Only 46 years old, West has been called — if only by his publisher — “the pre-eminent African American intellectual of his generation.” His work has elicited White House invitations and more requests as a speaker, blurb writer and distinguished guest than any individual could possibly fill. In a market in which it is increasingly difficult for genuine scholars to get an academic monograph in print, West has written or edited 20 books published by commercial publishers — 16 in the last 10 years alone.

Even more remarkable, except for a thin volume of rambling opinions on issues of the day called “Race Matters,” none of West’s books sell sufficiently to justify the commercial support his work has received. They are put into print (as one of his publishers informed me) as “prestige” publications to bring credit to the house.

One reason for the failure of West’s books to gain intellectual traction is that while his writings combine the philosophically grandiose with postmodern frou frou, they are singularly lacking in the intellectual power that would sustain either. His first effort, published when he was 29 (and old enough to know better) was titled “Prophesy Deliverance! An Afro-American Revolutionary Christianity.” Then followed “Prophetic Fragments,” “The American Evasion of Philosophy,” “The Ethical Dimensions of Marxist Thought,” “Prophetic Thought in Postmodern Times,” “Prophetic Reflections,” “Keeping Faith” and “Restoring Hope.”

If the subject matter implied by these titles suggests intellectual airiness, their style recalls a Jesse Jackson riff without the rhymes. Thus we learn from notes West has supplied for the new Cornel West Reader that “prophesy” (which appears to be his academic specialty) means injecting Marxist clichis into religious dogmas: “These introductory remarks to my second book, ‘Prophetic Fragments’ (1988), convey my moral outrage at the relative indifference of American religion to the challenge of social justice beyond charity.” The excerpt from the book that appears in the Reader is more explicit (the style pompously typical): “The principal aim of ‘Prophetic Fragments’ is to examine and explore, delineate and demystify, counter and contest the widespread accommodation of American religion to the political and cultural status quo.”

A few years ago, Leon Wieseltier wrote a cover feature for the New Republic on West’s oeuvre called “The Decline of the Black Intellectual.” West’s productions were, in Wieseltier’s mortifying words “monuments to the devastation of a mind by the squalls of theory.” Surveying the corpus of West’s academic work, Wieseltier concluded that the Alphonse Fletcher Jr. Harvard professor was an intellectual empty suit whose writing was “noisy, tedious, slippery … sectarian, humorless, pedantic and self-endeared,” and whose works were “almost completely worthless.” As Gertrude Stein once said of the city of Oakland, there is no “there” there.

Ironically, it is the very emptiness, even incoherence, of his intellectual persona that West has managed to turn into a career virtue. One of the early catalysts of his rise into the cultural stratosphere was his plea for racial harmony. As a Marxist black radical he was almost unique in saying that it was not appropriate for other black militants to hate all whites and Jews. Yet he has endorsed the radicals grouped around the magazine Race Traitor, which calls for the “abolition of whiteness,” and two of America’s most notorious black race haters.

While West is known as the most prominent radical among African-Americans preaching ecumenical healing between blacks and Jews, he is a friend to Louis Farrakhan, the most influential anti-Semite in America. Recently, as Bill Bradley’s advisor on blacks, he encouraged the presidential candidate to meet with Al Sharpton (whose own senatorial candidacy West supported). This is the same Sharpton who incited black anti-Semites to boycott a Jewish-owned store in Harlem, which was then torched by a deranged member of the group and set on fire, killing seven people.

West can maintain this oxymoronic position — racial healer and bedfellow of racial extremists — for the simple reason that no one takes him seriously. He is the quintessential non-threatening radical, an African American who can wave the bloody shirt to orchestrate the heartstrings of white guilt, while coming to dinner at the Harvard faculty club and acting as a gentleman host.

The text of the “Cornel West Reader,” itself a holograph of his iconic place in the PC culture, reads like the diary of an inginue — breathless with discoveries both real and imagined, particularly the discovery of self. It is as though Georgie Porgie, reincarnated as a Harvard don, stuck in his thumb and pulled out this plum: “I am a Chekhovian Christian.” Thus West announces his intellectual identity in the introduction.

He proceeds to go on and on about his “Chekhovian Christian viewpoint,” whatever that means. But looking for tangible meaning in West’s prose is a terminally discouraging quest, a bit like looking for a breath of fresh air at the bottom of the sea. There is no “there” there, except perhaps the tedious injection of more religious sentiments into Marxist cant:

I am a Chekhovian Christian … By this I mean that I am obsessed with confronting the pervasive evil of unjustified suffering and unnecessary social misery.

