Paperback release scheduled for early 2010!
Published by Basic Civitas Books
The Civil War outlawed slavery, and the civil rights movement put an end to legalized segregation. Crimes motivated by racism are now punished with particular severity, and Americans are more sensitive than ever when it comes to the words they use to talk about other races and ethnic groups. Yet the country remains divided along racial lines.
This controversial book identifies a new paradigm of race relations that has emerged in the wake of the legal victories of the civil rights era: racial paranoia.
African-Americans distrust the rhetoric of political correctness, and continue to see the threat of hidden racism lurking below the surface of America's public conversations. Conspiracy theories abound and racial reconciliation seems nearly impossible.
Racial Paranoia: The Unintended Consequences of Political Correctness
explains how this skepticism is cultivated, transferred, and reinforced; how it shapes our nation and complicates the goal of racial equality.
Partial list of Reviews:
The Philadelphia Inquirer on Racial Paranoia: 8/21/08
Racial Paranoia: The Unintended Consequences of Political Correctness, [is] an incisive, thought-provoking work on race relations.
Publishers Weekly review of Racial Paranoia: 2/11/08
Calls for a conversation about race crop up persistently—as in the wake of the Imus scandal or O.J. Simpson's acquittal. Jackson's (Harlemworld; Real Black) examination of how race remains singular in American consciousness proves a lively opening gambit to a thought-provoking analysis. After a loose historical survey of race matters before the 1960s, when “brash and brazen American racism” was mainstream, Jackson focuses on the current state of affairs in racial fears and distrust that have gone underground and express themselves as racial paranoia and “de cardio” racism (“what the law can't touch, what won't be easily proved or disproved, what can't be simply criminalized or deemed unconstitutional”). Racial paranoia, not “just 'a black thing,' ” owes much to the way mass media confirms or subverts stereotypes; de cardio racism is cloaked, “papered over with public niceties and politically correct jargon.” Jackson explores particularly fresh areas in his illuminating consideration of The Man Who Cried I Am and 1996, racial paranoia's canonical texts and in his attention to the McCarran Act's effect upon black thinkers. Passionate and committed Jackson is, but his content is balanced. Casually scholarly and often witty, Jackson offers the reader “new ways of talking about race's subtler dynamic and new ways of spying racial conflict in the twenty-first century.” (Apr.)
Booklist review of Racial Paranoia: 2/15/2008
In this era of political correctness, racism has became more subtle and perhaps more subversively dangerous than ever before. So argues Jackson in this thought-provoking scholarly examination of the ambiguous sense of racial distrust that infects both blacks and whites in contemporary America. Terming the new reality of race in mainstream America racial paranoia, he analyzes the origins, the consequences, and the future implications of a racism that is often difficult to see, touch, and define but nevertheless exists and tempers the ways in which people across racial lines react to one another and interact with each other. Racial paranoia should not be dismissed as extremism, rather it must be publicly acknowledged, understood, and expressed before it can be combated. Although it might make uncomfortable reading for some, Jackson’s well-reasoned analysis is right on target.
The Penn Gazette: 9/08
Racial Paranoia: The Unintended Consequences of Political Correctness—an unusually entertaining volume whose take on contemporary racial divisions and conspiracy theories proved prescient when coverage of Barack Obama’s presidential campaign was hijacked last spring by the sensation that was the Rev. Jeremiah Wright[.]
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Some questions that John L. Jackson, Jr., asks in Racial Paranoia:
What can Dave Chappelle teach Don Imus and Michael Richards about American history?
How are racism and racial paranoia related (and not)?
What do Kanye West and Mos Def have to say about racial paranoia?
Why do conspiracy theories help us to make sense of how ALL people understand racial differences?
What does it mean to move from de jure and de facto racisms to what Jackson calls de cardio racism?
In what sense is racial paranoia a quite reasonable response to the current state of race-relations in America?
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"For those who are repeatedly wounded by racism, the prophylactic defense of 'paranoia' may be every bit as involuntary as it is practical. In his insightful new book, John L. Jackson Jr. renders a rigorous and fresh examination of the new axis of race relations in America."
-Randall Robinson, author of An Unbroken Agony: Haiti From Revolution to the Kidnapping of a President
"Brutally honest and brilliantly original, Racial Paranoia diagnoses an urgent problem: the suspicion and the reality of racism on the down-low. John Jackson takes us on a stunning whirlwind tour through a landscape peopled by everyone from Frederick Douglass to Dave Chappelle. The picture that emerges is of a new reality where race is everywhere and nowhere, seen and unseen, felt and ignored. Jackson's insight into what he calls the de cardio racism inscribed on American hearts is destined to make this book a classic."
-Noah Feldman, Professor of Law, Harvard University, author of Fall and Rise of the Islamic State
"By listening to conversations about race and studying its endless iterations in popular culture, John L. Jackson, Jr., arrives at a nuanced and utterly convincing reading of how, when we talk about race, we pretend to talk about everything but race, and of how all of us learn to understand what's being said. This important new book will help us decipher and make sense of our national conversation about race."
–Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Alphonse Fletcher University Professor, Harvard University
"Having an honest conversations about race is as daunting as it was a century ago when W.E.B. DuBois acknowledged the color-line as the defining reality of American culture. Never one to be discouraged by such challenges, John L. Jackson, Jr., once again puts conventional wisdom on its head with a smart, imaginative and humorous conversation about race in contemporary America. With the publication Racial Paranoia: The Unintended Consequences of Political Correctness, I suspect Jackson will become everybody’s favorite public intellectual." —Mark Anthony Neal, author of New Black Man
