Richard Thompson Ford's THE RACE CARD Reviewed in Washington Post

Crying Wolf
A law professor argues that it's dangerous to make unfounded claims of racism.

Reviewed by Daniel J. Sharfstein
Sunday, March 9, 2008; Washington Post

THE RACE CARD

How Bluffing About Bias Makes Race Relations Worse

By Richard Thompson Ford. Farrar Straus Giroux. 388 pp. $26

I've been accused of being a racist once in my life, shortly after a street vendor in Dakar, Senegal, asked the equivalent of $50 for a seashell glued onto a piece of maroon leather. I was 22 and no expert on African art, but this tchotchke did not look like a big-ticket item. When I declined in halting French, the man leaned close, looked me right in the eye and said, "Why do you hate black people?" After a slow second of guilty panic, I walked on, chalking up that exchange to the glory of capitalism. Given the sensitivities of young white Americans traveling through West Africa, the accusation was smart business.

In The Race Card, Stanford Law professor Richard Thompson Ford suggests that there is an equally robust market for unfounded claims of racism in the United States, but the consequences are more serious. As Ford sees it, the successes of anti-discrimination laws and the civil rights movement not only have encouraged African Americans to overplay the race card, but have also spawned legions of dubious imitators. For example, Michael Jackson accused Sony of a "racist conspiracy" when his album sales slackened. And People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals compared beef industry practices to slavery and lynching. As a result, legitimate claims of bias are undermined and political capital is diverted from what Ford terms "the persistent and destructive legacy of overt racism of the past": segregated schools and neighborhoods and epidemic levels of poverty, unemployment and imprisonment.

For the rest of Daniel J. Sharfstein's review, click here.