If we ask why Chekhov (and not, say, Tony Kushner or Spike Lee), however, all we get is a blast of hot air: “I find the incomparable works of Anton Chekhov - the best singular body by a modern artist …” Or, as specifically as West can manage: “[Chekhov's] magisterial depiction of the cold Cosmos, indifferent Nature, crushing Fate and the cruel histories that circumscribe desperate, bored, confused and anxiety-ridden yet love-hungry people, who try to endure against all odds, rings true to me.”

Well, duh. What has this to do with identifying Chekhovianism as a genus of Christianity? It is beyond West’s mental reach to address the question his juxtaposition begs: How can a Christian universe informed by love and the prospect of redemption be squared with the cold Chekhovian Cosmos, an “indifferent Nature [and] crushing Fate?” Don’t spend too many gray cells attempting to answer that one.

Throughout, the intellectual superficiality is accompanied by an intellectual status-seeking worthy of a character out of Molihre: “Despite my Chekhovian Christian conception of what it means to be human - a view that invokes pre-modern biblical narratives …” “I stand in the skeptical Christian tradition of Montaigne, Pascal and Kierkegaard …” “My Chekhovian Christian viewpoint is idiosyncratic and iconoclastic. My sense of the absurdity and incongruity of the world is closer to the Gnosticism of Valentinus, Luria or Monoimos … My intellectual lineage goes more through Schopenhauer, Tolstoy, Rilke, Melville, Lorca, Kafka, Celan, Beckett, Soyinka, O’Neill, Kazantzakis, Morrison and above all, Chekhov … And, I should add, it reaches its highest expression in Brahms’s ‘Requiem’ and Coltrane’s ‘A Love Supreme.’”

Notwithstanding the intellectual jive, comedy would be an inapt term to describe a yearning like West’s, which has been socially constructed and is entirely unnecessary. For his intellectual charade reflects the political sickness of the modern academy, which has thrown over its traditional calling to the “disinterested pursuit of knowledge,” and assumed a new institutional identity as an “agency of social change.” West’s plight is that of a paradigmatic affirmative-action baby, whom the good wishes of his “oppressors” have elevated so far beyond his merits that he has lost sight of terra firma below. As a result, he has been condemned to a life of suspended animation, his entire being addressed to the impossible task of proving that he is someone he can never be.

Although West is almost incapable of writing a concrete sentence, he shows just enough autobiographical skirt in “The Cornel West Reader” to betray the source of this dilemma. Growing up as a precocious black child in the radical 1960s, West became a black militant activist, president of his senior high school class and an inevitable target of liberal uplift. At 17, he was recruited to Harvard where his political militancy convinced him that he had more to tell his professors than they had to teach him. He was determined, as he informs us, to press the university and its intellectual traditions into the service of his political agendas and not the other way around: to have its educational agendas imposed on him. “Owing to my family, church, and the black social movements of the 1960s, I arrived at Harvard unashamed of my African, Christian, and militant de-colonized outlooks. More pointedly, I acknowledged and accented the empowerment of my black styles, mannerisms and viewpoints, my Christian values of service, love, humility and struggle, and my anti-colonial sense of self-determination for oppressed people and nations around the world.”

This was a crucial moment for what could have been a promising student — the confrontation of a brash but also impressionable youth with a 300-year-old educational institution dedicated to passing on the intellectual traditions of a 3,000-year-old civilization. It was a system that had shaped generations before him. Yet, it was a system that failed West, as its liberal ramparts collapsed before his militancy, backed by the cultural radicalism of the age.

In the years West was a student at Harvard, traditional disciplines were being broken down and destroyed, intellectual authority assaulted and deconstructed, and the university transformed into a quasi-political party. New disciplines and even entire institutions were created — ideologically committed black studies and women’s studies departments, paganized theology schools, Marxist and post-Marxist curricula in the fields of English and the humanities.

The old and tested rules of scholarship were rejected. Instead of educating and disciplining their intellectual tyro, Harvard and its liberal faculties merely encouraged him. It was the PC thing to do for the oppressed. Cornel West’s aborted education was a case of what Shelby Steele has analyzed as liberal whites looking for moral absolution and radical blacks looking for the easy way up — and who could blame them or West for that? As a result, the once-promising student never learned the difference between an intellectual argument and a political attitude, between the pursuit of an intellectual inquiry and the search for “answers” that were ideologically correct.

“The Cornel West Reader” is a testament to the intellectual vacuum that a progressive education creates. The trappings of intellect are in place, the canonical names invoked, the capsule histories recalled, the theories broadly rehearsed. But behind the footnotes and the latinate prose, the vulgar mind of the activist is feverishly at work. A “discourse” is produced in which political postures invariably substitute for thought.

The intellectual ruin of West is not an isolated case. There is a whole generation of racially favored intellectual water flies — Bell Hooks, Michael Dyson, Robin D.G. Kelley, Patricia Williams, to name a few — whose cultural elevation is not only unrelated to any serious intellectual achievement, but has eliminated the possibility of one.

