Abstract
How do today’s normative tools for understanding and discussing race and racism constrain and enable people’s lived experiences of diversity? That is the question that Meghan Burke set out to answer while a graduate student in Chicago. Burke became intrigued with how whites express “racial ambivalence”—a simultaneous and even contradictory commitment to both “color-blind” beliefs in which race is thought not to matter, alongside a commitment to racial diversity and an appreciation for racial justice. From 2007 to 2008, Burke examined this dichotomy through snowball sampling and in-depth interview techniques with a small number of residents in three racially diverse communities on Chicago’s Northeast side: 12 in Rogers Park, 17 in Edgewater, and 12 in Uptown.
Six chapters compose Racial Ambivalence in Diverse Communities. The first is an introduction to the topic and an overview of Burke’s rationale for her theoretical and methodological decisions. It also contains a small glance at how Burke’s study fits among scholarship of classic sociological examinations of Chicago—from Gitlin and Hollander’s Uptown: Poor Whites in Chicago (1970) to Maly’s Beyond Segregation (2006). Chapter Two provides an understanding of each neighborhood in relation to the demographic and economic shifts of the past three decades. Moreover, it focuses on how residents’ political and social ideologies have changed and become, at times, marshaled toward specific engagements with block clubs or community councils that consistently debate four main topics: safety, commercial development, social events, and justice. These areas provided a platform for Burke to wrestle with the “… complex web of thought and discussion that takes place around issues of race and diversity in these communities, as these residents work to navigate competing values such as color-blindness and diversity” (p. 54).
Accordingly, Chapter Three sets out to show the extent to which color-blind ideologies are embraced in these supposedly liberal and diverse areas of Rogers Park, Edgewater, and Uptown. Burke finds that most whites are complicit with the “frames” of color-blindness, à la Eduardo Bonilla-Silva’s (2013) account of “abstract liberalism,” the “minimization of racism,” “cultural racism,” and the “naturalization of racism.” Burke argues that many whites have a strong reliance on coded racial discourse in order to communicate racialized meanings and signals without overtly discussing race or expressing racism. Yet, some of her interviewees were not adept at employing such coded race talk and became quite incoherent—a finding echoed by Bonilla-Silva’s analysis that whites often stumble in their speech in an effort to conceal racism. Yet, Burke departs from this analysis to demonstrate how such disjointed discourse may be the result of her interviewees’ dual commitment to color-blindness and diversity: “… they are by and large committed to the racial diversity in this community. Color-blindness leaves them trapped. Incoherence is their voice trying to escape” (p. 92).
Chapter Four delves farther into racialized discourse and how these residents’ deep-seated commitment to living in a racially diverse community is structured by white normative behavior and beliefs that end up unintentionally preserving white advantages. In specific, “diversity” became objectified in nonracial aspects of life such as music or food that was happily consumed by whites who would then point to these practices as evidence of their nonracist and progressive ways. It is here, again drawing from Bonilla-Silva and colleagues (2006), that Burke argues that diversity is distilled into narrow practices that reproduce white dominance because of a “white habitus.” Appropriating Bourdieu, the white habitus is a set of sensibilities and habits that conflate white advantages as normative and which in turn are the “engine of color-blind ideologies” (p. 117).
Chapter Five then moves from white discourse into white identity. Burke shows how white racial identity can, in key moments, become non-normative and cannot be taken for granted. This chapter, perhaps the most sophisticated and interesting segment of the book, examines an array of issues, from whites’ ability to “code-switch” (a shifting acknowledgment of whites’ own racial privilege), intra-white racial boundary-making in which whites articulate and castigate other whites’ racialized choices, and the use of “othering stories” that whites tell to express an appreciation for diversity and to disrupt color-blind political correctness.
Burke then advances a final chapter that is as much a critique of Elijah Anderson’s Cosmopolitan Canopy (2011) as it is summary, recommendations for national and local policy initiatives, and call for future research directions. Burke’s work is a good read. It demonstrates that whites need not flock together in homogeneous spaces for the operation of color-blind racism to rear its ugly head. A critique of liberal and progressive communities and their supposed good intentions are much needed in the sociology of race and ethnicity, and Burke sets a strong agenda toward that end.
Yet, I was struck by several shortcomings in her analysis. First, residents in Rogers Park numbered 54,991; 56,521 in Edgewater, and 56,362 in Uptown by 2010. Interviewing 12, 17, and 12 of them, respectively, seems severely limited. Second, and in consort with the latter, while Burke’s focus was on whiteness and white identity, we would benefit from the voices of more people of color. Out of her 41 interviewees, 30 were white; 2 people of color were interviewed from Rogers Park, 6 from Edgewater, and 3 from Uptown. While Burke does not seek statistical generalizability, I am skeptical that a theoretical saturation point was reached for this qualitative study in relation to the variation of different racialized groups’ embrace of racial ambivalence within and between these communities. Third, Burke’s patterned buttressing of Bonilla-Silva’s ideas reads more as supplication to the theory of “color-blind racism” than as novel work. I do not wish to overstate my last point. Burke’s work shines brilliantly on its own when she focuses on her empirical illumination of the causal mechanisms and operational nuance within the operation of color-blind ideologies. That is, when she demonstrates why and how such color-blind frames become salient and what structural conditions and intersecting variables facilitate their operation, her book affords new and important insights—see for example the aforementioned discussion of discursive incoherence or whites’ code-switching.
Limitations aside, Burke pushes in a new direction rarely seen in sociology—the link between racial ideology and social outcomes, especially in relation to the literature examining “diversity.” Racial Ambivalence in Diverse Communities shows how the tensions between the Scylla of color-blindness and the Charybdis of diversity leave many torn and vexed—how can one advocate for racial justice while abiding by both the hegemonic confines of neighborhood expectations and the economic pull of protecting one’s propertied interests? Burke thus sets an important agenda for the investigation of authentic interracial comradeship and cooperation in future work: “That people find such pleasure in diversity is a positive sign … In fact, I find that pleasure vital. Without it, key venues of support for racially diverse communities and the democratization and social justice that I think they must entail are academic, esoteric, and unlikely to move people to change” (p. 162).