While most readers are well aware of the history of the past six years (the history that prompted Eduardo Bonilla-Silva to revise Racism Without Racists), it is important to consider the context for the first editions of the book. Bonilla-Silva does an excellent job of briefly outlining the history of slavery, Jim Crow, and the civil rights movement, and he does an equally outstanding job of explaining the viewpoints of white people in the moment (the era of the late 1990s to the present), but he only briefly glosses over the gaps in racial eras and the way political actors defined that gap period as expressed in several books listed in the works cited below.

Between the late 1960s and the present, the political right in the United States was on the ascendant. Historians often use a push-pull interpretation of history, and such an ideology would work like this: the era of the 1960s pushed too far left, and so a conservative pullback happened. This new conservative movement broke up the New Deal coalition, which was a dominant voting bloc made up of geographically split laborers, the middle-class, Black people, and farmers.