When Ford does get speculative, it is never too over the edge. As example, a good portion of the book is devoted to debunking racism by analogy, as Ford lambastes people who support animal rights, gay marriage, fat and looks discrimination, and much of multiculturata. Likely the section that will engender the most criticism is that which deals with sexual harassment — in one case, Ford goes to great lengths dissecting a case of a warden of a female prison who basically made the female officers his sexual playthings in order to advance. A woman who filed a sexual harassment suit lost because Ford explains the difference between his actually explicitly asking her for sexual favors, and merely creating an environment where her path to success (and those of male officers whom the warden had no sexual interest in) was allegedly hindered.

Much of this example, and others, will cause argument, both over their relevance and Ford's stances on them, and I certainly do not agree with all of Ford's posits; but he never dwells on a single case too long to bore one, and he mixes and matches his examples and points enough to keep a reader wondering just what more will Ford reveal of judicial and legal nuances, such as the difference between formal discrimination, discriminatory intent, and mere discriminatory effects — something Ford terms 'racism without racists.' This condition he relates as a result of not direct racism, but from 'isolation, poverty, and lack of socialization as much as from intentional discrimination or racism.'

While zealots on both sides of the race issue — be they supremacists, or more likely, these days, folk claiming 'reverse racism,' racial opportunists, opponents of Affirmative Action, multiculturalists, pseudo-rights organizations, or those selfish individuals playing the race card for murky reasons, Ford's solutions and common sense approaches are sure to evoke a backlash 'with us or against us' cry, and a label as the aforementioned liberal apologist or Uncle Tom.

Yet, these very labels, and the urges to toss them with ease, on both sides of the political spectrum, are at the heart of what motivates the idea and usage of the race card to obscure more important issues. Especially guilty of this are those people and groups who accuse others of a 'racism by analogy' — i.e.-- the assorted other dubious –isms out there, like looksism or weightism. People in those groups try to leach off of genuine rights protections afforded by the assorted Civil Rights legislation of the 1960s, which prevent discrimination based upon race, color, sex, ethnicity, or religion, things which can cause problems of a social order.

Ford deftly flays such haughtiness by noting manifest things as there never having been riots of ugly nor fat people, despite the latter group's spurious claim that 'fat is the new black;' because one cannot change one's race, whereas weight maintenance is merely a personal challenge, albeit often a difficult one. He also zeroes in on the problem of fat people trying to pay only one fare on airplanes, even if they physically take up two seats, and one obese, black woman's lawsuit which first had her claim weight discrimination, then switch to race discrimination when the first option failed legal scrutiny. Such an example lays bare an old adage that I have wielded myself, that 'taking offense is always a conscious choice' on the part of an individual, and usually is done so to try to leverage guilt for recompense (financial or emotional) of one sort or another.

Aside from the immanent silliness of such trivial claims and lawsuits (and the author really tattoos PETA, the animal rights group, for employing convenient old time racism in service to their cause), Ford argues that they give cover to real acts of discrimination with the old 'boy who cried wolf' claim made by the real bigots, who try to cover up their sins by pointing to the mounting cases of these forms of the race card which distract the public from the real issues that need addressing. Aside from the concision of his arguments, Ford's writing style is concise, occasionally witty, but, most of all, intelligent, as he uses his knowledge of the law not to preen but to elucidate. As example, on the aforementioned: