Playing the race card is not really Barack Obama’s style. Although happy to use his racial identity as an asset, he seeks to transcend it by getting beyond obsessing about racial grievances. This is not easy in a party that has long wallowed in the politics of group grievance. It is especially difficult when running against a woman who has so assiduously used the gender card while profiting from her own victimization at the hands of the same unfaithful husband who now joins her in tag-team distortions of Obama’s record.

Gloria Steinem took Hillary Rodham Clinton’s I-am-woman-vote-for-me approach to the limit in a New York Times op-ed by suggesting that it would be better to elect a white woman than a black man because women got the franchise 50 years later and have "no masculinity to prove."

So perhaps Obama should be forgiven for piling on a bit after other black leaders implausibly accused Clinton of showing disrespect for the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. when she pointed out that King needed President Johnson to push civil-rights laws through Congress. Obama was ill-advised to call Clinton’s statement "ill-advised" and "unfortunate." But would forbearance have cost him black votes?

"All the habits of verbal thuggery that have long been used against critics of affirmative action [and of] radical feminism," David Brooks observed in his New York Times column, "are now being turned inward by the Democratic front-runners."

Is it too much to hope that this embarrassing identity-politics brawl proves to be a learning experience for liberals about the dangers of reflexively attributing racist, sexist, and other bigoted motives to people who disagree with or displease them?

Happily, a lively new book by a man whose policy prescriptions are generally liberal offers a wealth of perceptive insights about the harms done by promiscuously crying racism — and sexism, and homophobia — when the real problem is not (or not necessarily) contemporary bigotry but the tragic legacy of our history of oppression. The book is The Race Card: How Bluffing About Bias Makes Race Relations Worse, by Richard Thompson Ford, a Stanford law professor.

"As racial politics increasingly focuses on trivial slights, innocent slips of the tongue, and even well-intentioned if controversial decisions," Ford writes, "the most severe injustices — such as the isolation of a largely black underclass in hopeless ghettos or even more-hopeless prisons — receive comparatively little attention because we can’t find a bigot to paste to the dartboard."

(Speaking of prisons, Bill Clinton’s racial-justice rhetoric did not prevent him from courting the tough-on-crime vote as president by doing more than his share to incarcerate for many years tens of thousands of small-time, nonviolent, disproportionately black drug offenders.)

Ford adds: "The race card threatens to undermine public support for civil rights and other policies that promote social justice. It breeds and exacerbates mistrust between the races, making genuine claims of racism less credible…. And it distracts attention from the real issues involved in conflicts that are mislabeled as instances of bigotry."

Among the phoniest invocations of the race card, Ford suggests, are complaints by rich black celebrities such as Michael Jackson, who accused his record label, Sony Music, of a "racist conspiracy" to undermine his popularity "after sales of his disappointing latest album were, well, disappointing." Ford also faults Justice Clarence Thomas for "shamelessly play[ing] the race card" by accusing critics at his 1991 confirmation hearing of a "high-tech lynching." The author allows, however, that the sexual-harassment charges raised at the proceeding "had an ugly racial overtone, intended or not: the black man as sexual predator."

Ford stipulates that plenty of racists still walk the earth. But he stresses a reality from which most Democratic politicians and liberal activists avert their eyes: "Many of today’s racial injustices are not caused by simple prejudice; instead, they are legacies of the racial caste system of our recent past, entrenched by the inertia of class hierarchy and reinforced by the unforgiving competition of capitalist markets. As a result, many people have legitimate grievances but no racist to blame for them." Ford calls this "racism without racists."

Among Ford’s other insights are these.

• He refutes the facile claim that racism helps explain the Bush administration’s botched response to the catastrophe visited by Hurricane Katrina on the low-lying black ghettos of New Orleans. "George Bush does not care about black people," rapper Kanye West said on national television; Jesse Jackson compared the shelters for Katrina refugees to "the hull of a slave ship." To the contrary, Ford demonstrates, "there is little evidence that Gorge Bush cares less about poor black people than about poor whites." The federal response, if inept, "could as easily have left white San Franciscans huddled in inadequate shelters for days after a major earthquake."

• Ford provides an especially telling example of why the familiar complaint by black men, himself included, that taxis won’t stop for them does not necessarily prove that the cabbies are racists. First, he quotes Cornel West, the celebrity black professor now at Princeton, raging about how nine cabbies passed him by one afternoon after "I left my car — a rather elegant one — in a safe parking lot" to head for East Harlem. But wait, Ford says: Might not these cabbies be motivated by the same fear of crime that West himself had manifested, plus the odds that a black passenger might be bound for a dangerous neighborhood? "West won’t risk his no-doubt insured car," Ford notes. So why must a cabbie "risk his livelihood, maybe even his life?"

• Ford demonstrates brilliantly how the Supreme Court’s insistence that racial preferences in education are illegal unless designed to promote "diversity" has forced liberals "to embrace what had once been the fringe position of black nationalists (and white supremacists): The races are fundamentally — perhaps intrinsically — different." This has helped to entrench in the academic world an obsession with multiculturalism and self-segregation — all but displacing the ideal of integration that was the original and the best justification for racial preferences.

• He also shows how many "multiculturalists blithely advance a radical agenda that would force employers and businesses to effectively subsidize ethnic and racial nationalism — a worldview most Americans find abhorrent."

Ford’s book has lessons (if not very new ones) for conservatives, too. He skewers simplistic claims that affirmative action is simply "reverse racism," when in fact no one really believes that, and the impact on whites who lose out is a far cry from that of American apartheid on blacks. He also shows that conservatives’ color-blind-Constitution absolutism, no less than liberals’ "rhetoric of bias," detracts from the "cool-headed cost-benefit analysis" that should help shape our legal definitions of prohibited discrimination.

In my view, Ford tends to underestimate the social costs of preferences for minorities over much better qualified whites. But he is right to focus on real-world impact instead of moral absolutes.

Ford adds welcome touches of wry humor. Noting the shifts in society’s labeling of his own racial group from "colored" to "Negro" to "Afro-American" to "African-American" to "people of color," he observes: "At this point one might be forgiven for transposing the terms and saying ‘colored people’ — but you won’t be, so don’t do it."

One figure who pops up playing the race card over and over in Ford’s narrative is Al Sharpton. The book begins with how he became a household name by promoting the "apparently staged" claim that black teenager Tawana Brawley had been gang-raped and brutalized in 1987 by racist whites, including an assistant district attorney and a police officer. Sharpton later seconded Michael Jackson’s absurd "racist conspiracy" complaint. He mocked as an assault on black culture a modest proposal by Cornell University’s president to house entering freshmen in racially integrated dorms for a year before they settle into the university’s prevailing patterns of self-segregation. And so on, and so on.

Ford seems to be talking about Sharpton, among others, when he writes: "Playing the race card places all claims of racism — valid and phony — under a cloud of suspicion. [It is] mean-spirited. Racism is a serious charge — it ruins careers and destroys reputations. When warranted, it should. But when trumped up, the charge of racism is a particularly vicious slander….

"People who ‘play the race card’ opportunistically and with intentional deceit are the enemies of truth, social harmony, and social justice. All decent and honest people must join in condemning such people and their libelous claims."

This is, of course, the same Al Sharpton who has become such a power in the Democratic Party that far from condemning him, every aspiring presidential nominee (and former President Clinton) feels compelled to kiss his ring.

Democrats will be a healthier party when they start listening to thinkers such as Ford and tuning out demagogues such as Sharpton. Obama seems to get that, most of the time. Does Team Clinton?