Racism and sexism: it’s time to change the paradigm

Published: May 21, 2008, 2:08 pm

Tags: feminism, women s issues, videos, women, you tube, newsweek blogitics, black african american, sexism, racism, race, 2008 elections, minorities, democrats, barack obama, hillary clinton, politics

Richard Thompson Ford, professor of law at Stanford University and author of The Race Card: How Bluffing About Bias Makes Race Relations Worse, spoke last month at Google. In his talk and in his book, Ford argues that we should think of racism not as a crime, like murder, where we have to find bad people and fix them, but rather as a social problem that we can come together to work on and fix, “kind of like air pollution.” He disputes the notion that Americans don’t like to talk about race. He says we talk about race obsessively, just not very productively. “Every few weeks there’s a race scandal, but we don’t talk about the real problems and we don’t talk about real solutions.” Instead we talk about phony scandals generated by people paid to be offensive (stand-up comics, cable news pundits and radio jocks). And the problem is this distorts our understanding of race and distracts us from the real issues we could be addressing. Ford

[ Full article ]

Blog link

Comments