Liberal Racism: How Fixating on Race Subverts the American Dream - Softcover

Sleeper, Jim

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0742522016 ISBN 13: 9780742522015

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2002

Synopsis

Liberalism seems poised for a renewal, but its chances for creating a visionary program for the next century are jeopardized by racial contradictions and confusions that continue to appear in its social policy. Instead of the colorblind society once promised by the left, we inhabit a country seething with racial resentments. With uncompromising clarity, Jim Sleeper discusses what liberals need to do to return their political movement to the vital center.
Along the way, Sleeper punctures liberal pieties to reveal politicians and journalists still stymied by race, impotent in the face of conservative racism, and paralyzed by a guilt that neither advances social justice nor helps fashion a common American identity. Jim Sleeper challenges us to transcend race, to reject the foolish policies and attitudes that have only reinforced racial divisions, and to weave a social fabric sturdy enough to sustain the values upon which this country was founded.
Now available in paperback with a substantial new introduction, Liberal Racism: How Fixating on Race Subverts the American Dream is sure to reawaken and re-energize the debate surrounding race and ethnicity.

About this title

Review

A kind of sequel to Jim Sleeper's earlier The Closest of Strangers: Liberalism and the Politics of Race in New York, this is a tough-minded, provocative indictment of the failure of liberalism in the post-Civil Rights era. As Sleeper sees it, liberals once held the moral high ground because they "fought nobly to help this country rise above color." Now, however, liberals have become blinded by race and have abandoned the fight to create what Sleeper calls the "transracial belonging and civic faith for which Americans of all colors so obviously yearn." Much of what Sleeper has to say here flies in the face of politically correct received wisdom about race, but as an effort to remind Americans that all of us are fundamentally responsible for our fates, this is a much-needed corrective to race-based thinking that has proven unproductive.

About the Author

Jim Sleeper is a writer on urban politics and civic culture, and has been a politcal columnist for The New York Daily News. His commentary has appeared in Harper's, The New Republic, The New Yorker, The Washington Monthly, The Nation, The Weekly Standard, The New Leader, and others.

Edition details

• Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
• Publication date: 2002
• ISBN 10: 0742522016
• ISBN 13: 9780742522015
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Edition number: 2
• Number of pages: 232