With Liberal Racism, political journalist Jim Sleeper offers a devastating indictment of American liberalism's greatest failure: it has turned away from - indeed turned against - the ideal of a color-blind society liberals had fought so hard to achieve. Once the champions of individual opportunity unbounded by race, liberals have embraced the corrosive idea that racial differences should shape over identities and opinions.

Such liberal thinking - which its adherents call "diversity" but is better seen as a kind of racism - promotes the color-coding of public policy and civic culture: a dangerous strategy that makes one's skin color one's destiny. Sleeper follows the consequences in the streets, courts, polling booths, and newsrooms, demonstrating that liberal efforts no longer curb discrimination, but invite it.

By insisting that racial differences are much more profound than they really are, the new racism constrains Americans increasingly and officially to define their citizenship and their selves - whether they like it or not - foremost by color.

Drawing new lessons from black Americans' quest for full citizenship, Sleeper argues that it should now be a point of pride for any American entering a jury room, teaching a class, or reporting a news story to mute his or her racial affinities in order to stand for the whole of American civic culture.