Racial Paranoia
The Unintended Consequences of Political Correctness The New Reality of Race in America
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
The Civil War put an end to slavery, and the civil rights movement put an end to legalized segregation. Crimes motivated by racism are punished with particular severity, and Americans are more sensitive than ever about the words they choose when talking about race. And yet America remains divided along the color line. Acclaimed scholar John L. Jackson, Jr., identifies a new paradigm of race relations that has emerged in the wake of the legal victories of the civil rights era: racial paranoia. We live in an age of racial equality punctuated by galling examples of ongoing discrimination-from the federal government's inadequate efforts to protect the predominantly black population of New Orleans to Michael Richards's outrageous outburst. Not surprisingly, African-Americans distrust the rhetoric of political correctness, and see instead the threat of racism lurking below every white surface. Conspiracy theories abound and racial reconciliation seems near to impossible. In Racial Paranoia, Jackson explains how this paranoia is cultivated, transferred, and exaggerated; how it shapes our nation and undermines the goal of racial equality; and what can be done to fight it.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Calls for a conversation about race crop up persistently as in the wake of the Imus scandal or O.J. Simpson's acquittal. Jackson's (Harlemworld; Real Black) examination of how race remains singular in American consciousness proves a lively opening gambit to a thought-provoking analysis. After a loose historical survey of race matters before the 1960s, when "brash and brazen American racism" was mainstream, Jackson focuses on the current state of affairs in racial fears and distrust that have gone underground and express themselves as racial paranoia and "de cardio" racism ("what the law can't touch, what won't be easily proved or disproved, what can't be simply criminalized or deemed unconstitutional"). Racial paranoia, not "just 'a black thing,' " owes much to the way mass media confirms or subverts stereotypes; de cardio racism is cloaked, "papered over with public niceties and politically correct jargon." Jackson explores particularly fresh areas in his illuminating consideration of The Man Who Cried I Am and 1996, racial paranoia's canonical texts and in his attention to the McCarran Act's effect upon black thinkers. Passionate and committed Jackson is, but his content is balanced. Casually scholarly and often witty, Jackson offers the reader "new ways of talking about race's subtler dynamic and new ways of spying racial conflict in the twenty-first century."
