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In their 2001 article, Eduardo Bonilla-Silva and Gianpaolo Baiocchi highlighted myriad ways by which researchers limit the significance of racism in sociological studies. Specifically, they examined and critiqued methods sociologists use to study racial stratification as well as their tendency to report data in ways that fail to substantively describe the racial realities of minoritized1 populations. They noted how racism in the 1960s was defined as an egregious set of beliefs and attitudes that compelled racist persons (namely White supremacists) to discriminate against or knowingly harm members of racial groups they deemed inferior. Eminent critical race theorist Richard Delgado (1984) argues that minoritized persons typically "see racism as including institutional components that extend far beyond lynch mobs, segregated schools, or epithets like 'nigger' or 'spick'" (p. 571). Notwithstanding, Bonilla-Silva and Baiocchi observed that racism in contemporary research continues to be viewed as extreme acts committed by an ignorant or illintentioned few. In short supply, they maintain, are sociological studies that take into account structural/institutional racism as an explanatory factor for racial differences in various outcomes. Hence, like Harrell (2000) and Jones (2000), I define racism in this article as individual actions (both intentional and unconscious) that engender marginalization and inflict varying degrees of harm on minoritized persons; structures that determine and cyclically remanufacture racial inequity; and institutional norms that sustain White privilege and permit the ongoing subordination of minoritized persons.
In Delgado's (1984, 1992) examination of trends in law reviews and legal studies journals, he observed that White persons who wrote about racial inequities and civil rights often cited only each other's research and rarely that of minoritized scholars who had published scholarly articles on similar topics. As a result, they often made incomplete or erroneous assumptions in their writings about the complex social realities and policy needs of minoritized communities. Consistent with earlier published critiques regarding the mishandling of racism in sociological research (e.g., Ladner, 1973), Bonilla- Silva and Baiocchi (2001) sorted shortcomings of their discipline into four categories: (a) the limitations of surveys that seek to ascertain people's honest racial attitudes; (b) the failure of post-civil rights era indices to accurately measure contemporary racial progress; (c) ethnocentric frameworks that mask the centrality and power of race-based social networks; and (d) the limitations of...