For them, as for West, the pathos lies in what might have been. The left-wing university culture has stripped them of an educational opportunity that is given only once per individual lifetime. Meanwhile, the self-appointed social redeemers, whom West thanks for helping him along, are in reality the very people who deprived him of a chance to learn the hard, old-fashioned way, and thus helped to destroy whatever intellectual potential he may once have had.

U.S. district judge Shira Scheindlin granted class-action certification to a stop-and-frisk lawsuit against the city of New York, Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly, and Mayor Michael Bloomberg. The plaintiffs allege that the NYPD’s stop-and-frisk policy regularly violates the Constitution by illegally stopping and searching scores of people belonging to a particular demographic — black and Latino. Pending the city’s appeal, the class-action ruling will put stop-and-frisk on trial.

Plaintiffs in Floyd et al. vs City of New York also argue that they were stopped by police who did not have the legally necessary “reasonable suspicion” that they had committed or were going to commit a crime. What’s more, the suit alleges, police often performed frisks, but not because they saw a bulge they suspected to be a weapon, another legal requirement.

In her written decision, Scheindlin said the alleged constitutional violations result not from the actions of rogue officers, but from a policy handed down from the very top. “The stop-and-frisk program is centralized and hierarchical,” said Scheindlin. “Those stops were made pursuant to a policy that is designed, implemented and monitored by the NYPD’s administration.”

Scheindlin’s ruling cites “overwhelming evidence” — a spike in stop-and-frisks and the NYPD’s own words — indicating that at the “highest levels of the department” police are enforcing a policy that leaves behind a trail of daily injustices.

For years, Mayor Bloomberg and Police Commissioner Kelly have used distortions and misinformation to promote and justify a policy that violates the constitutional rights of those who were stopped. Now, the Scheindlin findings have exposed the NYPD game for what it is, an illegal system of quotas and racial profiling imposed on field police from the top of the NYPD.

“Suspicionless stops should never occur,” Scheindlin wrote in her decision, adding that, “Defendants’ cavalier attitude towards the prospect of a ‘widespread practice of suspicionless stops’ displays a deeply troubling apathy towards New Yorkers’ most fundamental constitutional rights.” Stop-and-frisk, which the data shows is a form of racial profiling, violates not only the Fourth Amendment — protection from unreasonable searches — but also the 14th Amendment, which includes the equal protection clause, the plaintiffs charge.

The Scheindlin decision was informative and comprehensive, including a number of important facts and observations. Here are eight important points from the decision.

1. Soaring numbers. The rate of stops has grown exponentially under the Bloomberg administration. Scheindlin’s ruling notes that police conducted 2.8 million documented stops of people between 2004 and 2009, about half of whom were frisked. In contrast, in 1998, Scheindlin explains, NYPD officers made roughly 150,000 stops per year. In 2004 alone, officers recorded more than 313,000 stops, “and since then the number has increased every year except 2007, rising to over 684,000 in 2011.” Scheindlin cites the large increase as evidence of a centralized policy change.

2. No reasonable suspicion. Reasonable suspicion that a person is involved in a crime is necessary for a legal stop. Eighty-eight percent of those stopped, however, are not charged with any crime. As Scheindlin noted, the data shows that “according to their own records and judgment, officers’ ‘suspicions’ were wrong nearly nine times out of ten.”

3. Imaginary bulges. Officers’ suspicions were similarly unsubstantiated when reportedly searching for guns. A “suspicious bulge” was cited as a reason for about 10 percent of all stops, but guns were seized in less than 1 percent. “For every 69 stops that police officers justified specifically on the basis of a suspicious bulge, they found one gun,” the decision notes.

4. Stops for no reason. The absence of a legally necessary, interpretable “suspected crime” cited on official forms grew from 1.1 percent in 2004 to 35.9 percent (more than 200,000 reported stops) in 2009. During those years, “Overall, in more than half a million documented stops — 18.4 percent of the total — officers listed no coherent suspected crime,” Scheindlin wrote, meaning they either ignored the section altogether or did not cite suspected behavior that is indeed illegal.

5. Unlawful stops. Scheindlin writes, “According to their own explanations for their actions, NYPD officers conducted at least 170,000 unlawful stops between 2004 and 2009.” Stops based on nothing more than “furtive movement” or a “high-crime area” were the justifications of at least 100,000 stops, but as Scheindlin says, are illegal due to the Fourth Amendment law protecting Americans from unreasonable search.

