Lawrence D. Bobo, Professor of the Social Sciences at Harvard University, and Ryan Smith use this term to argue that the racial outlooks of white Americans have shifted from the more overtly racist Jim Crow attitudes – which endorsed school segregation, advocated for governmentally imposed discrimination, and embraced the idea that minorities were biologically inferior to whites – to a more subtle form of racism that continues to rationalize the ongoing problem of racial oppression in the United States.
[5] Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, who is a professor of sociology at Duke University, suggests that all groups of people in power construct these ideologies in order to justify social inequalities.
These ideologies help to reinforce the existing condition of affairs by concentrating on cultural distinctions as the cause of the inferior accomplishments of minorities in education and employment.
Jim Crow racism declined during the twentieth century, in part due to the Civil Rights Movement that challenged the notions of the biological inferiority of blacks.
[11] Laissez-faire racism of the post-civil rights era was formed through the successes of that movement, including the rejection of outright racist discourse.
Opponents of laissez-faire racism claim that those who refuse to accept social explanations for inequality also oppose attempts to prevent it.
[citation needed] According to Bobo, the slow progression from Jim Crow to laissez-faire racism can be measured in the trends for questions on racial principles.
Surveys and polls conducted in 1942 show a continuing increase among whites who support racial integration and equal rights.
Laissez-faire racism supports the idea of rugged individualism and dismisses oppression on the basis of racial discrimination as attitudinally based and generally questionable.
[14] David Kelley's work contrasts this idea of "rugged individualism" with a more accurate picture of the "unrugged individualism"[15] that allows for differentiation based on merit only in the voluntary sector of society, while still pointing out that society is not currently a meritocracy, so that meritocracy claims of those with state power cannot be held up as revealing all true merits on equal footing.
By refusing to acknowledge the hierarchy of race, class and gender in the United States, those in the position of dominance and power are able to downplay and ignore the realities of "oppression fashioned” prejudice (i.e., overt categorical hostility).
Three mutually reinforcing social processes—subtyping, ideology-based homophily, and political avoidance norms—interact to sustain whites’ sense of group superiority and justifications for racial inequity.
Dei explains that some of the benefits of white privilege include: the positive effects linked to having one's own race extensively and positively represented in the media; the idea that for the most part, your skin color will not prevent you from obtaining housing and employment; and, the knowledge that you will never have to educate your children about what it means to be "different" or negatively represented in society.
[17] Racial preferences have come under intense scrutiny for the past decade by those who don't see a need for the program, often calling it racist and accusing it of seeking to punish Asians and whites.
The color-blind ideals would make racial preferences unnecessary because it is based on the idea that we live in a society where race is neither acknowledged nor important.
However, according to Dei, these ideas fail to accept the long history of racism that has left its imprint on the lives and opportunities of minorities in the United States.
Second, Bobo states that symbolic racism is also explicitly based on the idea of the sociocultural theory of prejudice, which places its central meaning on the "psychological affective" nature of racist attitudes.