To truly inspire a new dialogue on race, President Clinton will need to push further. Jim Sleeper frames the challenge well: 'Our best leaders are those who show their neighbors, every day, how to leave subgroup loyalties behind at the doors of classrooms, jury rooms, hiring halls. . .' That's far better advice than anything Clinton's advisory panel has offered so far.

Ronald Brownstein, Los Angeles Times

Jim Sleeper courageously writes abut what can only be whispered in the Academy and in the bowels of bureaucracy: an identity politics that refuses to identify itself.

John Patrick Diggins

Sleeper doesn't sneer; he argues skillfully and persuasively. And he takes pains to make Liberal Racism a critique of the left, not an endorsement of the right. . . . If he is particularly disappointed in liberals, Sleeper tells us, it is only because he expects more of them in the first place.

Eric Liu, The Washington Post

In this short, highly accessible, and often insightful book, Sleeper scores several strong points . . . the liberal left has always been compelled to use race instead of class to bring about social change and has become trapped in this strategy by a combination of genuine puritanical moralism about racism and sheer political opportunism.

Gerald Early, Washington University in St. Louis, editor of Miles Davis and American Culture, Chicago Tribune

If race is a concept with dubious biological and philosophical foundations, why continue to validate it? Why not argue, as Sleeper has done, for a more nuanced accommodation and celebration of ethnic differences and abandon the theoretical construct race and its destructive corollary, racism?

Mary Lefkowitz, The New York Times

Sleeper elaborates a compelling alternative to current liberal thinking, one that combines stalwart integrationist principles with a deep concern about the wretched conditions of millions of black Americans.

Sean Wilentz, Slate