Eduardo Bonilla-Silva is an Afro-Puerto Rican professor of political sociology at Duke University. Born in Pennsylvania to academic parents in 1962, he was educated in Puerto Rico. In 1993, he earned his PhD from the University of Wisconsin–Madison where he had also earned his master’s degree. Before joining the faculty at Duke, he taught at the University of Michigan and later Texas A&M University. In 2011, he won the Cox-Johnson-Frazier Award from the American Sociological Association. He has written several articles in scholarly journals but is most famous for the book Racism Without Racists, a book based at least in part on his own research.

Bonilla-Silva was trained in Marxism, an ideology that still impacts his lectures and texts. Most of his professional work has concerned race and the way it is presented in public life. Specifically, in all his work he has argued that racism is about racial domination, making racism itself a collective, systemic, and structural phenomenon in society rather than merely the actions of individual racist actors. He has noted that racism is, thus, not the problem of a few bad apples but one of the entire tree being rotten.

Since publishing his work, other academics have cited him on numerous occasions and largely corroborated his theses.