Book Review: The Race Card — How Bluffing About Bias Makes Race Relations Worse by Richard Thompson Ford - Page 2

Yet, Ford does not just make his case by using examples, for he dissects these incidents, as well as more cogent, if unknown, legal cases, with a rapier that is not easily defined by any political label, merely a consistency of rationale. At times, some readers may feel that Ford is too detailed, but given the hairsplitting nature of so many claims about race — from racial supremacist theories to the rights and wrongs of race baiting, this is hardly a grand flaw in the book, if one at all.

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.

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