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Race Experts: How Racial Etiquette, Sensitivity Training, and New Age Therapy Hijacked the Civil Rights Revolution
Controversial and strikingly original, Race Experts looks at how we capsized racial progress in the quest for self-esteem. Now available in paperback, it 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 examines 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.
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.
288 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2001
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
January 18, 2017
Fantastic book! If one wants to understand how we went from a demand for equal rights to identity politics and victimhood culture, this is one of the essential books to read. Really informative. Easy to read. It is clear that many of the mainstream trends today started in the 1960s or earlier. Race is still, unfortunately, an important discussion today and this insightful and thought-provoking book helps us clear up some of the confusions.
October 16, 2017
The only reason I gave this four stars rather than five is that I really wish the author would give us an updated version that addresses some of the rhetoric we have been hearing since 2002...
March 18, 2026
Good writing, good concept.
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 suppressed and vilified, but never refuted?
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 suppressed and vilified, but never refuted?
January 5, 2021
on the polemical side, but there's enough empirical stuff in here to keep it from being a lazy op-ed. In essence, ELQ says IdPol in many ways is just another "spiritual bypass" hustle, part of how whitey cucked and gutted Black Power movements.
Shows how, in practice, anti-racism policies can eschew economic policy reform, ignoring issues of precarity in favor of inequity. Language of racial disparities is decoupled from economic forces that engendered them, setting an agenda that seeks to redress disparity while incapable of ending precarity
Shows how, in practice, anti-racism policies can eschew economic policy reform, ignoring issues of precarity in favor of inequity. Language of racial disparities is decoupled from economic forces that engendered them, setting an agenda that seeks to redress disparity while incapable of ending precarity
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June 21, 2024This book came out in 2001, but it's striking how dated it already feels. I almost completely ignored the primary argument and read this as a historical curiosity.
November 15, 2020
An effective, if somewhat tedious (and overly-provocatively titled), overview of changing attitudes towards race relations in America (which certainly deserves an update to cover the racial tumult of the Trump era). Self-appointed diversity "experts" really just regurgitate New Age mumbo-jumbo (for a hefty fee) but their colour commentary might actually INCREASE racial tensions by stirring up angst and anger between different groups of people that wouldn't be triggered were it not for these diversity experts bringing them up in the first place. If you want to listen to a white woman in 2020 talk about race, don't listen to Robin DiAngelo - listen to Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews