Eduardo Bonilla Silva

Education and career

Bonilla-Silva received his BA in sociology and economics from the University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras Campus in 1984, and his MA and PhD from the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1987 and 1993, respectively. He taught at the University of Michigan from 1993–1998 and at Texas A&M University from 1998–2005, after which he joined the Duke faculty.

Work and views

Bonilla-Silva is known for researching the role of race in public life. In 2004, he published the book Racism Without Racists: Colorblind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in the United States, which discusses his view that systemic racism is a major problem in the United States, despite the fact that Americans do not do or say something overtly racist on a regular basis. As of 2014, it was his best-selling book. He has said that systemic racism in the United States did not disappear in the 1970s, as many Americans believe, but merely became less overt and harder to identify. He has also blamed the fact that formerly all-white colleges in the United States did not change their curriculum or culture after integrating for racist incidents re-occurring on the campuses of these colleges. He has described these colleges as "historically white", and has said that this problem is not one of bad apples, but that it may be one of the entire apple tree.

Awards

Bonilla-Silva received the 2011 Cox-Johnson-Frazier Award from the American Sociological Association (ASA). In 2009, he and Tukufu Zuberi both received the Oliver C. Cox Award from the ASA's Section on Racial and Ethnic Minorities for their book White Logic, White Methods: Racism and Methodology.