6. Racial profiling. The NYPD’s stop-and-frisk program targets blacks and Latinos because of their skin color. Scheindlin admitted the testimony of Columbia University professor Jeffrey Fagan, who found that police stopped blacks and Latinos far more than white residents. Isolated from other factors like crime rates and neighborhood racial composition, racial disparity from racial targeting was statistically significant, strongly underscoring that skin color is the essential factor in determining who gets stopped and throwing weight behind allegations of 14th Amendment violations. Fagan’s research also found that “the search for weapons is (a) unrelated to crime, (b) takes place primarily where weapons offenses are less frequent than other crimes, and (c) is targeted at places where the black and Hispanic populations are highest.” Cops are more likely to list no suspected crime category, or what Scheindlin called “an incoherent one,” like “furtive movements,” when stopping blacks and Latinos than when stopping whites. They also are more likely to use force against people of color.

7. NYPD illegal quotas. Scheindlin links the rising number of stops and the targeting of black and Latinos to NYPD quotas and to Commissioner Kelly’s own admission that the NYPD has a quota policy, albeit disguised. In a recent operations order, Commissioner Kelly explained departmental policy under the euphemism “performance goal.” Kelly said in the order, “Department managers can and must set performance goals,” for “the issuance of summonses, the stopping and questioning of suspicious individuals, and the arrests of criminals.”

The order also explains a weekly review during which a sergeant compares each officer’s monthly “activity” with the “daily assignment,” whereby police who “do not demonstrate activities” — or keep their numbers up — “will be evaluated accordingly and their assignments re-assessed.” In other words, there will be consequences for officers who don’t meet quotas, even though New York labor law says penalizing cops for failing to meet quotas is illegal.

Former NYPD officers turned whistleblowers Adhyl Polanco and Adrian Schoolcraft have collected evidence documenting NYPD quotas in practice. From 2008 to 2009, Polanco, from the 41st Precinct, and Schoolcraft, from the 81st, recorded roll calls revealing supervisors’ and other high-ranking officers’ enforcement of quotas. In Scheindlin’s own words, Schoolcraft’s audio files expose supervisors “repeatedly telling officers to conduct unlawful stops and arrests and explaining that the instructions for higher performance numbers are coming down the chain of command.”

Similarly, Polanco testified that “his commanding officers announced specific quotas for arrests and summons (quotas that rose dramatically between early 2008 and 2009) and for UF-250s” (a term for the forms used in stops), said Scheindlin, “and threatened overtime and undesirable assignments for those who failed to meet them.”

8. Repeat performances. According to the NYCLU, in 2011 the NYPD stopped more young, black men than live in New York; that is, some individuals are stopped and frisked repeatedly. To protect their rights, plaintiffs are seeking “systemic relief” — an end to the unconstitutional practice of stop-and-frisk.

Kristen Gwynne covers drugs at AlterNet. She graduated from New York University with a degree in journalism and psychology.

But what if both the multicultural left and the nativist right are wrong? Definitions of racial identity in the U.S. have changed over time. In the twentieth century, Americans with different degrees of African ancestry who in earlier generations would have been described as negroes, quadroons and octoroons were all lumped together in a single category as blacks. And in the nineteenth century, eminent American ethnologists debated the question of whether Irish-Americans belonged to the same race as Anglo-Americans.

In the 1970s, the federal government came up with the bizarre “non-Hispanic white” label, lumping together Arab-Americans, Norwegian-Americans and Irish-Americans into a single government-created pseudo-race. To compound the absurdity, at the same time the federal government invented a category of “Hispanics” who, as government forms invariably note, “may be of any race.” The artificial “Hispanic” category is even more preposterous than the “non-Hispanic white” category, including blond, blue-eyed South Americans of German descent as well as Mexican-American mestizos and Puerto Ricans of predominantly African descent.

These government racial labels are increasingly out of touch with America’s fluid demographic reality. But for the sake of argument, let us take America’s official racial classifications, all too reminiscent of Soviet nationality labels, at face value. According to polls, a slight majority of Hispanics (or Latinos) identify themselves as “white.” Between 2000 and 2010, the percentage of government-labeled Hispanics who identified as “other race” dropped in percentage from 42 to 37 while those who identified as white rose from 48 to 53 percent.

If self-described “white” Hispanics are annexed to the “non-Hispanic white” group in order to form a single category of “whites” (Hispanic and non-Hispanic), then the emergence of a “nonwhite” majority in the U.S. is postponed by generations and perhaps indefinitely.

What is more, by the third generation, a majority of Hispanics marry outside of their ethnic group, mostly but not exclusively into the non-Hispanic white population. It is possible that their children will identify themselves as “mixed race” or “other race” — categories for self-labeling that have been allowed in recent Census counts. But it is more likely that the unscientific but powerful cultural category of “whiteness” will be enlarged to include Hispanics and Asians and their children as “non-Hispanic whites.”

In a widely-reprinted 1998 article for the New York Times Magazine, “The Beige and the Black,” I pointed out that America’s nonrational caste system has been binary: not white/nonwhite, but black/nonblack. Because “white” really means “nonblack,” the arbitrary white category is infinitely elastic, capable of being enlarged to include practically anybody who is not clearly of black African descent. While Hispanics and Asians have suffered from vicious bigotry in American history, anti-black prejudice has always been the organizing principle of caste in American culture.

As I wrote 14 years ago:

In the 21st century, then, the U.S. population is not likely to be crisply divided among whites, blacks, Hispanics, Asians and American Indians. Nor is it likely to be split two ways, between whites and nonwhites. Rather, we are most likely to see something more complicated: a white-Asian-Hispanic melting-pot majority — a hard-to-differentiate group of beige Americans — offset by a minority consisting of blacks who have been left out of the melting pot once again.

(This is a prediction on my part, not a prescription. Rather than witness the redefinition of whiteness, from Anglo-American to Euro-American to Euro-Latino-Asian American, I would rather live to see a truly post-racist America in which caste is completely expunged from culture and consciousness. But I am reporting trends, not creating them; please don’t shoot the messenger.)

If this analysis is right, then present-day Republican racial politics is doomed — and so is Democratic racial politics.

Today’s Republican right seems intent on treating the ridiculous government category of “non-Hispanic white” as though it represented a core community of  “real Americans,” excluding black Americans and protected from demographic inundation by Hispanics, or “Third World hordes” as the gentlemanly Patrick Buchanan politely calls our fellow citizens of Latin American descent. Quite apart from betraying its roots in the Republicanism of Lincoln and the abolitionists, a Republican Party whose image of the American nation excludes not only blacks but also Hispanics and their descendants is doomed in electoral politics.

Democrats are right about that. But progressives are wrong to imagine that a new “majority of minorities” is about to emerge and create a lasting majority for the Democrats. The success of white nativists in the GOP in driving away Hispanic voters may help the Democrats for a few more electoral cycles, but sooner or later Republican politicians who are tired of losing will challenge the neo-Confederate wing of their party and practice a more racially-inclusive politics of the kind pioneered by George W. Bush and his brother Jeb Bush, with his Hispanic wife and mixed-race children.

Nor should progressives assume that Hispanics and their mixed-race progeny will remain loyal to the Democrats for generations to come. The fact that Anglo-American nativists in the Republican Party in the early 1900s tried to keep their ancestors out of the country does not deter most working-class white “ethnics” of Irish and Italian descent in the U.S. from voting for today’s GOP. Like earlier waves of immigrants, Hispanics are likely to change in their political values as a result of assimilation and upward mobility.

What does this mean for black Americans? On the one hand, the persistence of an informal “white” majority defined in opposition to the black minority would mean further delay in the realization of a truly post-racist America.

On the other hand, black Americans made much more rapid advances during the New Deal/Civil Rights era, when the melting of European ethnic differences created an overwhelming “white” majority for a time, than they have done since mass immigration made them the second largest official “minority” in the U.S. after Hispanics. The truth is that the “rainbow coalition” strategy of uniting minorities has helped other groups more than blacks. Affirmative action in higher education, for example, while doing little to help the majority of black Americans who do not go to college, has benefited upper-middle-class white women, who are part of the white majority (and, if they are affluent, part of the social elite within the dominant group). Programs like affirmative action and minority business set-asides, originally designed to help the descendants of American slaves, lost all moral credibility when they were opened up to white women and recent Hispanic and Asian immigrants, notwithstanding the feeble “diversity” rationale that America’s white oligarchy invented to rationalize them.

It remains to be seen how changing racial conceptions shape American politics. But if demography is destiny, one thing is clear — in the long run, both the diversitarian left and the nativist right are doomed.

But beyond the business headlines, what’s really fascinating about “The Intouchables” is the way it exposes the gulf in racial attitudes between France and the United States, along with another gulf that’s just as wide, the one that has film critics and cinephiles on one side and popular audiences on the other. Viewers in numerous countries have eagerly devoured this feel-good fable about two men of different races and classes who forge an improbable friendship (dubbed by some wags “Driving Monsieur Daisy”). While the audience for foreign-language film is inherently limited in America, there’s no reason to believe it won’t do well here also. At the same time, heated transatlantic debate has erupted over whether “The Intouchables” traffics in offensive racial stereotypes, with Variety critic Jay Weissberg writing an uncharacteristically angry review that accused the film of “Uncle Tom racism” and compared the Senegalese caretaker character to a “performing monkey.”

When Harvey Weinstein first acquired “The Intouchables” in the wake of its smash success in France, he clearly imagined another dark-horse Oscar contender, in the wake of “The Artist.” The film has racked up audience awards at film festival after film festival, and currently stands at No. 93 on IMDb’s user-generated “Top 250″ list. Omar Sy, the charismatic Afro-French actor who plays Driss, the caretaker, won this year’s César award (the French Oscar equivalent) for best actor, beating out actual Oscar winner Jean Dujardin. But with the looming possibility that “The Intouchables” could spark a divisive, soul-searching racial debate — which was precisely what squelched the Oscar hopes of “The Help” — those expectations have been downplayed. (That isn’t why “The Intouchables” is being released this week, with Weinstein and most of the film-biz aristocracy in Cannes, but the coincidence is oddly useful.)

Let me come clean right now and tell you that I enjoyed “The Intouchables” quite a bit. If you’re looking for a lightweight summer change of pace, with just a smidgen of Continental flair, here it is. Both Sy and co-star François Cluzet (of the hit thriller “Tell No One”) are marvelous, the former playing a guy who’s constantly in motion, both physically and psychologically, and the latter playing a depressed and repressed guy who literally can’t move, but whose real imprisonment has more to do with his spirit than his spinal cord. Don’t go expecting serious French art cinema, please; those who have described this movie as something like a mid-’80s Eddie Murphy comedy dressed up with classy Parisian settings are correct. But here’s the question, and I can’t answer it for you: Is that such a bad thing, in itself?

Once is not enough for a movie that’s made this much money, of course, and Weinstein already has an American remake in the works, possibly to star Colin Firth as stick-up-butt wheelchair dude. The real Eddie Murphy has gotten too old to play the loosey-goosey, pot-smoking sidekick, but there’s no shortage of guys who could do it: Jamie Foxx is the default setting these days, but I’d go for the suddenly hot Kevin Hart from “Think Like a Man.” I’m not claiming it’s aesthetically or sociologically valid to remake a French movie that already feels like a reheated Hollywood throwback, by the way. I’m saying it’s a cruel reality, like Dutch elm disease or Adam Sandler, and there’s no way to stop it.

To get back to the case at hand, I do understand what the haters find so offensive about “The Intouchables.” (The infelicitous English title, by the way, reflects the fact that they couldn’t really get away with calling it “The Untouchables,” could they?) I was pretty taken aback by Weissberg’s vituperative review, and I tend to believe that “Uncle Tom” is one of those expressions that white people should pretty much never use. On the other hand, I can only applaud him for abandoning the balanced, analytical mode of trade-magazine criticism and saying exactly what he damn well thinks. (As for comparing a black man to a monkey — well, I understand what Weissberg was getting at, but it’s an error of rhetoric, the sort of comment that makes nuance and context disappear.) And I know for sure, from hearing friends and acquaintances in and around the movie business complain about this film, that Weissberg is not alone.

I believe that Olivier Nakache and Eric Toledano, the writing-directing duo who made “The Intouchables,” are innocent of any bad intentions. In fact, “innocent” isn’t a bad word overall, for this movie and the worldview it represents. The French may pride themselves on being the most worldly and sophisticated of all people, but the debate in France about race and immigration and multiculturalism — which ramped up sharply after the suburban riots of 2005 — can sometimes sound strikingly naive to American ears. Until very recently, mainstream French opinion has resisted thinking about the nation in anything except homogeneous terms, despite growing Arab and black minorities (both immigrant and native-born) and evident social problems with segregation and discrimination. (The French census, for instance, is prohibited from collecting data on race or religion, so no one really knows how many French people are black or Islamic.)

There can be no question that the characters in “The Intouchables” are stereotypes, in the broad sense. Cluzet’s character, Philippe, is an aristocratic zillionaire who lives in an astonishingly luxurious flat in central Paris. Since being injured in a paragliding accident, he’s lived inside a cocoon of money and privilege, surrounded by antiques and modern art and a bevy of assistants. Sy’s character, Driss, is easygoing, good-hearted, lustful and uncultured, and his passions run toward pretty girls, getting high and vintage American R&B. Philippe hires Driss specifically because Driss doesn’t particularly want the job — he only shows up to get a signature for his benefits card — and feels no pity for Philippe.

Which is actually a pretty good reason. You get where this is going, most likely: Driss is a pretty inept caretaker, at least at first, but is the only person Philippe knows who will relate to him man to man. There’s a bit of borderline-homophobic humor about their enforced intimacy; there are interludes with hookers and fast cars and late-night conversations fueled by booze and marijuana. Driss learns to like Mozart and modern art; Philippe learns to get down with Earth Wind & Fire and gets some valuable tips about chicks. It’s probably fair to summarize this movie as being the story of a paralyzed white man who needs the help of a younger, stronger, more virile black man to reconnect with his own masculinity, and if you want to say that narrative reflects an underlying latticework of racist attitudes, I won’t argue with you. Then there’s the complicating factor that in the real-life story on which “The Intouchables” is based, the caretaker was of Algerian origin, and hence Arab rather than black. (The filmmakers have said they wanted to cast Sy, and built the story around him, but it’s certainly possible to render other interpretations.)

