Richard Ford's THE RACE CARD in NYT Sunday Book Review

Politics Issue
The Big Blind
By ORLANDO PATTERSON
New York Times Sunday Book Review: February 10, 2008

THE RACE CARD: How Bluffing About Bias Makes Race Relations Worse.
By Richard Thompson Ford.
Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $26.

A few years ago, an American lady showed up late at an exclusive Parisian store and was turned away. The outraged shopper was Oprah Winfrey, who charged racial bias; a companion said it was “one of the most humiliating moments of her life.” Oprah may have been denied a prerogative of elite status in our new gilded age — being waited on in luxury stores after hours — but had she been the victim of racism?

In “The Race Card,” a sharp, tightly argued and delightfully contentious work, Richard Thompson Ford flatly disagrees, finding “something Orwellian” about Winfrey’s “egalitarian demand for one’s rightful position as V.I.P. — a civil rights claim to a colorblind hierarchy of the rich and famous.” Winfrey’s complaint, Ford writes, is typical of a class of grievances that has created a crisis in the social and legal meaning of race: playing the race card, defined as making “false or exaggerated claims of bias” that “piggyback on real instances of victimization.”

The sleazy Tawana Brawley episode — in which a young black woman apparently falsely claimed to have been raped and smeared with excrement by racists, and which her lawyers and Al Sharpton egregiously exploited — is of a piece with Clarence Thomas’s shameless accusation of a “high-tech lynching,” Michael Jackson’s claim that the low sales of one of his albums were due to a “racist conspiracy” by his record company, and explanations of the Hurricane Katrina disaster that attributed it to racism. Worse, even some whites now play the race card — recently, and ignobly, demonstrated by former President Bill Clinton — which threatens to become what Ford calls a “national patois,” a dangerous and shortsighted way of crying wolf that has the long-term effect of undermining valid complaints from those who still suffer genuine racial injury.

With a daring disregard for ideological propriety, Ford vivisects every sacred cow in “post-racist” America. Inevitably he overreaches, and he is occasionally quite wrong; but the end result is a vigorous and long-overdue shake-up of the nation’s stale discourse on race.

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