Richard Ford's THE RACE CARD Reviewed by Associated Press

Book shows problems with the 'race card'

By THERESA BRADLEY,
Associated Press, Tue Feb 5, 2:53 PM ET

"The Race Card: How Bluffing About Bias Makes Race Relations Worse" (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 388 pages, $26), by Richard Thompson Ford: The fight against racism is nearing a crossroads, a "crisis of success" that's blurring definitions of discrimination and allowing insidious injustices to persist unaddressed.
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As the clearest cases of bigotry have faded with civil rights' progress, our old ways of fighting bias are dangerously outdated but inspiring a host of impostors to co-opt their methods nonetheless.

In his book "The Race Card: How Bluffing About Bias Makes Race Relations Worse," Stanford University law professor Richard Thompson Ford outlines this new ambiguity and one of its most unfortunate results: the race card.

Drawing irrelevant references to race, the race card magnifies minority status or seeks to blame problems on bias, oversimplifying serious social issues to advance self-interest in the name of justice, Ford says.

An example: O.J. Simpson cast the cops as racist and was cleared.

"The race card is symptomatic of a real crisis in the way we currently think and talk about race: a crisis born of our failure to keep up with a changing social world," Ford writes. Because we assume racial wrongs are the work of individual bigots, "when there's no one to blame, we find ourselves without relevant ideas."



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