Race games, old and new.(The Race Card: How Bluffing About Bias Makes Race Relations Worse)(Book review)

The Race Card: How Bluffing About Bias Makes Race Relations Worse, by Richard Thompson Ford (Farrar, Straus, 400 pp., $26)

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IT's hard to imagine a more red-meat-conservative title. At last, someone--a black law professor from Stanford, no less--is calling attention to the vast injustice of misplaced accusations of bigotry. The book itself turns out to be a bit of a bait-and-switch--it's a wide-ranging collection of essays, with few strong attacks on bias hustlers--but it contains much of value.

Richard Thompson Ford does cover the race card, broadly defined (he includes both the Tawana Brawley hoax and the fat-acceptance movement's claim that anti-overweight discrimination is "just like racism"). His analysis is clear-headed, for the most part, though the few policy proposals he espouses are seriously flawed.

Regarding the race card as it's typically understood--an accusation that's untrue, or at least far from clearly true--Ford provides a number of anecdotes and analyzes them in detail. There's the ritzy boutique that turned Oprah away after its closing time, and Clarence Thomas's "high-tech lynching." Ford almost always concludes that racism could have played a role-because, after all, any negative interaction involving a black person might not have happened were the person white.

And that's the rub. Ford describes our current era as "post-racist," meaning not that racism is over but that it's been completely transformed, and for the better. Outright bigotry is completely socially unacceptable, leaving parody (e.g., the comedy of Sarah Silverman) as its sole expression. Still, blacks' history places them, disproportionately, at the bottom of the economic and educational ladders ("racism without racists"), and whites who notice the effects of this can develop negative stereotypes. They're not illogical, as race is "an accurate, if crude, proxy for some types of antisocial behavior."

Ford argues not that blacks should refrain from "bluffing about bias"--that is, playing the race card when they're not certain that racism is in play--but that they should use gentle language, and that both accuser and accused should step back and analyze carefully, as Ford himself does. Take, for example, blacks' having a harder time getting cabs; this might be because blacks tend to live in high-crime areas. Forcing cabbies to take all fares without hesitation, though it makes the world fairer for blacks, shifts the burden of crime onto working-class drivers. Public policy should reflect this.