Laissez-faire racism is closely related to color blindness and covert racism, and is theorised to encompass an ideology that blames minorities for their poorer economic situations, viewing it as the result of cultural inferiority.
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The term is used largely by scholars of whiteness studies, who argue that laissez-faire racism has tangible consequences even though few would openly claim to be, or even believe they are, laissez-faire racists.
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Laissez-faire racism has two main ideas: first, the belief in the melting pot and America's assertion of ideas of equal opportunity, regardless of race.
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Second, laissez-faire racism encompasses the ideology of how individual deficiencies explain the problems of entire social groups.
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Tarca explains that whites tend to view laissez-faire racism as being beneficial to people of color, while many minorities believe that these ideologies contrast and ignore the realities facing many minorities in America.
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Jim Crow Laissez-faire racism declined during the twentieth century, in part due to the Civil Rights Movement that challenged the notions of the biological inferiority of blacks.
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However, according to Dei, these ideas fail to accept the long history of Laissez-faire racism that has left its imprint on the lives and opportunities of minorities in the United States.
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Many people who express the laissez-faire attitude towards racism oppose racial preferences on the grounds that they highlight differences in society when we should focus on making America more colorblind, asserting that they believe in equal rights for minorities, and oppose racial discrimination.
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Symbolic Laissez-faire racism, which is a term connected with the work of David O Sears, Professor of Psychology and Political Science at UCLA, and his associate Donald Kinder, is a mix of racist ideals combined with the traditional American moral standards connected with Protestant ethical values.
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Second, Bobo states that symbolic Laissez-faire racism is explicitly based on the idea of the sociocultural theory of prejudice, which places its central meaning on the "psychological affective" nature of racist attitudes.
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