Racism without racists? A new book tries to define discrimination and fails.

LAST YEAR, an editor from a women's magazine told a group of lawyers that Black women's hair was a beauty "don't" in the workplace. Outrage ensued. The woman apparently lost her job or resigned, and to make matters right (or at least to save face with its Black readers) the magazine's editors convened a panel to talk about race and beauty.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

We spent a few hours, panelists and audience alike, bemoaning the many times people had made nasty, prejudicial remarks about our hair. Sitting on the panel, however, I couldn't help noticing that the offending white woman had been silently branded a racist and the rest of us had sat down to talk about the beauty woes besetting women of color who can afford to pay a hair stylist $100 or more. Had this really been a situation about racism? Or were we "playing the race card"?

It was, at the very least, a case of people trying to understand the way racism plays out in this culture, but I'm not the only one who has had this kind of question. According to Stanford law professor Richard Thompson Ford, author of the new book The Race Card: How Bluffing About Bias Makes Race Relations Worse (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), the public conversation on race has been muddled by a national obsession to throw around the word "racist" and to usurp the language of the civil rights era for other causes. People have, for example, called city bans on smoking the new Jim Crow laws, and PETA infamously drew analogies between cruelty against animals and the enslavement of Black people. This nabs media attention but does a disservice to racial injustices, Ford forcefully argues in his book. "The race card is seductive," he writes, "because it lets us defer the question of substantive social goals."

Ford sets out in this book to help us figure out when we're "playing the race card." Is it racism when a Manhattan cabbie won't pick up Danny Glover? Was there a racist responsible for the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina? When a Hermes boutique barred Oprah from entry, was that racism? Is gay marriage a case of civil rights, or are LGBT advocates playing the race card?

The guiding principle for Ford, and rightfully so, is that we stay focused on the big picture. Let's acknowledge racism if Oprah experiences it, he writes, but keep our attention and resources on Katrina survivors. When cabs pass Danny Glover by, let's put aside whether the cab driver is a racist and talk about the racial segregation of cities. Along these lines, Ford also concludes forcefully that groups should stop using analogies between their causes and the civil rights movement because those comparisons dilute the meaning of racism today. "Fat is not the new black," he writes, referring to those advocating for fat acceptance. He goes on to basically say the same for gay marriage, making some helpful (albeit arguable) points about the differences between a movement about marriage and one about the basic socio-economic rights of Black people.

Ironically, Ford's chapter on key civil rights law cases proves more confusing than helpful to understanding racism today. At best it provides an historical context for some of the ways we think about racism, but mostly it shows the degree to which judges have disagreed about what racism is over the years.