to perhaps move them farther to the left.
What Type of Racism Rules
the American Landscape?
In our frantic effort to make sense of Trumpism,
we ignored that the findings of most work on
racial attitudes over the last 30 years indicate
that post–Civil Rights era whites no longer
rely on “Jim Crow prejudice” to defend their
racial advantages. The consensus in the survey
community is that whites have developed a
new way of talking, arguing, and even feeling
about racial matters (Bobo et al. 2012).
Accordingly, we can believe that we were ana-
lytically wrong, and whites were closet Jim
Crow racists, or that whites changed their
views in a very short period of time, or—and
this is my view—admit that analyzing racial
ideology is a very complicated affair.
On my part, I still believe that (1) racism as
a system of practices to reproduce white privi-
lege operates along “new racism” lines
(Bonilla-Silva 2001), and (2) color-blind rac-
ism is the hegemonic racial discourse in
town—even the 71-year-old Trump tried to
express his views in somewhat color-blind
fashion (“I love Mexicans,” “I am the least rac-
ist or anti-Semitic person you’ve ever seen”).
But as (Woody) Doane (2017) has argued, our
work on racial domination and racial ideology
is not done. As racial domination and ideology
are never-finished projects, we must explain
the continuing significance of old-fashioned
racial views in the midst of our color-blind
America.
Let me now address a few things about
racial ideology in the Trump moment. First,
although color-blind racism is hegemonic,
most whites in post–Civil Rights America
(whether they are color-blind or not) share a
set of meanings and tropes on race matters, a
point made well by scholars such as Jessie
Daniels (1997) and Matthew Hughey (2012b).
Despite the limitations of survey instruments
to capture the contours of racial ideology, poll-
sters have found that a white nationalist senti-
ment is part of whites’ contemporary racial
attitudes (Ipsos Public Affairs 2017).
Second, a hegemonic racial discourse never
rules the ideological landscape of any polity
completely. Therefore, old-fashioned racism
remains part of the American landscape, which
is why surveys consistently find that about a
10th of whites still subscribe to traditionally
racist views on a number of matters (Bobo
et al. 2012; Krysan and Moberg 2016). Third,
8 Social Currents 00(0)
addressing the complexity of the dominant
racial ideology means recognizing that, like all
ideologies, color-blindness is a political tool or
“meaning in the service of power” (Thompson
1984:132). This means that color-blindness is
flexible and must accommodate new racial
developments (Jackman 1996).
In my empirical work on color-blind racial
ideology (Racism without Racists), I high-
lighted this complexity but not in a systematic
way. I showed that color-blind whites use the
frames, style, and racial stories of this ideology
with various tones, articulations between old
and new ideas, and different levels of commit-
ment. One good example of this complexity is
my argument that, in general, white workers
are more direct and crude in their use of color-
blind racism than middle-class whites who
seem like “compassionate conservatives”
(“Poor blacks with their dislocated families
and cultural deficiencies”). I believe this char-
acterization of white workers is still valid but
want to add more texture to my claim. For
instance, the fact that a race-class group
deploys a particular tone does not indicate uni-
formity of expression among its members. For
example, John Avery, a worker in Youngstown,
Ohio, cited by Joel Gest (2016:95) in his The
New Minority? states,
There are a lot of people who abuse [welfare]. I
am running around busting my hump, while
another guy sit on his porch. That’s not right. I
get food assistance and medical from the
government because of my daughter. But I go to
work every day, even after I broke my leg. You
have to earn it . . . [People on welfare] are driving
around in new cars and I can’t even afford a
vehicle. The government pays their rent and
utilities, and so they spend the cash on gold
chains and a Cadillac, when I can barely afford
my Cavalier . . . People will take advantage of
things any way they can.
How different is this angry white worker
from John II, a retired architect, who asserted
the following on reparations:
Not a nickel, not a nickel. I think that’s ridiculous.
I think that is a great way to get the black vote.
But I think that’s a ridiculous assumption
because those that say we should pay them
because they were slaves back in the past and
yet, how often do you hear about the people who
were white that were slaves and ah, the whites
that were ah? Boy we should get reparations, the
Irish should get reparations from the English . . .
. (Bonilla-Silva 2017:100)
This address is not the place for theory
building, but I hope to inspire young scholars
and graduate students to pick up the baton. We
need more systematic analyses of color-blind
actors to assess important variations within the
group as well as develop explanations for these
variations. Our overreliance on surveys, unfor-
tunately, limits our capacity to capture much of
the textuality needed to tease out variance and
tonalities in the current racial ideological field.
