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

by Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn

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.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Race, American History

288 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2001

Reviews

[Christine Louis-Dit-Sully · Rating 5 out of 5]

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.

[Richard · Rating 4 out of 5]

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...

[Andrew · Rating 4 out of 5]

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

[Darnell]

This 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.

[Alex Strohschein · Rating 4 out of 5]

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.