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The american dream in black and white: the clarence thomas hearings by Jane Flax (Ithaca, NY, Cornell University Press, 1998, 170 pp.)
In this brief but suggestive new book, jane flax, a professor of political science at Howard University and practicing psychotherapist, asks why “the American political system [has] been unable to eliminate…inequalities” of race and gender (pp. 1-2). She responds with a feminist critique of liberalism's and America's most cherished assumptions about fairness, the heroic (and heroically abstract) individual, the “problem” of difference. Although the main points of Flax's arguments will not be news to most readers versed in contemporary feminist and critical theories, her choice of method is refreshing. She focuses her critique through a case study of the Clarence Thomas hearings of September and October 1991 and uses the hearings to expose the American race/gender system and its effects and persistent inequalities. As I discuss here, her method is not uniformly successful. However, when it works, her case study method animates her theoretical points and grounds her suggestion that race/gender domination, far from representing historical anomalies, is an ongoing and, even more disturbingly, constitutive feature of the American dream.
Throughout The American Dream in Black and White, Flax writes race/gender as one word. She uses this linked term to accentuate the interdependence of race and gender and to promote a “more