Race Experts: How Racial Etiquette, Sensitivity Training, and New Age Therapy Hijacked the Civil Rights Revolution [Hardcover]

Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 17, 2001

Controversial and strikingly original, Race Experts looks at how we capsized racial progress in the quest for self-esteem.

Race Experts uncovers the hidden trajectory and terms of our thinking about race relations since the 1960s. Since segregation's dismantling, intense anxiety has surrounded interracial encounters, and a movement has arisen to engineer social relations through the specification of elaborate codes of conduct. Diversity training in business, multicultural education in schools, and cross-cultural psychotherapy have created a world of prescriptions. Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn carefully analyzes the teachings of these self-appointed "experts" and offers a bold and searching analysis of the origins of their ideas in the human potential movement and the radical milieu of the 1960s. Casting race primarily as an issue of etiquette or therapy, rather than of justice or equality, has had dire consequences for American life, diverting attention from the deeper problems of poverty, violence, and continued inequality and discrimination. In this sobering analysis, Race Experts illuminates how far away we are from the issues that deserve our attention.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

"One of our best-kept secrets and one of our greatest tragedies" is the undermining of the civil rights movement's universalism and moral truths by diversity theorists, who aim to "liberate whites from their alleged racism and blacks from their assumed bondage of low self-esteem," declares Syracuse University historian Lasch-Quinn. By attributing racial tensions to psychological factors, people like Price M. Cobbs and William H. Grier, coauthors of Black Rage (1968) who "believed that slavery created a set of interracial dynamics that led to a particular pathological mentality in slaves" persisting through generations into the 1960s drew attention away from bigger complexities of justice and inequality, she writes. The "rise of the therapeutic" in the form of encounter groups and sensitivity training created milieus in which psychological disorders are traced to all-pervasive white racism, Lasch-Quinn argues, rather than to social injustices that could be righted through political activism. In her view, such attitudes appear even in recent books like Beverly Tatum's "Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?" and Other Conversations about Race. Lasch-Quinn faults diversity trainers in latter-day workplaces for relying on broad stereotypes about groups She believes that children's multicultural "self-esteem literature" can affirm children (The Black Snowman) without resorting to "boosterism" (Nappy Hair). Despite many convincing examples, Lasch-Quinn ignores recent books that could complicate her thesis, such as Ellis Cose's The Rage of a Privileged Class. And while she notes that diversity experts frame a world in which social faux pas are deemed racism, she could better acknowledge the persistence of white privilege.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist

Lasch-Quinn, a history professor, probes the intersection of the civil rights struggle and modern social psychology, in particular the human potential movement. She highlights the "overthrow of the social code of segregation" and the adoption of an etiquette of black assertiveness and white submissiveness that has produced a "harangue-flagellation" ritual that does not advance the goal of racial equality. Contrary to the goals of the civil rights movement, which sought to remove distinctions based on race, Lasch-Quinn points to a cottage industry of experts on racial differences that perpetuates differentiation. She draws parallels to the behavior codes evinced by racial segregation and notes the danger that the new racial etiquette will make interaction between the races a social minefield, discouraging contact. She recalls the early history of social psychology as applied to race relations and cites books and movies that have either demonstrated the tortured landscape of racial etiquette or attempted to educate people about it. This is sure to be a controversial book among readers interested in race issues. Vanessa Bush
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 288 pages
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company; 1st edition (October 17, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 039304873X
• ISBN-13: 978-0393048735
• Product Dimensions: 8.1 x 5.4 x 1.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.2 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #677,932 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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16 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Blaming experts for the demise of the civil rights movement?, February 22, 2005

By 

David A. Ward "David A. Ward" (California) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Race Experts: How Racial Etiquette, Sensitivity Training, and New Age Therapy Hijacked the Civil Rights Revolution (Hardcover)

This book lays the blame for the demise of the civil rights movement at the doorstep of a collection of professionals she calls "race experts." These so-called experts have carved out niches for themselves in the last thirty years in fields such as psychology and social work as well as newer professional roles such as diversity trainers whose main objective is to change the racist beliefs of white middle-class Americans. Here, Lasch-Quinn argues that rather than ameliorating racism, race experts have only served to make everyone overly anxious about inter-racial exhanges. To support this argument, she mines an array of sources from popular culture from the 1960s through the 1990s - including films, novels, and advice books, books about therapy and encounter groups, diversity training manuals and videos, and media accounts of multicultural education.

By focusing narrowly on particular sources, Lasch-Quinn ignores a number of other narratives about race that were also circulating during this 30 year time period. As many scholars of race relations have found, Americans continue to tell stories about innate superiority of whites and don't feel guilty about it, stories that disavow the significance of race altogether, and stories about building coalitions and universal human rights, to name only a few. Finally, what Lasch-Quinn fails to point out is that neoconservatives have already come up with a clever rebuttal to the ritual of racial reprimand. People of color who mention race or racism are now ritually reprimanded for "playing the race card."

While the evidence in the opening chapter is not convincing, Lasch-Quinn's exploration of race experts and their misadventures - particularly the chapters on the politics of therapy and encounter groups - brings to light some interesting historical connections between the rise of therapeutic culture and its appropriation of race. Here, Lasch-Quinn explores the convergence between the rise of the human potential movement and its focus on the self as the "new frontier" for change and growth with 60s Black Power rhetoric about empowerment. However, by the end of the book, one is left feeling that all Americans do is worry overly much about whether they are giving or receiving racial slights. While it is true that race is an emotionally loaded issue in the United States, this is not a particularly new finding. What is new is that Lasch-Quinn identifies a body of experts who believe they can solve these problems through the social engineering of feelings and attitudes and, as she argues, they have been largely unsuccessful. For this reason, her book would pose as a counterpoint to political and economic explanations for the demise of the civil rights movement in graduate seminars on American race relations. However, I would not recommend it for use in undergraduate courses. Its narrow focus on race experts as the main culprits in dismantling the civil rights vision of egalitarianism does not provide the necessary historical background for those who know little about the rise of the civil rights movement or the political and economic forces that brought about backlash and retrenchment in the years to follow.

24 of 33 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Hijackers Misidentified, January 18, 2002

By 

Yours Truly (New York, New York USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: Race Experts: How Racial Etiquette, Sensitivity Training, and New Age Therapy Hijacked the Civil Rights Revolution (Hardcover)

As a historian, Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn should revisit the events of 1968. Elected President that year, partly in reaction to the rioting that followed the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., Richard Nixon gladly embraced the advice of Daniel Patrick Moynihan to practice a policy of "benign neglect" toward the African American community. The administration decided against rebuilding the nation's cities, and white Americans exited en masse to the suburbs.

Linking to the work of her father (Christopher Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism) Lasch-Quinn instead blames angry black men and wimpy white liberals for disrupting what had been, as she sees it, an ever-expanding, polite circle of inclusion. She claims that various individuals deployed the tools of humanist psychology to make piles of money making whites feel guilty and helping corporations deal with a more diverse workforce without expanding democracy's benefits. I was intrigued by her argument that diversity training, by dealing primarily with employes' emotions, distracts them from larger issues of equity in the workplace, but she doesn't develop it.

Instead, she's bent on belittling anyone who continues to argue that racism is virulent in America. She doesn't address the fact that African Americans as a group still receive poorer housing, education, and health care and greater prison time than their white counterparts. Putting all the "race experts" she despises out of business wouldn't change that, but perhaps she'd consider it impolite to say so.

0 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Intended Audience--Unclear., January 20, 2010

By 

Plain Talk "corey washington" (Augusta Ga) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Race Experts: How Racial Etiquette, Sensitivity Training, and New Age Therapy Hijacked the Civil Rights Revolution (Paperback)

Plain Talk - Volume 1

When looking at the title and liner notes, I thought this book was going to focus on Race Experts that we all know. (Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton) Or maybe this book will focus on talking heads that we always see on T.V. talking about race--Michael Eric Dyson, Cornel West, Skip Gates, Larry Elder) Instead most of the book centered on obscure workshops that most people have never heard of. I did enjoy many aspects of the book. My favorite was the discussion of the book Nappy Hair. I vaguely remember this event, but Race Experts made many things clear. If I were the child of an African-American child in 3rd grade, I would not want a white teacher reading a book of that nature to my child. It's amazing that this teacher, being inexperienced, did not consult another teacher before reading Nappy Hair to the class. The parents had a right to be angry, but not that angry. In my book Plain Talk, I state upfront, that I do not believe that there is a such thing as a Race Expert. This book has solidified my stance.