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Title: Liberal Racism: How Fixating on Race Subverts the American Dream by Jim Sleeper ISBN: 0-7425-2201-6 Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield (Non NBN) Pub. Date: November, 2002 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $19.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.1 (10 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: An honest and ebjective portrayal of racial issues.
Comment: Sleeper's book Liberal Racism portrays his ideas about modern american racial tensions in a brutally honest and clear manner. The book deals with liberal's failings in their ideas about race, but Sleeper is careful not to make it an attack of the left, nor a support of the right, but rather an encouragement and constructive criticsm of liberal ideologies about race. In doing this he mantains objectivity by brilliantly refusing to take sides with any political entity, supporting equally the ideas of people as disparrate as race radicals of the 1960's to Newt Gingrich. In addition to Sleeper's careful structuring of his stance, he argues the book with sharp and clear logic, his language and structure flowing beautifully not only within chapters and subjects, but throughout the whole text, as he categorically examines ideas relating to crime, voting, the media, and culture, among others. This book is a valuable text in today's modern racial context because it is not only enlightening, it offers a fresh and concise viewpoint on an often less than clear topic.
Rating: 3
Summary: Who is this book's intended audience?
Comment: "If you have always believed that everyone should play by the same rules and be judged by the same standards, that would have gotten you labeled a radical 50 years ago, a liberal 25 years ago, and a racist today." That quote by columnist Thomas Sowell neatly illustrates how the world has turned from under the feet of old-line liberals like Jim Sleeper, who is the author of this book. He decries the progressivist idiocies about race he sees in urban policy, in the media, and in race relations, not much differently than in similar books by conservatives. But who is he talking to? The leftist ideologues for whom thoughtful liberals like Sleeper served mainly as beards have long since completed their Long March through the institutions, and don't need to pretend to take their counsel anymore. Nor would race warlords who make their living from racial strife care to lend an ear. Periodically throughout the book, he pauses and fires a blast at conservatives, for "balance", maybe. But a conservative reader could easily reply, "Well, we told you so." For example, Sleeper in an aside deplores the vulnerability of helpless minorities to the amoral market forces of capitalism. This is true, but not exhaustively true. Maybe, if liberals and their allies hadn't worked might and main to weaken ("transform", in their parlance) intermediary institutions like the family, the church, the educational system, etc., these people might be bettered buffered against the storms of life.
None of this is to suggest that the book isn't good--it is. Jim Sleeper is an accomplished magazine writer, and has done a great job marshalling his arguments in this very readable and thoughtful book. Declining the role of savant, he includes excerpts of material from experts including Glenn Loury and legal scholar Randall Kennedy. Students of issues like these have simply read this particular catalog of ills many times before, is all.
There is a surprise, though. In the inevitable section where we are urged to re-embrace the vanished values of old, Sleeper offers the example of the New England village. And who personifies this Yankee resilience? Of all people, W. E. B. Dubois. Dubois is like the soldier who threw himself onto the barbed wire so that other men could run up his back and advance. He fought American racism for most of his very long life, only to give up on America and fall into the pan-African and communist delusions just as his efforts were succeeding back home. Sleeper tells Dubois' tragic tale, ingeniously illustrating how his starchy small town values sustained him, and suggesting that those sound virtues would sweep away a lot of liberal racial hypocrisy. He may be right. But who's listening?
Rating: 3
Summary: In the end lacking...
Comment: Sleeper's criticism of the corrosiveness of (generally) well-intended white liberal political interventions is astute, but his proposed solution - the (re-)adoption by all Americans of New England puritan values (capitalist vigour + personal thrift + rigid church-based moral codes), while sounding 'tough talking', is simply naive.
He assumes that vigorous free-market consumer capitalism is compatible with such traditional values, whereas the reality world-wide would seem to be the opposite: Traditional and local values get lost in a blur of glossy consumer indulgence and hedonism. What does he propose replacing this money-making, money-spending search for pleasure with? Thrift as a good in itself? But if we don't spend then the system comes crashing down, especially in post-industrial, service-oriented economies.
Moreover high personal moral values of the sort he praises in the last section of the book have always been compatible with beliefs that we now see are terribly immoral - slavery, for instance. The men who wrote that it was self-evidently true that all men are created equal owned slaves. If it seems banal to restate that, it's a reminder that one can't just step into the values of a time gone by, cherry-pick the ones one likes, and then try to browbeat the poorer members of society into adopting them: they come with historical baggage. Hence they may be impulsively resented and deserve to be seriously interrogated.
Mr Sleeper believes that the 'true' American values on which the communal spirit should be rebuilt are New England Puritan ones, but weren't the values of the Southern slave-owners equally 'truly American'? To step outside the reality of history is to step away from reality in all its cluttered complexity, and engagement with reality is what is so often lacking in the discussion of race issues.
In the end Sleeper's proposal that if everyone knuckled down - especially the poor - and conformed to a single vision of the life well-lived then society would be more harmonious, is little more than a conservative platitude. It has the added bonus of letting white people and those in power off the hook as regards racism and racial disadvantage, hence its appeal to comfortably-off right-wingers, who feel themselves terribly put upon by the notion that their skin-colour still gives them privileges in 21st Century America.
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Title: Race Experts: How Racial Etiquette, Sensitivity Training, and New Age Therapy Hijacked the Civil Rights Revolution by Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn ISBN: 074252759X Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield (Non NBN) Pub. Date: December, 2002 List Price(USD): $16.95 |
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Title: The Ordeal of Integration: Progress and Resentment in America's "Racial" Crisis by Orlando Patterson ISBN: 188717897X Publisher: Perseus Book Group Pub. Date: November, 1998 List Price(USD): $18.00 |
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Title: A Dream Deferred : The Second Betrayal of Black Freedom in America by Shelby Steele ISBN: 0060931043 Publisher: Perennial Pub. Date: 01 November, 1999 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
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Title: The Content of Our Character : A New Vision of Race In America by Shelby Steele ISBN: 006097415X Publisher: Perennial Pub. Date: 01 September, 1991 List Price(USD): $12.95 |
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Title: Made In Texas: George W. Bush and the Southern Takeover of American Politics by Michael Lind ISBN: 0465041213 Publisher: Basic Books Pub. Date: 17 December, 2002 List Price(USD): $24.00 |
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