In The Coming Race War, University of Colorado law professor Richard Delgado argues that American law is inherently racist. It guarantees that minorities will be oppressed and that a white elite will maintain power. As he did in the Rodrigo Chronicles, he organizes the book around a series of dialogues between an unnamed professor and a half-black, half-white younger associate. Among the arguments set forth are Delgado's belief that minority judges are the only ones qualified to protect minority rights, that affirmative action should be maintained, and that court decisions striking down hate speech laws are wrong. Then there's the theory that conservatives want to end welfare in order to provoke a rebellion by minorities that will lead to the creation of an apartheid state.
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In The Washington Post, Julius Lester praised Richard Delgado's The Rodrigo Chronicles: Conversations about America and Race as free of cant and ideology. . . . an excellent starting place for the national discussion about race we so desperately need. The New York Times has hailed Delgado as a pioneer in the study of race and law, and the Los Angeles Times has compared his storytelling style to Plato's Dialogues.
In The Coming Race War?, Delgado turns his attention to the American racial landscape in the wake of the mid-term elections in 1994. Our political and racial topography has been radically altered. Affirmative action is being rolled back, immigrants continue to be targeted as the source of economic woes, and race is increasingly downplayed as a source of the nation's problems. Legal obstacles to racial equality have long been removed, we are told, so what's the problem?
And yet, the plight of the urban poor grows worse. The number of young black men in prison continues to exceed those in college. Informal racial privilege remains entrenched and systemic. Where, asks Delgado in this new volume, will this lead? Enlisting his fictional counterpart, Rodrigo Crenshaw, to untangle the complexities of America's racial future, Delgado explores merit and affirmative action; the nature of empathy and, more commonly, false empathy; and the limitations of legal change. Warning of the dangers of depriving the underprivileged of all hope and opportunity, Delgado gives us a dark future in which an indignant white America casts aside, once and for all, the spirit of the civil rights movement, with disastrous results.
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