Liberal Racism: How Liberals Got Race Wrong; How America Can Get It Right - Softcover

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.

Jim Sleeper's writing on urban politics and civic culture has appeared in Harper's, The New Republic, The New Yorker, and elsewhere. A former political columnist for the New York Daily News, he is an occasional commentator for National Public Radio and teaches political science at Yale.