Equally complex a subject matter, however, that Ford excels at putting into both a cultural and legal context, is the rise of the political correctness — or multiculturalism movement of the last two decades. Ford laments how many of its proponents have so severely twisted their notions of rights that they have tried to enact legal constructs to protect 'cultural purity' by attempting to garner legal protections for segregated housing on university campuses, de facto arguing that integration, assimilation, social engineering, and all the fights against redlining and legal discrimination in housing were, in effect, worthless, and that separate but equal was perversely correct. Naturally, such notions have only allowed many of the purveyors of power to justify their own racist beliefs by pointing to the fact that the so-called victims of bigotry actually endorse the same ideas that the enablers and profiteers of bigotry do.
Yet, Ford is not only taking shots at nebulous nobodies, as he takes on those black celebrities who play the race card. Aside from the vapidly manifest examples of an Al Sharpton or Oprah Winfrey, he takes dead aim at one of the leading black intellectuals in the country, Princeton University religion professor Cornel West (who often as not portrays himself as a heinous cross between two of the nation's most noted recent charlatans — a leaner version of the aforementioned Al Sharpton, and a tanner version of mythological bamboozler Joseph Campbell), who also wrote a book dealing with race, 1993's Race Matters.
What is so impressive about Ford's gripe against West is that Ford simply allows West's own words reveal his own race baiting by virtue of the unconscious ways the noted racial provocateur deploys modifiers. In West's own words he describes his frustrations over not being picked up by a Manhattan taxicab. Naturally, he ascribes this solely to racism, even though Ford parses West's own words, where he writes he left his own 'rather elegant' auto in a 'safe' parking lot, then waited at a nearby corner on Park Avenue, trying to hail a cab that would take him to Harlem. West claims that, after nine taxi's drove by, he got angry.
Yet, Ford opines, if West himself decided it was unsafe to drive his own car to the crime-ridden area, and made sure enough it was squirreled away in a parking lot that was "safe," how can he then charge other people — the cabbies, who also do not want to venture into such a neighborhood, with racism, when he, a black man, is manifestly guilty of the same fears they are — motivated by crime, not race?
And, aside from the more nebulous claims of racism on the individual level — be it celebrity or anonymous plaintiff, Ford also delves into the "big issues," like the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, which let a social disaster follow a natural one, and which displayed unadorned racism of the old sort, wherein a white couple pictured with stolen goods was captioned to elicit sympathy while a black man was captioned to elicit a fearful reaction. He writes:
The black guy is a looter, a gangbanger, a stone-cold Crip out for an easy score. Isn't that a boom box in his hand? Oh, wait, it's a pack of diapers. The white couple: Jeannie and Jean Valjean, driven by adversity to take a loaf of bread, no doubt to feed their small children who are, unfortunately, just outside the frame. I bet they even left their names and telephone numbers and a note apologizing.
Yet, Ford does not concur, and ends the digression on Katrina like this, after discoursing on his claim of "racism without racists":
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