Richard Thompson Ford Reviews WHAT OBAMA MEANS in Washington Post

Reviewed by Richard Thompson Ford
Sunday, January 18, 2009; Washington Post

WHAT OBAMA MEANS

For Our Culture, Our Politics, Our Future

By Jabari Asim

Morrow. 223 pp. $21.99

Barack Obama's historic struggle to become the nation's first black president is over, but the fight over the meaning of his victory has only begun.

In What Obama Means -- one of what will certainly be many efforts to interpret and define the Obama phenomenon -- Jabari Asim argues that Obama's victory is the culmination of decades of black political struggle, social advancement and cultural achievement. Obama promises to continue this cultural transformation with a new style of racial politics: more productive and less antagonistic than that of the "charlatans and camera hogs with whom we are all too familiar" (a group in which the Reverends Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson figure prominently) but no less committed to social justice. Asim, editor of the NAACP's journal the Crisis and former deputy editor of Book World, insists that Obama is the latest and most inspiring of a long line of "dedicated champions of black advancement." Because of Obama "it's becoming cool to be thoughtful, temperate and monogamous," writes Asim, and Americans "may come to associate blackness with brilliance, thoughtfulness, confidence, and radical optimism."

By contrast, Obama's detractors, left and right, have suggested that the new president inevitably will be limited by the racial politics of the past. Last year the conservative commentator Shelby Steele argued in A Bound Man that Obama was tethered, by his liberal ideology and racial loyalty, to a counterproductive politics of grievance that exaggerates white racism and denies the need for individual responsibility among blacks. By contrast, left-leaning black social commentators such as Cornel West, Tavis Smiley and Jesse Jackson have complained that, to win elections, Obama pandered to white voters, ignoring his responsibility to blacks.

For the rest of Richard Thompson Ford's review, click here.

Richard Ford's THE RACE CARD a Slate Best Book of '08

Pad Out Your Amazon Wish ListSlate picks the best books of 2008.
Posted Tuesday, Dec. 16, 2008, at 7:40 AM ET

Dahlia Lithwick, senior editor
Amid a flock of excellent legal books this year, two are really outstanding in my view. The first is Jane Mayer's The Dark Side. The second is my former law professor Richard Ford's The Race Card. Ford asks a simple question: How can claims of racism—in the courtroom, the media, and casual conversation—be so pervasive in America if so few of us are racists? His answers are provocative: Much of what we call racism is the result of racist decisions made decades ago with respect to housing, education, or urban planning. Cab drivers who refuse to pick up black men may be motivated by factors beyond racial hate—like not wanting to drop someone off in a bad part of town. The Race Card advances a debate that has been mired in reductive thinking for decades. You won't agree with Ford on everything. But you may find yourself thinking differently about everything. And that's my definition of a great book.

Richard Thompson Ford's THE RACE CARD a NY TIMES Notable Book of 2008

100 Notable Books of 2008
The New York Times, November 26, 2008

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.

To see the full list, click here.

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.

For the rest of the article, click here.

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.

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.” ♦

For the article, please click here.

Richard Thompson Ford, author of THE RACE CARD, on the Colbert Report

To see the Colbert interview, click here.