Thankfully, a group of young scholars such as
Joyce Bell and Hartmann (2007), Kristen
Lavelle (2014), Megan Burke (2017), Jennifer
Mueller (2017), Ashley Doane (2017),
Margaret Hagerman (2018), and a few others
are critically examining the nasty contours of
this seemingly suave racial ideology.
On Democracy or How
Not to Normalize Everyday
Power
Almost every day Trump and his representa-
tives say or do something that pundits identify
as a major threat to democracy. Although I
believe Trump, like most billionaires, is an
authoritarian person, I am more concerned
about social analysts in general, and Democrats
in particular, normalizing regular power. They
seem to be confusing form (Trump not follow-
ing the rules of the game) with content (the fact
that liberal democracy in America is “the best
possible shell” [Lenin 1917:393] for class,
race, and gender rule) (Domhoff 2014). In an
intervention in last year’s ASA on this subject
(Bonilla-Silva 2017), I stated the following:
We cannot fall for the siren call of the media and
liberal Democrats who, in their effort to criticize
Trump, herald “normal power.” They have
highlighted since the election the patriotism of
the intelligence community, the valor of FBI
Bonilla-Silva 9
agents, and the virtues of generals and the
military. Some were even happy when he named
General Kelly as his Chief of Staff. This
militarization of the political regime is not
healthy and we should all be concerned about it.
The wish for “state politics as usual” explains
why so many observers seem giddy when Trump
engages in “regular state” actions (really,
“imperial actions”) such as illegally16 bombing a
Syrian airfield with 59 Tomahawks, downing a
Syrian plane in violation of international law and
without Congress’s authorization, or delivering
what should have been seen by all as a racist
“civilizational” speech in Poland.
Since I made this statement, things have got-
ten worse in terms of the Democrats and the
media trying to get us back to “normal poli-
tics.” Take for example how quickly most com-
mentators and even Democrats touted FBI
Director Jim Comey, General Kelly as Chief of
Staff, and General Mattis as Secretary of
Defense. Also, we continue to defend without
much qualification the FBI, CIA, and other
intelligence agencies as institutions central to
our democracy. But facts, as John Adams
uttered, are “stubborn things” and the histories
of these people and organizations cannot go
unnoticed. Comey, for example, had a work
history typical of previous FBI directors, which
should have given great pause to liberals. He
worked for Lockheed Martin and two large
financial organizations—his job in the latter
was cleaning their messes (Meyerson 2017). As
FBI Director, Comey did not object to keeping
foreign-born officials under scrutiny (particu-
larly Muslim agents), despite acknowledging
as a problem that 83 percent of Bureau agents
were white (Ackerman 2017). He also advanced
the infamous and unproven “Ferguson effect”
argument (the idea that crime rates are on the
rise in places where people protest police bru-
tality), which police departments and “law and
order” politicos have used to push back against
the black Lives Matter movement (Pimentel
2017). Interestingly, analysis of 911 calls in a
major metropolitan area reveals that black peo-
ple are less likely to dial 911 immediately fol-
lowing the highly publicized assault or death of
a black person at the hands of police, an effect
that remains salient for about a year (Desmond,
Papachristos, and Kirk 2016). Hence, if there is
a Ferguson effect, it seems to work against peo-
ple of color.
Regarding the Generals, as with Comey, we
should have proceeded with great caution
before embracing them as saviors. Until very
recently, General Kelly was depicted as the
rational person in charge of keeping Trump
and his White House in check (Schwarz 2017),
but we did not do due diligence on him. For
example, in his brief stint at Homeland
Security, Kelly was responsible for a policy
whereby egregious cases of criminal activity
by undocumented workers were highlighted to
justify Immigrations and Customs Enforcement
(ICE) raids (Speri 2017). Furthermore, we all
witnessed how he insulted Frederica Wilson, a
black representative from Florida, for some-
thing she did not do (Schwarz 2017). Following
the lead of the president he serves, Kelly has
not apologized for erroneously attacking
Representative Wilson. We also witnessed
Kelly’s Trump-like stand on immigrants when
he referred to those who did not apply for
Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals
(DACA) protection as “too lazy to get off their
asses” (CBS/AP 2018). Last, and more
recently, Kelly threatened Omarosa Manigault,
former White House staff, with legal trouble if
she were to divulge any information about her
time working for President Trump (Hagerman
2018).