But one can concede all of that while still agreeing with French historian and multicultural activist François Durpaire, who has responded to Weissberg by arguing that the huge success of “The Intouchables” is likely to have positive effects in Europe’s emerging discussion of race and culture, even if the movie relies on crude generalizations. (Durpaire adds that if “The Intouchables” is offensive, so were the “Beverly Hills Cop” movies.) Movies are not meant to be seminars in sociology, after all, and most viewers will receive “The Intouchables” as an upbeat story about two guys from vastly different circumstances who turn out to have a lot in common and help each other, etc., rather than a lesson in racial semiotics.

Perhaps the strongest endorsement for “The Intouchables” has come from aging French ultra-nationalist Jean-Marie Le Pen, who has described it as an allegory about how the future of his nation depends on disenfranchised young immigrants from the suburbs. He thinks that’s a “dreadful” vision, mind you — but, seriously, who knew that guy was so smart?

“The Intouchables” opens this week in New York and Los Angeles, with wider national release to follow.

A far more unsettling finding is buried in this otherwise up-with-reading news item. The Ohio State researchers gave 70 heterosexual male readers stories about a college student much like themselves. In one version, the character was straight. In another, the character is described as gay early in the story. In a third version the character is gay, but this isn’t revealed until near the end. In each case, the readers’ “experience-taking” — the name these researchers have given to the act of immersing oneself in the perspective, thoughts and emotions of a story’s protagonist — was measured.

The straight readers were far more likely to take on the experience of the main character if they weren’t told until late in the story that he was different from themselves. This, too, is not so surprising. Human beings are notorious for extending more of their sympathy to people they perceive as being of their own kind. But the researchers also found that readers of the “gay-late” story showed “significantly more favorable attitudes toward homosexuals” than the other two groups of readers, and that they were less likely to attribute stereotypically gay traits, such as effeminacy, to the main character. The “gay-late” story actually reduced their biases (conscious or not) against gays, and made them more empathetic. Similar results were found when white readers were given stories about black characters to read.

What can we do with this information? If we subscribe to the idea that literature ought to improve people’s characters — and that’s the sentiment that seems to be lurking behind the study itself — then perhaps authors and publishers should be encouraged to conceal a main character’s race or sexual orientation from readers until they become invested in him or her. Who knows how much J.K. Rowling’s revelation that Albus Dumbledore is gay, announced after the publication of the final Harry Potter book, has helped to combat homophobia? (Although I confess that I find it hard to believe there were that many homophobic Potter fans in the first place.)

Absurd as this tactic may sound, many publishers are already kind of doing it — and catching hell. Although the term “whitewashing” is most often used to describe film and TV adaptations in which white actors are cast as characters who were people of color in the original book, something similar also happens with book graphics. Novels about black or Asian characters have been given cover art that features white people.

Controversies over cover-art whitewashing, and other attempts by agents, editors and publishers to downplay or even eliminate minority characters, have roiled the world of young adult literature in recent years. The author Justine Larbalestier (who is white) wrote a YA novel, “Liar,” with a black heroine in 2009, but her publisher insisted on using a photograph of a white teenager for the cover. Larbalestier took their disagreement public and the ensuing scandal persuaded the publisher to back down. Ursula K. Le Guin, a revered science-fiction and fantasy author who has often chosen dark-skinned people as her protagonists, has had to put up with seeing them depicted as white in cover art and film adaptations for decades.

Publishers argue that they’re only trying to make sure their authors’ books find the widest possible audience. What they mean is that a certain percentage of white (or straight) readers will summarily conclude a book isn’t for them if the face on the cover fails to resemble their own. Sad to say, the publishers are probably right about that. While the readers in the Ohio State study didn’t get to choose the stories they read, many of them were deciding how much to invest in the protagonist and his experiences — how much to identify — on the basis of his sexual orientation or race.

Authors, fans and observers are rightly disgusted by the practice of cover-art whitewashing. It shouldn’t have to be that way. But some commentators on the controversy seem to think that if publishers act as if race or gender or sexual orientation isn’t a factor in what many people decide to read, somehow it will simply stop being a factor. This seems unlikely. If it were so easy to rid people of their prejudices, the world would already be a much pleasanter place. It takes regular exposure to different types of people in the course of everyday life — at school and in the military, the workplace and the neighborhood — plus a whole lot of time and peer pressure to wear bias down.

