The Race Card
In America today, race is a taboo subject. Anyone who has ever found him or herself on the wrong side of an accusation of racism knows how devastating it can be. Race has become a weapon in society to enforce a political orthodoxy. Stanford Professor Richard Thompson Ford examines this curious situation, which has become known colloquially as “playing the race card,” in his latest book The Race Card: How Bluffing About Bias Makes Race Relations Worse. There are shelves upon shelves of books about racism, race relations, etc. However, it is rare that one manages to rise above the fray and actually engages the issues from an elevated perspective. If you’re looking for partisan hackery or one-sided screeds, look elsewhere. The irony of Ford’s evenhanded look at race is that many conservatives will find him to be too liberal, while many liberals will disparage his pragmatism as too right-leaning.
One of the overarching themes of Ford’s book is this idea that the old tactics from the Civil Rights era don’t fit today’s model. “Civil rights were spectacularly successful in those places where they succeeded,” Ford concedes, “But when a treatment works brilliantly for some ailments and fails miserably for others, good doctors don’t just apply more of it in the tough cases and hope the patient recovers.” Instead, he argues that we have a situation where society has progressed, but we are still left with some racist residue in society, the inevitable leftovers from a time before anyone currently alive was around. He deems this situation as “racism without racists.” In light of this new reality, Ford calls for a paradigm shift in how Americans approach race relations. “Rather than search all the more stubbornly for hidden bigots and incognito racists, applying more rarefied and obscure definitions of racism with ever more shrill and anxious convictions,” he suggests, “maybe we should look to new approaches to deal with racial injustices that don’t fit well in the civil rights framework.”
The reason, Ford explains, is clear. Society has progressed and now bigotry is no longer acceptable in the mainstream. Almost sensing the inevitable counter attack from his critics, Ford is quick to admit that racism persists in our world. He makes it clear that racism is not fully extinguished, but stresses that unlike our “unambiguously white supremacist past,” modern race relations are less black and white (no pun intended) than before. Many contemporary ideologues, Ford suggests, have yet to acknowledge this fact. “Racism persists,” explains Ford, “but contrary to the claims of some racial demagogues, it hasn’t simply changed form or become subtler. It is also not as prevalent or as severe as it was the era of Jim Crow.”
Society has changed so dramatically that some ironic contradictions develop, which Ford is quick to point out. The rhetoric of the old movement no longer works when mainstream America is behind the goals of tolerance and antiracism. “Playing the race card is a symptom of partial success. In dealing with overt racism, the antiracist has the coercive power of government and the weight of popular consensus behind her. For most of American history, antiracism was a movement of resistance and critique. Antiracist rhetoric retains the belligerent, confrontational tone appropriate to a marginal protest movement. But today’s antiracists often must [use] the influence of large and powerful bureaucracies and the coercive power of government. Speaking truth to power is an anachronism when the person speaking also has the power.”
Ford, a college professor, also has great insight into the problem with race in the academy today. He expresses regret that Supreme Court decisions have pigeonholed “diversity” as the sole acceptable rationale for affirmative action programs. “The diversity idea rests on a plausible but debatable empirical assertion: that racial diversity contributes to a more robust exchange of ideas,” he explains. Exploiting the flaws of that assertion, Ford jokes, “Is there a Native American perspective on advanced calculus, a distinctly black viewpoint on the relationship between built structure and load-bearing capacity, or a uniquely Latino perspective on open heart surgery? Wouldn’t the typical left-liberal elite university enjoy greater pedagogical benefits from ideological diversity or religious diversity? Why not admissions preferences for born-again Christians or libertarians?”
In other words, how do we define diversity? As many at Wabash will recognize, this is a pertinent question for higher education. At Wabash, the goal of “diversity” has been trumpeted again and again in faculty decrees and strategic plan drafts, never given a definition or intellectually substantive form.
Ford’s objection to the Supreme Court’s decisions, as he explains, is that there are other, and presumably superior, rationales to keep affirmative action that can no longer be used. Although many conservative critics might disagree with that characterization, they would no doubt agree with Ford that the result has been that “colleges and universities – the very institutions that should encourage robust debate on controversial policy questions – [have adopted] a state-imposed orthodoxy on one of the most controversial issues of the day.”
