Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn

Race Experts

Controversial and strikingly original, Race Experts looks at how we capsized racial progress in the quest for self-esteem.

Race Experts 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 analyzes 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.

"In clear, hard-hitting English, Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn presents a well-reasoned and well-balanced analysis that exposes an insidious racket."—Eugene D. Genovese, author of A Consuming Fire

"[A]n essential primer, replete with eye-opening horror tales of political correctness."—Michael Meyers, Executive Director, New York Civil Rights Coalition

"[A]n unflinching look at the elaborated codes that govern racial exchanges and relations."—Jean Bethke Elshtain, author of Democracy on Trial