Thursday, February 07, 2008


Colorblind Conclusions on Racism

From The New York Times,February 6, 2008
A black man stands on a street corner in Manhattan and waves for a taxi, and the driver speeds by. Is this racism? The actor Danny Glover thought so, and he took his case to the public and city regulators, resulting in a citywide crackdown on wary cabbies in the late 1990s. But what if he got it wrong?

Richard Thompson Ford (left)


THE RACE CARD
How Bluffing About Bias Makes Race Relations Worse
By Richard Thompson Ford
Farrar, Straus & Giroux. 388 pages. $26

In “The Race Card” Richard Thompson Ford, a professor at Stanford Law School, offers the cabdriver problem as a classic illustration of why racial prejudice is so hard to identify and address in an era he defines as postracist, when the social and legal meaning of racism, he writes, “is in a state of crisis.”
Racism, Mr. Ford argues, has not disappeared, but the civil rights movement has made it contemptible in the eyes of most Americans. Changes in the law have introduced penalties for overt discrimination. Consequently, current racial conflicts tend to involve “ambiguous facts and inscrutable motives.” They also encourage playing the race card to achieve emotional satisfaction or tactical advantage.
In the cabdriver phenomenon, for example, many drivers who refuse to stop for black passengers are themselves black, Mr. Ford points out, and others are Asian or Middle Eastern. Some are motivated not by antipathy toward blacks but by a fear of being asked to drive into a dangerous neighborhood. Some are rushing to return their cabs to the depot.
This may be racism, but of a special variety that Mr. Ford calls “racism without racists.” Disproportionately, and because of past racism, black Americans live in dangerous neighborhoods, which nonracist cabdrivers might reasonably wish to avoid.
Similarly, when Oprah Winfrey, in a celebrated instance, was turned away from an Hermès shop in Paris, racism might or might not have been the cause. The circumstances suggested several reasons other than racism for why she was not let in: she arrived after closing, for example, and the store was preparing for a special event.
Sometimes life deals out injuries and setbacks. Not all rise to the level of a social problem requiring legal remedy. “If both racism and a more innocent or more complex explanation are plausible causes of an incident, it’s just as wrong to insist on racism and refuse to consider the other possibility as it would be to deny the possibility of racism, ” Mr. Ford writes.
Even so. “If the reason for Oprah’s humiliation was that the incident at Hermès triggered memories of her past experiences with racism, then Oprah’s race was the reason she felt humiliated,” Mr. Ford writes. “In this sense, Oprah was humiliated because of her race.”
Mr. Ford, a clear and lively writer, probes and prods and provokes as he steers his way through this contested terrain. He takes dead aim at racial opportunists, opponents of affirmative action, multiculturalists and the myriad rights organizations trying to hitch a ride on the successes of the black civil rights movement. All, in different ways, he argues, are playing the race card. All are harming the cause of civil rights.

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