Richard Thompson Ford's THE RACE CARD in The Nation

Hearts and Minds
By Thomas J. Sugrue

This article appeared in the May 12, 2008 edition of The Nation.

In The Race Card, Richard Thompson Ford, a professor at Stanford Law School, grapples with our myopic focus on individual racist thoughts and actions rather than persistent structural inequality. Ford chronicles our impoverished racial discourse, in which "cheap theatricality stands in for valuable insight" and "simplistic dogma masquerades as analysis." Though he doesn't use the term, Ford describes a sort of false consciousness wherein personal slights, interpersonal disputes and legitimate differences of opinion are elevated to the status of racism.

Ford plucks his examples from the garish world of celebrity culture: O.J. Simpson's attorneys painting him as a victim of a racist conspiracy; Oprah Winfrey turning a rude encounter with snobby French salesclerks at an Hermès shop in Paris into a cause célèbre; and rapper Jay-Z's boycott of Cristal Champagne because its corporate flack dissed "'hip hop' culture." There is more than a little sensationalistic fluff padding Ford's accounts of spurious charges of racism (do we really need another rehash of "If the glove doesn't fit, you must acquit"?). But when he gets into real-life examples, such as taxi drivers refusing to pick up black passengers (it's the logical consequence of persistent residential segregation, concentrated poverty and crime, not usually the bad intentions of cabdrivers), and the disparate racial impact of Hurricane Katrina (the real villain here is not George Bush but instead systematic racial segregation, the marginalization of the black poor and long-term disinvestment), his insights are bracing. Ford also challenges the slippery ways that aggrieved individuals (including the obese, people with tattoos and piercings, and white critics of affirmative action) have created a politics and jurisprudence of prejudice analogous to racism. "Fat is not the new black," Ford argues, dismantling arguments that when airlines require overweight passengers to pay for two seats or gymnasiums decline to hire a person of size to run an exercise class, it is the equivalent of systematic Jim Crow. "Weightism and looksism aren't problems of social order or of social injustice," as were laws that excluded blacks as a group from the full prerogatives of citizenship.

Ford's critique of the race card is rooted in a larger, institutional understanding of racial discrimination. "Our tools for describing, analyzing, and righting racial injustice assume that racial injustices are the work of racists," he writes. Such tools create confusion when applied to what Ford provocatively calls "racism without racists," which is what occurs when people get trapped in the legacies of discriminatory policies. The result is disabling. The scandal-hungry media feast on ridiculous or exaggerated charges of racism while ignoring the real problems of racial inequality in their midst. Whenever the race card gets played, by either a multiculturalist or an opponent of affirmative action, it trivializes racial inequality and oppression and harms the cause of civil rights: "Practices that create a permanent underclass," he writes, "are unjust in a different and more profound way" than isolated, arbitrary acts of prejudice. Fingering a few bigots--rightly or wrongly--does nothing to challenge pervasive educational and housing segregation, the black-white wealth and health gaps, or the disproportionate impact of the prison-industrial complex on young black men.

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