Richard Thompson Ford THE RACE CARD Briefly Noted in New Yorker

Books Briefly Noted
The Race Card
by Richard Thompson Ford (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; $26)
New Yorker, March 10, 2008

Ford, a professor of law at Stanford, argues that ubiquitous accusations of discrimination in the United States frequently distract from serious racial injustices, which, in the ambivalent aftermath of the civil-rights era, “stem from isolation, poverty, and lack of socialization as much as from intentional discrimination or racism.” Drawing on examples from popular culture and the law, Ford guides the reader through the worst of these abuses, and articulates a bold strategy for dealing with systematic injustice in a world of “racism without racists.” Ford’s pragmatic approach will irk those for whom ideological concerns are uppermost, but few would object to his emphasis on the need for long-term solutions to persistent segregation and poverty or to his call for discussion of “the more ambiguous cases of bias in the cool tone of technical expertise rather than in the heated cadence of moral judgment.” ♦

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