Racists without racism? From colourblind to entitlement racism online

ABSTRACT

While colourblind racism has defined the post-Civil Rights era, there has been little evaluation of how everyday social actors conceptualize racism following the recent rise in overt racism and racist hate crimes. To evaluate if colourblind racism remains a central interpretive framework, I analyse 60 interviews with young adults about their experiences of racism. I argue that overt racism experienced online is a key feature of respondents’ everyday lives, which challenges their adoption of a colourblind framework. Yet, few classify their experiences as racism. I use Essed’s concept of entitlement racism to explain how respondents make sense of this “racists without racism” situation – by invoking the “right to be racist” online. Though colourblind frameworks are not used, the racial order is nevertheless ideologically justified by entitlement racism. By showing how racism is experienced online, this work holds implications for how sociologists theorize and address racism in the contemporary era.

KEYWORDS:

• Colourblind racism
• entitlement racism
• digital sociology
• qualitative sociology
• everyday racism
• online racism

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Scholars working from a DisCrit framework have critiqued race scholars’ pervasive use of the metaphor of blindness in “conflating a lack of sight with a lack of knowing” (Annamma, Jackson, and Morrison 2016). The colourblind metaphor (1) bolsters ableist views of people who deviate from the norm as inherently deficient, and (2) from an intersectional perspective, obscures the ways ableism and racism contribute to the oppression of people of colour with disabilities (Annamma, Jackson, and Morrison 2016; Frederick and Shifrer 2019).