New Orleans' black residents suffered as a result of racism — the racism that established black segregation and a crippling cycle of poverty. They also suffered because of the shortsightedness, neglect, and government incompetence that made the aftermath of Katrina worse than it had to be. It's natural to want to hold the available blameworthy parties responsible for all of these evils. But most of the racists responsible for the distinctly racial cast of the Katrina disaster are dead and gone.
And it is just such a rapier, and its wielding, that separates Ford from both lesser thinkers and writers, whether or not one believes President Bush is a racist — passive or not, nor whether there are other incidents in the President's life that might support such a claim. Ford's point is that Katrina alone may have just been an Occam's Razor example of the President's overall incompetence, not any deeper bigotry.
Yet, there are some stumbles, such as this take, in which Ford not only mangles the meaning of the term post-racist as used in modern society, especially on blogs and call-in cable TV and radio talk shows, but succumbs to his own version of cringe-worthy politcally correct gamesmanship (note the none too subtle uses of the feminized she for the gender neutral he):
A 2006 article in the arts and culture magazine Black Book announced the rise of a 'post-racist' culture. The term is too clever by half, but still evocative and compelling. Like 'postmodern' or 'postcolonial,' the prefix in post-racist doesn't suggest the demise of what it modifies — in this case racism. Instead, 'post' suggests a sort of supernova late stage of racism....The post-racist parodies racism, but she doesn't exactly repudiate it.
Fortunately, for every misstep like this there are a few dozen outstanding jabs like the piece quoted just prior to this one. Furthermore, by book's end, Ford returns to the very thing that I opened this review with — avoiding the pitfalls of how to end the book with a long list of unattainable prescriptions for society, save for suggesting that a government jobs program, similar to the Works Progress Administration, during the Great Depression, might be a start to alleviating the problem of black ghettoization. He even ends the book in an open-ended fashion which squarely tosses the issues he raises back in the laps of his readers, rather than the usual sociological proscriptions and neologisms that such books usually pass off as a form of wisdom from the mount.
Overall, The Race Card is one of the best written (stylistically), focused, and incisive books I've ever read on the subject of race in America. It is a work that avoids excessive delving into the supposed motives of people, and instead focuses on their actions, as well as explicating multiple ways of confronting an 'incident,' on racial, political, personal, and emotional levels. Perhaps only the long series of interview-based books dealing with race and class by Studs Terkel are as good, albeit they are so different in appeal and approach to this book that any real comparison is inept.
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