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:
Taking every racial issue personally can blind us to the many racial injustices for which no one is to blame. If every racial injustice entitles its victims to lambaste the person nearest to hand, then when there is no racist to blame, it follows that there must be no injustice. As racial politics increasingly focuses on trivial slights, innocent slips of the tongue, and even well-intentioned if controversial decisions, the most severe injustices — such as the isolation of a largely black underclass in hopeless ghettos or even more hopeless prisons — receive comparatively little attention because we can't find a bigot to paste to the dartboard.
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