aTypical Joe: a gay New Yorker living in the rural South

Saturday, March 08, 2008

Race Card crackles with insight

I just ordered THE RACE CARD: How Bluffing About Bias Makes Race Relations Worse from Amazon. I’ll be reading it on a Spring Break trip to New Orleans in a couple weeks.

It’s reviewed in tomorrow’s WaPo:

When Ford delves into the intricacies of post-racist America, the book crackles with insight and pierces the pieties of left and right. His discussion of employment discrimination doctrine is a masterful primer for the general reader, coupling a cogent critique of “color-blindness” with a provocative argument—explored at length in his 2004 book Racial Culture: A Critique-- that workplace bias against seemingly race-specific behavior is not necessarily racism. A neutral corporate grooming code, for example, may keep African American women from wearing cornrows, but to Ford, a hairstyle has to be regarded as “freely chosen behavior.” To say it’s a racial trait would make any “failure to tolerate nonmainstream norms and practices . . . racism-like bias” and would destroy the political consensus behind anti-discrimination laws.

Similarly, he defends affirmative action with an old-fashioned commitment to integration and the assimilative function of a university education, rather than the “questionable and convoluted justification” of diversity.

The legacy of Jim Crow is more pervasive than Ford allows. He suggests, for example, that the incompetent response to Hurricane Katrina can be attributed to President Bush’s narrow political self-interest, not to his racism. But Ford doesn’t address the modern Republican Party’s calculated strategy to become the party of segregationists and white Southerners. Similarly, if discrimination against Spanish speakers seems distinct from race in the abstract, language was an unsubtle proxy for race in segregated schools, workplaces and jury pools in the American Southwest for much of the 20th century. But this history only heightens the urgency of today’s problems, to which Ford, in his pragmatic and passionate effort to redefine civil rights, brings a jolt of clarity.

NYTimes reviews are here and here; excerpts here, here and here; the first chapter here; purchase it here. Ford interviewd by Stephen Colbert here.