Progressive Racism is about the transformation of the civil rights movement from a cause opposing racism--the denigration of individuals on the basis of their skin color - into a movement endorsing race preferences and privileges for select groups based on their skin color. It describes the tragic changes of this cause under the leadership of racial extortionists like Al Sharpton, who took a movement in support of American pluralism and turned it into a movement governed by a lynch mob mentality in which white Americans are regarded as guilty before the fact and African Americans are regarded as innocent even when the facts prove them guilty, even when their crimes are committed against other African Americans.

The author of Progressive Racism, David Horowitz, is a witness to these events and betrayals. Horowitz was a participant in the civil rights movement of the 1960s, and in 2001 led a national campaign against a proposal for "slavery reparations" that would have required Hispanic, Asian and other Americans who had no role in slavery to pay reparations to African Americans who were never slaves.

Progressive Racism examines how the term "racism" has been drained of its original meaning and is now used as a weapon to bludgeon opponents into silence. It describes how the so-called civil rights movement has become an oppressor of African Americans by supporting a failed school system that blights the lives of millions of African American children and a welfare system that has destroyed the black family and created a "underclass" dependent on government charity. It is an indictment of the hypocrisy that today governs discourse on race issues, so that a lynch mob in Ferguson, Missouri seeking to hang a police officer because he was white can be described as a civil rights protest and be supported by the first African American president of the United States.