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Law Prof Adds Hid Voice To Ongoing Conversation On Race, Hope Lewis

Hope Lewis

This essay reviews Richard Thompson Ford's 'The Race Card: How Bluffing About Bias Makes Race Relations Worse,' Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 2008, 388 pages. Stanford Law School Professor Richard Thompson Ford's 'The Race Card' seeks nothing less than to demarcate the line between legitimate charges of racism and those that are ill-defined or false. An impossibly ambitious task , to be sure, but Ford's wide-ranging, often maddening effort makes timely and important contributions to continuing debates on race in the United States.

Of course, no serious accusation - whether if be racism, intolerance, murder, rape, child abuse, sexual harassment, theft …