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

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.

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