Racial Preferences

DEI Destroys CHIPS

Featured image DEI (racial and other quotas) is intrinsically evil. At The Hill, Matt Cole and Chris Nicholson reveal a shocking, practical downside to DEI hysteria: “DEI killed the CHIPS Act.” The issue is critical because Taiwan now produces 90% of the world’s advanced microchips, and China has indicated its intention to annex Taiwan in the near future. So the CHIPS Act sought to incentivize chip production in the U.S. Unfortunately, that »

Legislatures Are Coming For DEI

Featured image It is slowly dawning on liberals across America that DEI is, in most contexts, illegal. The whole point of DEI is to discriminate against disfavored groups, and in favor of preferred groups. Liberals have a hard time understanding that there is anything wrong with this, but the courts–most notably, recently, in the Harvard and UNC cases–are beginning to set them straight. In many states, legislators aren’t waiting for litigation to »

Gail Heriot wants you

Featured image Speaking of identity politics, as I do in the adjacent post on Claudine Gay, we should note that the left never gives up. That is what occurs to me and it is the place where William McGurn begins his Wall Street Journal column “Making discrimination okay again.” In the column McGurn recounts the efforts of California Democrats to make discrimination by race legal after its apparently decisive legal defeats: Do »

Sowell Strikes Back

Featured image Thomas Sowell, recently profiled here by Scott Johnson, was born in Gastonia, North Carolina in 1930 and raised in Harlem. Sowell earned a bachelor’s degree from Harvard, a master’s from Columbia, and a Ph.D. in economics from the University of Chicago. That was all achieved without any government affirmative-action scheme. The high achiever was bound to draw fire from supporters of such schemes. One of them was Lani Guinier, the »

Another Pretendian

Featured image It pays to be a minority, especially a Native American. That is the only possible explanation why so many people, especially academics, adopt fake Indian identities. There is even a word for it: Pretendian. And it seems as though the more militant the academic, the more likely he actually isn’t Native at all. One more case in point: University of Kansas professor Kent Blansett. The Dakota Scout reports: University of »

The War on Merit, Teacher Edition

Featured image The City of New York has agreed to pay $1.8 billion to would-be teachers who failed the state’s teacher qualification exam between 1994 and 2014: Roughly 5,200 black and Hispanic ex-Big Apple teachers and once-aspiring educators are expected to collect more than $1.8 billion in judgments after the city stopped fighting a nearly three-decade federal discrimination lawsuit that found a certification exam was biased. *** Court rulings found the exam »

State AGs Say: Stop Discriminating! [Updated]

Featured image The Supreme Court’s anti-discrimination decisions, Harvard and UNC, have revitalized the movement to achieve equal justice for all Americans. Those cases had to do with college admissions and didn’t directly touch on employment, but they show which way the wind is blowing. And the arguments against race discrimination in academia transfer easily to race discrimination in employment. Thus, earlier today thirteen state Attorneys General sent a letter to the CEOs »

Celebrating Justice Thomas

Featured image With his glorious concurrence in SFFA v. Harvard, today has become a day to salute Justice Clarence Thomas, or so it seems to me. Here is a man who has thought his own way through to a true understanding of the principle of equality that we celebrate today. Justice Thomas’s concurrence in part smacks down Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson’s dissent. Justice Jackson’s dissent faithfully represents the groupthink denying the equality »

Andrew Kull: The affirmative action cases

Featured image After posting my own brief comments on the Supreme Court’s historic decision in the affirmative action cases on Thursday, I wrote Professor Andrew Kull. Professor Kull is Distinguished Senior Lecturer at the University of Texas at Austin School of Law and the author of The Color-Blind Constitution. I told him I had been drawing on CBC for something like 20 years to write about the “affirmative action” regime and that »

Joey Mumbles does college admissions

Featured image Within an hour of the release of the Supreme Court decision in the “affirmative action” cases yesterday, President Biden stepped forth with his pitty-pat steps to mumble his disparagement of it. The White House has posted the transcript of his halting remarks here. Biden spoke about the effects of the “affirmative action” regime with the confidence of a guidance counselor, but not the candor. On that point, he regurgitated the »

Supreme Court Finally Strikes Down Race-Based Admissions

Featured image The Supreme Court’s long expected ruling on the Harvard and University of North Carolina race-based admissions practices was just released. A 6-3 vote, along predictable lines, backs up Chief Justice John Roberts’s very strong opinion, which relies on the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment. I’m still making my way through the concurrences (Thomas decided to write a long concurrence giving the originalist ground for the ruling, as well »

The time has come today

Featured image The subject of what goes under the shibboleth of “affirmative action” is both close to my heart and one about which I have frequently written, usually drawing on Andrew Kull’s legal history The Color-Blind Constitution. Published by Harvard University Press in 1998, it remains a terrific book. If Kull updated it to take cases of the past 25 years into account, he would have a story with a somewhat happier »

Doublethink of the day

Featured image Tirien Steinbach is an attorney who has served as associate dean for diversity, equity and inclusion at Stanford Law School. You may recall the role she played in the shoutdown of Fifth Circuit Judge Kyle Duncan at the law school. She took the lectern at the event to lecture Judge Duncan in support of the shoutdown. Steve Hayward and I covered the story in a series of posts that are »

Don’t Drop the H-Bomb?

Featured image I’m filing this one under Great Moments In Self-Delusion. The London Times warns: “Harvard graduates advised to keep quiet about it.” But not for the reason you might think! They call it “dropping the H-bomb”. For decades, graduates of Harvard have wrestled with how best to mention that they went to a university with a reputation so splendid that some alumni fear to speak of it directly with friends and »

Will the Real Black Man Please Stand Up?

Featured image Barack Obama has criticized Tim Scott and Nikki Haley for getting off the left-wing plantation. His attack goes straight to the heart, not only of liberal ideology, but of the strategic position of the Democratic Party: Barack Obama has criticized two Republican presidential hopefuls, the South Carolina senator Tim Scott and the former UN ambassador Nikki Haley, over their stances on race relations in America. In a podcast interview, Obama, »

Pregame for “Massive Resistance”

Featured image After the Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954 ended segregation in public schools, many jurisdictions in the south engaged in what they openly called “massive resistance” to the Court’s decree, and enforcing the decision required both legislation and many follow-up lawsuits at every level of the federal judiciary for many years after. It appears colleges and universities are already preparing their own “massive resistance” to a prospective Supreme »

Biden Demands Race Discrimination

Featured image On February 16, Joe Biden issued an order titled “Executive Order on Further Advancing Racial Equity and Support for Underserved Communities Through the Federal Government.” The order demands “equity” throughout federal agencies. “Equity” is simply a fancy word for race discrimination. Earlier today, U.S. Civil Rights Commissioner Peter Kirsanow wrote to House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan, urging Congress to take action against Biden’s race discrimination order. Kirsanow’s letter is »