NBM BookNotes: Racial Paranoia

Racial Paranoia: The Unintended Consequences of Political Correctness by John L. Jackson, Jr.

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.

Racial paranoia isn’t just about people being hyper-sensitive, and it is hardly the same thing as old-fashioned racism. The nuances of those differences are at the center of current debates about the very possibility of democracy in a multiracial American society on the verge, potentially, of its first African-American President.


ADVANCE PRAISE FOR RACIAL PARANOIA

“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 The Debt and 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

John L. Jackson, Jr. is the Richard Perry University Associate Professor of Communication and Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania.