Race

Immigration and Affirmative Action

Featured image This is by David Leonhardt of the New York Times, in that paper’s daily email of yesterday. It is a good example of a liberal confronted by facts that refute his ideology, who can see truth off in the distance but can’t quite get there: Two economists — Ran Abramitzky of Stanford and Leah Boustan of Princeton — embarked on an ambitious project more than a decade ago. They wanted »

Who Needs DEI?

Featured image Black college athletes do, according to the NAACP. The NAACP is urging black athletes not to go to college in Florida: The NAACP asked Black student-athletes to reconsider their decisions to attend public colleges and universities in the state of Florida, in response to the University of Florida and other state schools recently eliminating their diversity, equity and inclusion programs. In a letter sent to NCAA president Charlie Baker and »

California Is About to Get Even Worse

Featured image You might think that the leftists who run California would be worried about the rapid decline of that state, but no: they are doing all they can to accelerate it. In the Wall Street Journal, Heather Mac Donald outlines California’s latest descent into racialist madness: What would happen if lawmakers reinvented the criminal-justice system to target “systemic racism” instead of crime? California is about to find out. Thanks to a »

The Apartheid Bowl

Featured image For the fourth straight year, “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” will be performed at the Super Bowl. The so-called “black national anthem” assumes a separate black nation, a concept with a rather strange origin. The Communist Party USA, an overwhelmingly white party controlled by an all-white Soviet dictatorship, held that blacks were not real Americans. In 1928, the Communist International, (Comintern), founded by the USSR to control national Communist parties, »

When Morgan Met Mike

Featured image It’s Black History Month. Back in 2005 on CBS “60 Minutes,” Mike Wallace told actor Morgan Freeman: “Black History Month, you find. . . . “ “Ridiculous.” “Why?” “You’re going to relegate my history to a month?” “Come on.” “What do you do with yours? Which month is ‘White History Month’? Come on, tell me.” “I’m Jewish.” “Okay. Which month is ‘Jewish History Month’? “There isn’t one.” “Why not? Do »

Go See “American Fiction”

Featured image If you follow the Academy Awards. . . okay, stop right there! I know what you’re thinking after just six words: Who is their right mind would give a tinker’s cuss about the Oscars any more? I get it, but indulge me a bit. If you follow the Academy Awards, you’ll know they have instituted a “diversity” requirement to qualify to be a nominee for Best Picture, by which is »

Blazing Saddles History Month

Featured image What in the wide, wide world of sports is a-going on here? I hired you people to get a bit of track laid, not to jump around like a bunch of Kansas City faggots! That was railroad boss Taggart (Slim Pickens) in Blazing Saddles, which opened on February 7, 1974, a full 50 years ago next month. The Mel Brooks film would not be made today, more reason to revisit »

The Grievance Studies Project revisited

Featured image Peter Boghossian thinks the time is ripe to revisit the investigation of academic grievance studies that he conducted in 2017 and 2018 with his fellow iconoclasts James Lindsay and Helen Pluckrose. For background read the New Discourses post “The Grievance Studies Project.” Check out Boghossian’s current set of linked tweets beginning with the one below by clicking on the time/date. Several of the tweets include a video excerpt from the »

Systemically Neutral Law Enforcement

Featured image The dogma that American law enforcement is “systemically” racist is one of the chief pillars of what passes for liberal thought. In truth, that theory has been perhaps the most damaging of all leftist shibboleths. A recent meta-study concludes that there is no empirical evidence that our criminal justice system discriminates against blacks, but that academics nevertheless continue to assert that claim–even in studies whose data actually refute it: An »

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 »

Kwanzaa Kickback

Featured image Jill and I wish a very Happy Kwanzaa to all those celebrating across America and around the world. May your homes be filled with hope, peace, and light. And in 2024, may we carry with us the wisdom of the seven principles of Kwanzaa — especially those of unity and faith. That was a December 26 post from White House resident Joe Biden. The Delaware Democrat failed to mention anything »

Obama and Farrakhan

Featured image A veritable Krakatoa of anti-Semitism is erupting across America, with little if any reference to the nation’s leading anti-Semite, Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan. As recently noted, 1984 presidential candidate Jesse Jackson apologized for calling Jews “hymies,” but refused to denounce Farrakhan. The Nation of Islam boss also has a history with the composite character David Garrow profiled in Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama. In 2005, a »

American Fiction, Part Deux

Featured image With lines such as “the dumber I behave the richer I get,” Cord Jefferson’s American Fiction does sound like cinematic dynamite. What this film does for the literary world, Robert Townsend’s Hollywood Shuffle, from 1987, has already performed for the movie industry. Townsend plays aspiring actor Bobby Taylor, who finds that Hollywood prefers to cast blacks in gang movies. Script in hand, the eloquent Bobby must rehearse lines such as, »

Racism and “American Fiction”

Featured image Even before the horror of October 7 blew the lid off the anti-Semitic rot on our college campuses, it was starting to look like the “social justice revolution” was starting to come apart. Think of how Ibram X. Kendi’s famous center for anti-racist research at Boston University hit the wall, as was easy to predict when it launched, along with the obvious corruption and self-dealing of Black Lives Matter that »

Glenn Loury Offers Another Helping

Featured image Last week on the 3WHH podcast I included Glenn Loury’s rant about Ibram X. Kendi from several months ago, but it is worth noting that 25 years before Kendi bamboozled Boston University’s moronic leadership into funneling millions into Kendi’s bogus Center for Anti-Racist Research, Boston University had a premier research institute on race issues headed by . . . Glenn Loury. He recounts some of this, and doubles down on »

Who’s Your MAGA?

Featured image Donald Trump’s “Make America Great Again” was a slogan of genius. While his supporters (and most Americans) instantly knew what it meant, Democrats hated it. They didn’t know whether to respond, “America is still great,” or “America was never great,” which is what most of them believe. It was a painful dilemma. But times have changed. Now Democrats embrace Trump’s slogan, or at least its acronym. They constantly refer derisively »

Confronting BLM at Berkeley

Featured image In the hectic days before departing for my current overseas assignment (more on that shortly—I’ve got a lot in the can already), I didn’t have time to relate hosting Heather Mac Donald, the most fearless journalist in America, for the Federalist Society at Berkeley Law. A substantial contingent of Black Lives Matter protestors turned up to register their displeasure at Heather’s presence and message. Let’s just say it was a »