Furthermore, in a brilliant chapter entitled, “The Clash of Ends: Contested Goals,” Ford critiques the antiracist movement in America, suggesting that it has yet to clearly define “success”. A contradiction has developed between enshrining and protecting “black culture” and pushing for integration. Although true for the wider world, nowhere is this concept more prescient than on America’s college campuses. To illustrate his point, Ford recalls an issue at Cornell University several years ago. The college had maintained a policy of allowing students to live in “theme” houses according to race, interests, etc. The state of New York eventually objected but declined to take action. In response to the state’s concerns, the college president reached what he probably thought would be received as an acceptable compromise. All students would be required to live together in dorms for their first two years before they could go and live wherever they liked. As Ford recounts, the response was swift and devastating. “The Reverend Al Sharpton came all the way upstate to ridicule this proposal: ‘We want more blacks and Latinos on campus; we just want them to merge in with everyone else so we don’t know they’re here.’” Once again recognizing the irony of the situation, Ford quips, “The events had all the hallmarks of the civil rights demonstrations of the 1960s, but the goal of the demonstrators was to avoid racial integration. All that was needed to complete this surreal scene was for the [university president] red faced and sweating in the Ithaca sun, to stand on the steps of Ives hall and, defiant to the end, declare his commitment to “integration now, integration tomorrow, integration forever.”
Joking aside, Ford manages to carefully and expertly sift through this seeming contradiction for their root causes. “Multiculturalism,” Ford posits, “tried to combine the two great opposing ideologies of black liberation: the Romantic cultural nationalism of black separatism and the hopeful cosmopolitarianism of integrationalism.” Despite their good intentions, the result, according to Ford, “was not a synthesis, but a simple contradiction.” Although each group was prepared to “accept the compromises that their respective visions necessarily entailed … the multiculturalists insisted on access without assimilation: they wanted to have their culture and eat it too.”
There are certainly some areas of concern with the book. At times, Ford seems to drone on and occasionally drags the reader off topic. One of the severest criticisms is that for all his insight, he fails to make any unique conclusions regarding resolutions. After taking an unabashedly unconventional look at modern race relations, he continues to peddle the same tired policy solutions that have been in the public arena for years. From busing to affirmative action, he brings to the table few fresh ideas on how to solve the problems he addresses; it would seem that he neglected to examine the stock solutions with the same zeal and careful scrutiny he gave other parts of his book.
However, with the exception of these low points, the book itself is a true gem. Ford has a knack for being able to soberly examine America’s racial landscape and his colorful commentary demonstrates that he is capable at laughing (perhaps crying?) at the bizarre ironies that often develop. Perhaps most crucially, Ford is capable of seeing into the future. He sagely recognizes that in a world where most situations of injustice will be examples of what he calls “racism without racists”, the use of the race card to indiscriminately bludgeon is not appropriate. In fact, such incidents can “undermine popular support for racial justice.”
Ford recognizes that much of the racial progress made in the past few decades came out of result of the recognition that there was a moral incongruity between the America we wanted to be (“all men are created equal”) and the reality of segregation and Jim Crow. Since this astonishing progress was based on goodwill, it is crucial that we do not let people exploit it through “playing the race card.” Otherwise, predicts Ford, “If too many people come to believe that the serious charge of racism has become a ploy used for undeserved advantage, the antiracist goodwill we currently enjoy may give way to a pervasive attitude of cynical indifference.” The result of this racial grandstanding is that “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.” Searching for perpetrators of racism when none are to be found is not in the spirit of cooperation through which the civil rights movement made its most powerful achievements.
Instead, Ford champions the notion that we should “begin by looking at racial injustice as a social problem to be solved collectively rather than as a series of discrete wrongs perpetrated by bad people. We should discuss the more ambiguous cases of bias in the cool tone of technical expertise rather than in the heated cadence of moral judgment.” To his skeptics, Ford points to the successes of the past and looks toward the future stating, “Optimism has always been a necessary part of the civil rights struggle. When black families willingly sent their children to some of the South’s first integrated schools in the 1950s, they must have been optimistic enough to believe – against much of their immediate experience – that white racism would eventually yield to common human decency.” With eyes solidly on the future, Ford proclaims, “Enough in our nation’s subsequent history has proven those courageous families right to justify continued optimism.” A noble call; hopefully the right people are listening.
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