For those who love (or need)a good talking to, “The Race Card: How Bluffing About Bias Makes Race Relations Worse” by Richard Thompson Ford (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $26) is defintiely a conversation piece worth flipping through.

Before you pick up that hotline to the likes of Rev. Al Sharpton and his handy entourage, asserts Ford, make sure you get it straight … first. While managing, somehow, to maintain a position somewhere along the border of the middle of the road, the Stanford University law professor challenges readers to consider all the players, circumstances and positions involved in perceived infractions before using race as a ready-in-hand trump. The damage almost definitely will have an opposite ripple effect.

Ford uses entertaining and thought-provoking examples culled from pop culture (How could Michael Jackson say his plummeting album sales had more to do with race than other turn-offs like, say, a molestation accustion?), politics (…. “With two more degrees of separation you could make Dick Cheney into an honorary black person”) and even daily life (Is the cabbie that refuses to pick up a black passenger, who might request a trip into a bad part of town, a racist or is it a case of what Ford refers to as “racism without racists?”). He turns the mirror on us to really look at what is really going on. Much of the problem, Ford says, is that we’ve lost sight of what the very definition of racism is as a society. Period.

With today’s climate including such blatant racial affronts as the Jena 6 incident and the noose-hanging knock-offs that followed, it is well worth it at this juncture  … if not absolutely critical … to not get it twisted.