The New York Times selected Richard Thompson Ford's The Race Card, in which "Ford vivisects every sacred cow in 'post-racist' America", as one of their 100 Notable Books of 2008.
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.
A few years ago, an American lady showed up late at an exclusive Parisian store and was turned away. The outraged shopper was Oprah Winfrey, who charged racial bias; a companion said it was “one of the most humiliating moments of her life.” Oprah may have been denied a prerogative of elite status in our new gilded age — being waited on in luxury stores after hours — but had she been the victim of racism?
In “The Race Card,” a sharp, tightly argued and delightfully contentious work, Richard Thompson Ford flatly disagrees, finding “something Orwellian” about Winfrey’s “egalitarian demand for one’s rightful position as V.I.P. — a civil rights claim to a colorblind hierarchy of the rich and famous.” Winfrey’s complaint, Ford writes, is typical of a class of grievances that has created a crisis in the social and legal meaning of race: playing the race card, defined as making “false or exaggerated claims of bias” that “piggyback on real instances of victimization.”
The sleazy Tawana Brawley episode — in which a young black woman apparently falsely claimed to have been raped and smeared with excrement by racists, and which her lawyers and Al Sharpton egregiously exploited — is of a piece with Clarence Thomas’s shameless accusation of a “high-tech lynching,” Michael Jackson’s claim that the low sales of one of his albums were due to a “racist conspiracy” by his record company, and explanations of the Hurricane Katrina disaster that attributed it to racism. Worse, even some whites now play the race card — recently, and ignobly, demonstrated by former President Bill Clinton — which threatens to become what Ford calls a “national patois,” a dangerous and shortsighted way of crying wolf that has the long-term effect of undermining valid complaints from those who still suffer genuine racial injury.
With a daring disregard for ideological propriety, Ford vivisects every sacred cow in “post-racist” America. Inevitably he overreaches, and he is occasionally quite wrong; but the end result is a vigorous and long-overdue shake-up of the nation’s stale discourse on race.
You want to pick a fight? Call someone a racist. Few labels hit so hard or bring up so many deep feelings. It's a dark stain on someone's character. Then-Los Angeles police Detective Mark Fuhrman was accused at the O.J. Simpson trial of using racial epithets, and after Hurricane Katrina, rapper Kanye West said President Bush "hates black people."
According to Stanford law Professor Richard Thompson Ford of San Francisco, the national dialogue on race needs to change. In his recently published book "The Race Card," he argues that when people talk about race relations, they too quickly try to ferret out racism without looking at the larger issues. In doing so, they leave open the possibility that opportunists will unfairly paint someone as a racist to further their political ends, while de-legitimizing some very real problems.
"I decided to write the book out of dismay and frustration with the way questions of racial injustice are typically taken up," Ford says. "Right now, we tend to deal with questions of race and race relations in the context of scandal. There's not much conversation about the day-to-day issues with racial tensions and injustices."
Ford takes apart some of the more prominent recent scandals, such as the treatment of Hurricane Katrina victims and the dispute between hip-hop mogul Jay-Z and the makers of Cristal Champagne. He also digs into older ones, like the Clarence Thomas/Anita Hill Supreme Court confirmation hearings and the O.J. Simpson trial, to show how complicated events got reduced to screaming headlines.
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.
Today's race relations,” law professor Ford demonstrates, “are more complex and contradictory than those of the unambiguously white supremacist past.” In this journey through a political minefield, he examines dubious charges of racism and other kinds of bias, while acknowledging that exaggerated claims can piggyback on real examples of victimization. But the author's tenor is often more eye-catching than eye-opening. He revisits Tawana Brawley, Clarence Thomas, O.J. Simpson and Hurricane Katrina, along with Oprah's Hermès problem, Jay-Z's with champagne and Danny Glover's with New York City cabdrivers. Yet at its core, this book raises probing questions about the extent to which “the extraordinary social and legal condemnation of racism and other social prejudices encourages people to recast what are basically run-of-the-mill social conflicts as cases of bigotry.” By analogy, he addresses issues concerning animal liberation, gay marriage, “appearance discrimination,” “sex harassment law” and multiculturalism. In delineating the differences between formal discrimination, discriminatory intent and discriminatory effects, Ford also reviews thorny legal cases involving, for example, McDonnell Douglas and Price Waterhouse. Readers all along the political spectrum will find much to please, annoy and provoke thought about the thin “line between invidious discrimination and plan old unfairness.” (Feb.)
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