Well, it takes that — and maybe the magic of storytelling? The readers in the Ohio State study did become more understanding of gay and black people after they were (let’s not put too fine a point on it) tricked into identifying with them. This type of sleight-of-hand is something only a non-visual medium like prose fiction can pull off. It can firmly lodge readers inside an imaginary person’s head without ever showing them his or her face. In Neil Gaiman’s “Anansi Boys,” for example, the narrator never explains that all the principle characters are black, and each reader will come to that realization at a different stage in the narrative. It’s Gaiman’s way of tweaking the very common readerly assumption that defaults all major characters to white unless their race is otherwise specified. (And sometimes not even then, as quite a few young fans of “The Hunger Games” demonstrated by being astonished when a supporting character, clearly described as black in the novel, was played by a black actress in the film.)

Of course, not all readers are white or straight, and the ones who aren’t deeply appreciate novels that advertise the diversity of their characters. It’s about time they got heroes and heroines who looked like them, and novels that speak to their distinctive experiences. They have been identifying with characters across the boundaries of race, gender and sexual orientation from time immemorial, and are masters of the art, but understandably they’d like to give their ninja skills a rest. Furthermore, there are also white readers who prefer variety in their fiction or are deliberately trying to correct the imbalances of the past.

Nevertheless, if you believe, as many Americans have since the days of the Puritans, that books ought to morally improve their readers, then maybe there’s a place for a little judicious whitewashing in the writing and publication of fiction. It has literally been demonstrated to change hearts and minds, at least for a while. That’s more than many consciousness-raising efforts — including righteous lectures delivered by the enlightened — can say.

Further reading

Ohio State University’s research blog on the study of the experience-taking while reading stories

The Booksmugglers blog on notable recent instances of book-cover whitewashing in YA.

Ursula K. Le Guin writes for Slate about the changes made to the race of major characters in the TV adaptation of her “Earthsea Trilogy.”

Hunger Games Tweets, a Tumblr compiling and discussing the response of some fans to the casting of a black actress as a supporting character in the film version of Suzanne Collins’ novel.

Take a minute to walk to your limousine in my Gucci shoes, and you’ll realize that I’m just trying to make people smile. Mickey Rooney with buckteeth and a crazy accent in “Breakfast at Tiffany’s”? It’s so much funnier than finding a real Chinese actor just talking like himself. Then you’d have to get a screenwriter to actually write genuinely funny lines for that character. You get so much more comedy bang with buckteeth and a funny accent. I mean, it made me laugh. Many people, including myself, were also convinced that Charlton Heston truly was a Mexican/Native American/Egyptian/Ape who talked to God. And I think I convinced a lot of Asians that Genghis Khan really did look like John Wayne back in the ’60s. “Short Circuit” was one of my biggest hit movies and I was completely convinced that Fisher Stevens was Indian. Who knew he was a Jewish guy from New York? That accent was spot on!

My point is, I’m not the bad guy. I’m just the rich guy. When you look at it through my studio executive lens, you understand how important it is that both white people and non-white people believe that Indians, Asians, Mexicans and Arabs are truly just white people in brown makeup. I don’t like thinking that way. I just don’t have the luxury not to. I’m a businessman. White people spend more money on shit than anyone else. (Except on fast food, which is mostly blacks and Mexicans … at least that’s what I have heard. I’m a vegan.) So hey, non-Caucasians, stop buying tacos and start buying Cadillacs.

White people are also cheaper to light than dark-skinned people, and just so you know, you the moviegoer end up paying for that extra cost. Sometimes it’s just too unbelievable to cast an ethnic actor. I turned away a lovely Indian actress once who auditioned for the role of a hobbit. I mean there are no Indian hobbits. Audiences would never believe that.

Now, look: I am trying to do the right thing. America has changed and Hollywood should attempt to portray a truer depiction of the ethnic diversity that makes up this country. The fact that many television shows now hire a certain percentage of non-white actors is a step in the right direction, right? I am even prepared to make a deal with you ethnic people out there. Every time you let me cast a non-Caucasian character with a Caucasian actor, I will give you two or three non-white actors in smaller supporting roles. Why not lead roles? Because I’m trying to make a living here. I have spent a lot of time and money throughout history convincing everyone that white is normal. I have even convinced non-white people that white is better, prettier, smarter, stronger, and that only white people can truly be the heroes. Everyone has bought into it, and now you want me to just abandon all my hard work? OK, I will make an exception for some of you non-whites: If you are a hot Latina, you can be the lead. Why? Because white guys want to fuck Jennifer Lopez.

Here are a few more key elements to remember when watching a movie the way white people have been programmed to react. Laugh at the funny accents, because they are funny. Ignore the source material; I’m making movies, I don’t give a shit about staying true to your comic books. And … hold on! Why the fuck is Idris Elba playing a Norse God!?

To view a slide show of Hollywood’s egregious moments in white-washing, click on the link below — and share your own most memorable moments in the comments. (Slide show by Max Rivlin-Nadler)

View the slide show