General Kelly also had a problematic his-
tory prior to Trump’s presidency history that
we ignored. For instance, in a 2010 speech, he
stated, “The only territory we as a people have
ever asked for from any nation we have fought
alongside, or against, since our founding, the
entire extent of our overseas empire, are a few
hundred acres of land for the 24 American cem-
eteries scattered around the globe” (Schwarz
2017). This statement ignores completely
American imperial history, both internally
(how the United States is a settler colonial
nation-state) (Glenn 2015) and externally (the
more traditional imperialist and neo-imperialist
ventures of the United States that led it to
secure control of Puerto Rico, Guam,
10 Social Currents 00(0)
Micronesia, etc.). Finally, in a 2007 speech,
Kelly stated in a manner reminiscent of Trump
that “the media elite” was setting up “the know-
it-all chattering class to offer their endless criti-
cism” to conceal the fact that the military was
winning the War on Terror (Schwarz 2017).
Kelly is not the only General with issues.
Reports on General Mattis suggest he is not what
the media has so far suggested: a “scholar-war-
rior” (Hasan 2017) trying to be the voice of reason
in Trump’s cabinet. He is a hawk with an Anti-
Iranian bent for which he was let go in 2013 from
his post in the U.S. Central Command in Iraq
under the Obama Administration (Glantz 2017).
Last, let me comment on the Russian inter-
vention in our elections. While it is clear that
Russia intervened in the U.S. election, it seems
that we are suffering from collective amnesia.
(For a comprehensive list of U.S. interventions
in the world, see Zoltán Grossman’s (2018)
“From Wounded Knee to Syria: A Century of
U.S. Military Interventions.”) Have we forgot-
ten the CIA’s role in Chile in 1973, the 1970s
destabilization campaign against Michael
Manley in Jamaica, the Contras in Nicaragua,
and so on? In fact, the United States has had
the most interventionist foreign policy in the
world since it became an empire-state (Jung,
Costa Vargas, and Bonilla-Silva 2011), having
invaded or intervened directly in more than
100 countries. This does not mean anyone
should welcome Russian intervention, but it
means we cannot object to it based on a defense
of a “democracy” that has been the most inter-
ventionist state in the world-system in the last
100 years! And for people of color, the clearest
threat against their voting rights in 2016 was
not Russia, but the Republican Party with its
efforts to disenfranchise minority voters (V.
Williams 2017).
To be clear, the question is not ignoring
Trump’s authoritarian tendencies or not doing
anything to retain the democratic elements that
we the people have extracted from the power
elite throughout our history (Fick 2009; Peniel
2010). The issue is defending our limited
democracy in a critical manner with the goal of
deepening it (Strickland 2008). Otherwise, we
will continue reifying the “good old times” of
pre-Trump America where racial, class, and
gender domination worked primarily in a
hegemonic way, and everyone was (presum-
ably) happy in “the best of all possible worlds.”
Concluding Thoughts or
What Is to Be Done
Let me conclude by highlighting a few things I
believe we should seriously consider at this
special moment. First, although we are all
scared by the current occupant of the still very
white White House, we must recognize the tre-
mendous similarities between what is going on
today and what happened in the 1980s under
Reagan. The rise in hate crimes that followed
the green lights given by Reagan, the demoni-
zation of people of color (Reagan popularized
the term welfare queens), and the cuts in the
social wage are all similar to current develop-
ments (Marable 1983). However, as phases in
systems of oppression may repeat themselves,
so do forms of contestation. We are witnessing
mobilizations by women, people of color, and
now millennials saying no to Trump (Danley
2018; Roth 2018). We fought and survived
Reagan, and we will fight and survive Trump.
Second, I wholeheartedly believe we must
be in solidarity with all the “workers of the
world.” This is why I am so critical of the game
of demonizing white workers. But to be clear,
my stance is that we must engage with white
workers—I actually advocate with engaging
with all segments of the white community—
but not blindly. I am not in the habit of giving
blank empathy checks to anyone as liberals
and progressives such as Bernie Sanders are
willing to do with white workers (for a recent
example, see Teixeira 2018). My argument
here has been eminently political: I advocate
engaging workers with the goal of fostering a
higher, deeper, more humane consciousness
(Payne 2018). But to do so, we cannot ignore
the facts of their racial subjectivity (Bonilla-
Silva forthcoming). If we want, and I think this
is the progressive option on our plate, to forge
a new Rainbow coalition highlighting the
socioeconomic commonalities of the masses
(Brischetto 2016), we will have to be serious
about race matters. To get to class, we will
have to go through race (Mills 2003).
