Richard Ford's THE RACE CARD Reviewed in NYT

Books of The Times
Colorblind Conclusions on Racism
By WILLIAM GRIMES
New York Times: February 6, 2008

THE RACE CARD
How Bluffing About Bias Makes Race Relations Worse
By Richard Thompson Ford
Farrar, Straus & Giroux. 388 pages. $26.

A black man stands on a street corner in Manhattan and waves for a taxi, and the driver speeds by. Is this racism? The actor Danny Glover thought so, and he took his case to the public and city regulators, resulting in a citywide crackdown on wary cabbies in the late 1990s. But what if he got it wrong?

In “The Race Card” Richard Thompson Ford, a professor at Stanford Law School, offers the cabdriver problem as a classic illustration of why racial prejudice is so hard to identify and address in an era he defines as postracist, when the social and legal meaning of racism, he writes, “is in a state of crisis.”

Racism, Mr. Ford argues, has not disappeared, but the civil rights movement has made it contemptible in the eyes of most Americans. Changes in the law have introduced penalties for overt discrimination. Consequently, current racial conflicts tend to involve “ambiguous facts and inscrutable motives.” They also encourage playing the race card to achieve emotional satisfaction or tactical advantage.

In the cabdriver phenomenon, for example, many drivers who refuse to stop for black passengers are themselves black, Mr. Ford points out, and others are Asian or Middle Eastern. Some are motivated not by antipathy toward blacks but by a fear of being asked to drive into a dangerous neighborhood. Some are rushing to return their cabs to the depot.

Richard Ford, pictured left.

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