Playing the Race Card

Interviewed by San Francisco Daily Journal editor David Houston
     
Can there be racism without racists? Stanford law professor Richard Thompson Ford believes so. He also believes the race card gets played way too often. Think of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas invoking the image of a "high-tech lynching" at his confirmation hearings. Or Al Sharpton ... well, just think Al Sharpton.
      Ford, who is African American, grew up in San Francisco and attended Stanford University and Harvard Law School. After a brief stint at Morrison & Foerster in San Francisco, he taught at Harvard Law School and then moved to Stanford Law School, where he holds the George E. Osborne professorship. He has written widely on civil rights and antidiscrimination law and is the author of The Race Card: How Bluffing About Bias Makes Race Relations Worse (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008).
      Recently, Ford sat down with San Francisco Daily Journal editor David Houston for an interview.
     
      First of all, why did you write this book?
      I think the conversation about race and race relations in the United States has gotten stale and predictable and unfruitful. Right now, when we talk about race, we talk about it almost exclusively in the context of scandal. That's extremely troubling to me. So I wanted to write a book that would try to analyze, but also try to break out of, that kind of conversation and move us in a different direction.
     
      So, how should we talk about race?
      First and foremost, I think we should talk about the pervasive racial inequalities that affect our society, whether or not there's a racist around to blame for it. I'd like to see us talk about the legacy of past discrimination in things like neighborhood segregation, the disproportionate incarceration of African Americans, particularly young black men--those kind of inequities--without waiting for a scandal or a bigot or a highly charged situation.
     
      That sounds like a nice conversation at Stanford, but I don't see that conversation happening at a truck stop in Riverside.
      Well, you're probably right about that, and that's unfortunate. But what I'm suggesting is that we have a conversation about racism and racial injustice that is a bit like the conversation we have about global warming.
     
      Urban legend has it that Eskimos have many words for snow. Do
      we need more words to describe degrees or types of racism?
      I don't think we need more words for racism. In fact, to some extent, lots of different words for "racism" is part of the problem. Racism, or some variation, has been used to describe too many things: institutional racism, environmental racism, cultural racism, unconscious racism, etcetera. Calling all of these phenomena "racism" obscures the way they describe very different social problems. ... I think the English language is more than adequate to describe these social problems. The difficulty is that too often people use the term racism for rhetorical effect at the expense of accuracy, even though we could have a more nuanced conversation if we were willing to try.
     
      Geraldine Ferraro caused quite a stir last spring when she said Sen. Barack Obama wouldn't have had such a successful primary season had he not been a black man. Any truth to what she said?
      Sure--in the banal sense that Barack Obama is African American, and the biography of a political candidate is part of what makes that candidate attractive, and race is part of his biography. There's no doubt that some people think it would be a great thing to have a black man in the White House, and therefore that's a plus for Obama among those voters. Of course, you could have also said the same thing about gender and Hillary Clinton. But I don't think that suggests she was an affirmative-action candidate.
     
      Do you think you've benefited from affirmative action at any point in your life?
      Sure. I attended universities that have affirmative-action policies.
     
      Do you view that as stigmatizing?
      No, I don't. I understand that affirmative action is controversial, and ought to be controversial. I actually think there are good reasons to be concerned about racial preferences. But I don't feel stigmatized by affirmative action, and I do feel that affirmative action is appropriate in certain circumstances to promote racial integration. Selective universities have a lot of policies and preferences that depart from the standard of merit as measured by the numerical criterion.
     
      What are the legal implications of your book?
      One thing I wanted to do with this book is use my knowledge of civil rights law to make the point to the layperson that defining racism and knowing when it's in play is a difficult process. The average person thinks we all know racism when we see it, and if I see it and you don't, then you are in denial. And if you see it and I don't, then you are just playing the race card. But, in fact, when we look at the way the law deals with claims of racism, it's really quite difficult, and it requires a fairly complicated doctrinal and evidentiary apparatus to determine when racism is in play. After the first generation of civil rights cases, in which people would blurt out their racist motivations, the courts very quickly understood that in a world in which people aren't going to announce their bias, we need to come up with mechanisms to try to tease it out. And that's not easy. It's going to raise tough evidentiary questions, and in some instances it's going to raise tough conceptual questions.
     
      So if we take your book to heart, should discrimination lawsuits be harder to prove than they are now?
      Not necessarily. One of the arguments I make is that we need to think about antidiscrimination law as having a couple of different policy objectives. Right now, people think it's only one: eliminating racism. But there's a second objective, and that's the one I wanted to emphasize, which is integration. A lot of what contemporary civil rights law endeavors to do, at least indirectly, is promote integration in fields where minorities have historically been under-represented. That's an appropriate social goal. It's a controversial one now, but I think it's hard to understand contemporary civil rights law without that goal.
     
      Have you ever played the race card yourself to get something you wanted?
      I don't think so. There may be people who disagree, but I take the accusation of racism very seriously and try hard not to make that accusation unless I'm pretty sure it applies.
     
     

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