Bonilla-Silva 11
Third, as bad as Jim Crow prejudice is, we
must keep our eyes on the prize. Despite the
great work of Michelle Alexander (2012), we
are not in a “new Jim Crow” era. Racial domi-
nation nowadays “is not maintained through
Apartheid-like practices, but through the
actions of tolerant, liberal whites and seem-
ingly non-racial policies” (Bonilla Silva
2018:26). Contemporary domination is main-
tained through new racism practices (Bonilla-
Silva 2017) such as the covert discrimination
of smiling realtors, clerks politely asking peo-
ple of color “May I help you?” and college
admissions exams or tests in jobs that filter out
people of color. This “new racism” regime is
hard to fight and study, but the more we focus
on “the racists,” the less time and effort we
spend fighting the new, killing-me-softly mon-
ster that rules the day.
Last, as sociologists we are trained to
believe that objectivity, science, and dispas-
sion are our professional commands and that
research will liberate humanity. But science,
objectivity, and research have not freed anyone
in history. The moment requires sociologists to
be less like Weber and more like Marx (Gatica
2016). We must be involved in public dis-
course. We cannot remain silent, afraid of
being labeled “political.” Although I do not
believe we are in a fascist situation, as some
have suggested (Albright 2018), the danger is
real as reactionary populism can lead to a more
authoritarian version of the American liberal
democracy. We must become sociologically
driven citizens concerned with building a more
democratic, inclusive, and just society. The
time requires that we become sociological
activists in defense of our science but also of
our flawed democracy and the collective
humanistic values we hold dearly.
***
As I was finishing this article, news about
the conviction of former Trump Campaign
Chairman Paul Manafort for tax fraud, hiding
foreign bank accounts, and bank fraud emerged
(Polantz et al. 2018). The same day this hap-
pened, former Trump fixer, Michael Cohen,
plead guilty to tax fraud, making false state-
ments to a bank, and committing campaign
finance violations (Barrett et al. 2018). Cohen’s
campaign finance violation implicated Trump
directly. Furthermore, in the same week we
learned that Trump’s friend, David Pecker,
CEO of American Media, Inc. (AMI), which
owns the National Enquirer, signed an immu-
nity deal with federal prosecutors (Kelly and
Schouten 2018). Last, Trump’s CFO, Allen
Weisselberg, also signed an immunity deal
with federal prosecutors. This remarkable set
of legal developments has been viewed as the
beginning of the end for Trump. However,
consistent with what I have argued in this arti-
cle, nothing is guaranteed unless the Left
mobilizes people and works with the white
masses to explain the import of these events.
Without this engagement, I am afraid Trump’s
supporters will continue eating up the alterna-
tive facts they get from Fox News and other
sinister outlets, and Trumpismo will continue
reigning in America.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of
interest with respect to the research, authorship,
and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the
research, authorship, and/or publication of this
article.
Notes
 1. Republican Senate Majority Leader Mitch
McConnell famously said before the mid-
term elections of 2010 that “The single most
important thing we want to achieve is for
President Obama to be a one-term president.”
For a detailed analysis of McConnell’s machi-
nations, see Joshua Green’s (2011) “Strict
Obstructionist.”
 2. Stanley B. Greenberg (2017:27), a longtime
analyst and activist for the Democratic Party,
characterized the end of Clinton’s presidential
campaign as “campaign malpractice.” I made
even stronger claims about her campaign in
Chapter 10 of the fifth edition of Racism with-
out Racists (2018). Trump, we cannot forget,
lost the popular vote by almost three million
votes, but Hillary Clinton lost the election in
large measure because she failed to campaign
in crucial states (Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and
12 Social Currents 00(0)
Michigan) and did not inspire the most trust-
worthy segment of her base: voters of color.
 3. The media has produced a narrative that
because Trump has not advanced any major
legislation, he has not produced much as a
president. However, this misses the work his
cabinet is doing, the tax reform bill, the judi-
cial appointments, and the regulatory changes
he and his cabinet are implementing in agen-
cies such as the Environmental Protection
Agency (EPA), State Department, Department
of the Interior, and Department of Housing and
Urban Development (HUD), which will have
lasting repercussions. For a good summary
on all these things, see David Cay Johnston’s
(2018) It’s Even Worse Than You Think.
