This book demonstrates how ideological dogmatism could be potentially dangerous in policy-making processes. Specifically, it considers Thomas Sowell's constant disparagement of African American culture on the one hand, and his call for an immediate termination of preferential policies on the other as an intent to penalize a community that is already trapped in a double bind where the egalitarian promises of civic republicanism conflict with denigration and denial. As the book shows, this is eventually represented as an impending threat to the very ideal of an ethnically integrated society.