Rights Gone Wrong: How Law Corrupts The Struggle For Equality, by Richard Thompson Ford

Why is it that so many writers see rights as having gone wrong in the contemporary era? If you read books like these, you get a rather predictably and lamentably skewed perspective of why that is the case, but even though this book is deeply tainted by the author’s defective worldview and politics, there are at least a few worthwhile insights that should not be neglected even if they are rare jewels in piles of manure. One of the unexpected insights of this book is that the author reveals something that is highly damaging to those who speak loosely of structural racism, and that is the fact that African immigrants tend to succeed far more than African Americans not because they are any less black, but because they lack the oppositional attitudes that hinder success in contemporary American society. As it turns out, much (and perhaps all) of what is labeled as structural racism is in fact bad attitudes that lead to predictably negative performance in society, and that rather than deserving something from government, such people need to get over themselves and live in such a way that they may thrive with the opportunities that exist for those who are able to grasp them.

To be sure, it does not seem that the author particularly understands the seriousness of what he admits when contrasting the fate of African immigrants with African-Americans, but it undermines a big part of the author’s argument. For one, it appears that the author thinks that rights have gone wrong because the “wrong” people have been able to claim rights, and also because what the author and others like him want is not so much freedom from oppression and overt racism and the like, but rather material blessings that they view as obligated to them, and the author recognizes that the contemporary argument over rights does not suit the demand for entitlements well, given the Supreme Court’s understandably hostile view of demands for entitlements from society at large for “protected” and “vulnerable” groups. The author recognizes that the nuanced and complicated nature of our contemporary society is ill-suited to blunt weapons of lawfare, although it must be admitted that the author and others of his ilk cannot be trusted to mediate the disputes over rights any more than they can be trusted in other areas of politics. And ultimately that reality is fatal to the reasoning of the author and so many others like him. To trust in the political process requires us to trust those with whom we are dealing with, and those like the author who imagine structural racism that does not exist and claim that one cannot be racist against whites make themselves impossible to view as reasonable and trustworthy people with whom one can get along.

In terms of its contents, this book is about 250 pages or so in length, divided into a few large, sprawling, and somewhat poorly edited chapters. The book begins with a lengthy introduction that whines about the gap between the promise of rights in the 1960s and the situation today where rights have not done all that people hoped they would do. This is followed by a discussion of entitlement and advantage (1), which demonstrates the general tone-deafness of the author to properly understanding the widespread hostility to entitlements that exist in many quarters. This is followed by a chapter on discriminating tastes (2), where the author comments (accurately) that there are cases where discrimination is a good thing rather than a bad thing, something which ought to be kept in mind. This is followed by a discussion of unintended consequences of the law, such as the way that ladies’ nights have been forbidden as providing improper benefits to women, despite their intent to provide women to what would otherwise be disappointingly male-heavy social events (3). A chapter on civil rights activism as therapy (4) would be less heavy handed if the author considered that writing is also a known form of therapy that the author himself engages in. This is followed by the author’s view of how rights are to be righted (5), after which the book ends with notes, acknowledgements, and an index.