 4. Republican strategist Lee Atwater clearly
outlined this shift in an interview in 1981,
“You start out in 1954 by saying, ‘Nigger,
nigger, nigger.’ By 1968 you can’t say ‘nig-
ger’—that hurts you. Backfires. So you say
stuff like forced busing, states’ rights and all
that stuff. You’re getting so abstract now [that]
you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all
these things you’re talking about are totally
economic things and a byproduct of them is
[that] blacks get hurt worse than whites. And
subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I’m not
saying that. But I’m saying that if it is getting
that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing
away with the racial problem one way or the
other. You follow me—because obviously sit-
ting around saying, ‘We want to cut this,’ is
much more abstract than even the busing thing,
and a hell of a lot more abstract than ‘Nigger,
nigger’” (Perlstein 2012).
  5. See Gallup’s (2018) “Party Affiliation.”
  6. Ronald Reagan, “the Teflon President,” was an
actor-turned politician whose life story differed
from the traditional political expectations. His
campaign accelerated the use of advertising
techniques based on “image marketing” so
that “democracy itself [became] style” (Ewen
1988:268).
 7. Obama became a “rock star” politician who
generated media attention and crowds like no
other politician before. He also got a spectacle
boost from Oprah Winfrey’s public endorse-
ment, which arguably increased his support by
0.2 percentage points (Wheeler 2012).
  8. For a devastating inside view on the pathology
of elites in America, see Chris Hedges’ (2016)
observations in Unspeakable.
  9. Witness how, for example, Bill Gates and his
fellow billionaire friends believe they alone
can cure poverty, end disease, save education,
and help bring forth “the best of all possible
worlds.” This “philantrocapitalism” (Klein
2017) is not actually saving the world, but sav-
ing them money and distorting social institu-
tion such as public education. On the latter, see
Murray Levine’s (2016), “Andrew Carnegie
and Bill Gates: Philanthropy and oligarchy,
then and now.”
10. Trump claimed during the campaign that the
media needed him for ratings. He repeated
this claim in an interview with the New York
Times: “Another reason that we’re going to
win another four years is because newspapers,
television, all forms of media will tank if I’m
not there because without me, their ratings are
going down the tubes. Without me, The New
York Times will indeed be, not the failing New
York Times, but the failed New York Times
(2017).
11. For the record, all the research that shows that
having a higher level of racial animus was the
best predictor for supporting Trump is accu-
rate (Lopez 2017). The issue is understanding
that all whites are racialized, hence, all par-
take in racial ideology. Some subscribe to old-
fashioned racism, others exhibit a mixed racial
consciousness, and yet others—and I think they
are the majority—endorse a color-blind posture.
However, a small segment of whites displays
progressive racial views.
12. Truth in advertising. My colleague and friend,
psychologist Helen Neville (Neville et al. 2000)
at The University of Illinois, has developed a
scale to measure color-blind attitudes and finds
that whites with higher levels of color-blindness
vote Republican. Her scale is an admirable
effort at operationalizing color-blindness, but it
is still too close to the traditional measures used
to examine resentment and animus.
13. According to Griffin, Halpin, and Teixeira
(2017), in 1980, this group represented 70 per-
cent of the eligible voter population. Today,
they are no longer the majority but still com-
prise the “largest race/education group in the
country” (Griffin et al. 2017:32). Michael
Zweig (2011:34) estimates that workers are
about 63 percent of the American population,
and that 58 percent of whites belong to this
category.
14. There is still a debate about the class posi-
tion of Trump’s largest voter segment: non-
college-educated whites. Commentators such
as Nate Silver (2016) claimed most Trump
supporters were “middle class,” basing this
Bonilla-Silva 13
assessment on the median income of Trump
supporters ($72,000), whereas the median
national income was about $56,000. Leaving
aside that class is not appropriately appre-
hended as a derivative of income, analysts like
Silver missed that whites’ median income in
2016 was $65,000! And if one considers that
whites earn more than nonwhites at all occu-
pations and educational levels (Wilson and
Rodgers 2016), we should not be surprised
by the higher median income of Trump sup-
porters. On the limitations of Silver’s analysis,
see Joan C. Williams’ (2017) White Working
Class.
15. For a wonderful critique of her book and the
arguments she presents, see Bhambra’s (2017)
“Brexit, Trump, and ‘methodological white-
ness’ on the misrecognition of race and class.”
16. Trump’s attack on Syria, lauded by pundits,
Republicans and Democrats, and most Western
nations, were a violation of international law.
See Julian’s (Ku 2017) “Trump’s Syria strike
clearly broke international law—and no one
seems to care.”
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