Customer Reviews

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

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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.

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.

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.

... No made up hypothetical abstract theorization in this book. Not a vast this- or that-wing conspiracy, but instead only truthful reality. In tune with, "the criminals' behavior is so obvious they are now profiling themselves," her book makes great timing to display the excess of how white America is obviously being run over by what I see as revengeful behavior. Explaining how minority leaders and mainstream idols are profiling themselves as irrational, illogical, motivated by vile emotionalism and possibly allaround incompetent of any better leadership, the author's writing is backed with only the most blatant real-life, popular culture and everyday workplace examples of white societal submissiveness. She does not fabricate nor materialize, and the examples are so visable throughout society today (movies, television, billboard signs, music, workplace sensitivity, academic 'balancing,' etc.) that even after only one chapter no reader can escape feeling dumbfounded and thinking, "it's about time." The reader's eyes are opened not to a proposed concept but to the truth.

As a person myself who pays keen attention to the lopsided reverse-racism in America and it's idiocy, I indeed found continued use for the book and see it as almost by itself among hardprint. The author displays ingenuity and proposes new perspectives and new penetrating examples, and I particularly liked her investigative nature on how the mess is originating at the highest levels of academia and leadership, and simultaneously provides recent scenarios from such popular media as a Tom Cruise & Cuba Gooding movie.

I do want to emphasize that Lasch-Quinn, of who I do not know, is noticeably gifted in writing. There is a combination of simplicity, enjoyment, and wonderful truthfulness in her book that sincerely puts it in high regard.

The trouble with liberals and intellectuals is that they become so enamored of their concepts of the world as it should be that they are reluctant to check out the way it is. Why haven't all the prescriptions for fixing race relations worked? Is it that a racist conspiracy, of course well hidden, is pervasive throughout the land? Or are there other explanations for the different outcomes and behaviors of the races?

Ms. Lasch-Quinn makes those painful connections and comparisons for them. Between the "low self esteem" theory and the fact that those presumed to have low self esteem are in fact loaded with that quality. They just aren't intellectually very capable and they don't control their impulses. Between the "hurt feelings" school of dealing with diversity and the fact that people express rage more because it works and they can get away with it than for any other reason. Between the notion that whites "ought to to more" and the minority communities' often virulent rejection of their proferred assistance, unless it comes in the form of money or concessions.

As you will note from other reviewers' comments, minds are made up on this matter. Lasch-Quinn should not expect thanks from newly enlightened lefties.

Recommend that readers interested in the scientific aspects of the issue read "The Blank Slate" by Steven Pinker and "Genes, Peoples and Languages" by Cavalli-Sforza. Both are troubling to diversity advocates in academia although both go out of their way to avoid saying anything about differences in ability or achievement between the races. Their theses do, however, undermine the notion that it is illogical to think there would be differences. The next question to ask is whether people have researched such differences and what have they found? Oh. Turns out they have. And why are their findings so successfully supressed and vilified, but never refuted?