Race
July 8, 2020 — Paul Mirengoff
On July 4, a group of more than 400 Princeton faculty members and (from the look of it) hangers-on sent a letter to the university’s president and other leaders on the subject of “anti-black racism.” After a few perfunctory and unsupported allegations about this phenomenon, the authors proceed to the business at hand. They present several dozen “demands.” Each demand seems more outlandish than the last until, finally, we get
»
July 8, 2020 — Scott Johnson
Jonathan Holloway is the new president of Rutgers University. Insofar as one can tell from the quotes in Amanda Hoover’s NJ.com profile of Holloway — “Rutgers is named for a slave owner, but school’s first Black president says the name will stay” — his views resemble those of a conventional academic bureaucrat except in one respect. Holloway asserts that the university’s name isn’t up for changing even though it honors
»
July 7, 2020 — Steven Hayward
Left craziness is coming so fast and thick on an hourly basis that it is tempting just to turn this mini-series into a real time Twitter feed. So we’re reserving compilations for the most notable insanities. • And here is a doozy from The Guardian, beyond even the olympian satirical capacities of the Babylon Bee: Glass ceilings and phallic towers. Mean streets and dark alleys. Road names and statues of
»
July 7, 2020 — Paul Mirengoff
Roger Clegg offers seven thoughts for 7/7. One of them is this: Some statues will come down, and some will stay, and the impact on black lives will be precisely zero. The Left has gotten people’s attention about (fictive) “systemic racism,” and its agenda turns out to be defunding the police and tearing down statues — what more do we need to know about how silly it is? I agree
»
July 7, 2020 — Scott Johnson
KARE 11 reports that Protesters march from [the Mall of America] to George Floyd’s memorial.” I should think the news is that “Black Panthers of Minneapolis” were marching around town and blocking traffic while sporting what look to be AR-15s, but the reporter seems more interested in the angry comments of Tyrone Carter. Who are “Black Panthers of Minneapolis”? And were those things loaded? Good luck trying to find any
»
July 3, 2020 — Paul Mirengoff
Trevor Keels will be a senior guard next season on the powerhouse high school basketball team Paul VI in Fairfax, Virginia. Keels is a five-star recruit and ranks among the top 25 high school players in the class of 2021. Reportedly, he’s being recruited by the likes of Duke, Virginia, Villanova, and Michigan. The Washington area high school league Keels participates in has sent players to all of these schools
»
July 3, 2020 — Paul Mirengoff
The Washington Post notes that, although “taxes, for decades, have been redistributed from wealthy suburbs to poorer communities [in Minneapolis] to combat inequality. . .the prosperity fueled by the region’s Fortune 500 companies and progressive policies has not translated into economic equality.” On the contrary, “the wealth gap between Minneapolis’s largely white population and the city’s black residents has deepened, producing some of the nation’s widest racial disparities in income,
»
June 30, 2020 — Steven Hayward
Not long ago I had occasion to write an article for the Bipartisan Policy Center lamenting the decline in the discipline of history, noting, among other things: [C]onservatives in history departments are scarce and dwindling. . . conservative-minded historians are likewise alienated from both the ideological center of gravity and the dominant methodological focus of American history today. . . The effect of this is not simply a further narrowing
»
June 29, 2020 — Paul Mirengoff
I doubt that I agree with the Black Justice League about much. However, I agree with some of what it argues in this statement in response to the removal of Woodrow Wilson’s name from Princeton’s school of public policy. I agree that: 1. The Wilson-related name change is a “symbolic gesture” that does not address Princeton’s “racist status quo”; 2. “Diversity training” would not accomplish anything; 3. Princeton’s actions are
»
June 29, 2020 — Steven Hayward
My nomination for the most Orwellian phrase of the moment is, “We need to have a conversation about X [race, class, gender, policing, inequality—fill in the blank].” What “we need a conversation” means in practice is, “You shut up and agree with the left.” It seems the (checks notes) Harvard Business Review agrees, in an article titled, “Academia Isn’t a Safe Haven for Conversations About Race and Racism.” The interesting
»
June 27, 2020 — John Hinderaker
Did you know that Tim Scott is the only black Republican Senator? You probably do know that, because this is how everything he does is minimized and scoffed at by the Democratic Party press. Here are just a few of the thousands of examples we could offer: Scott himself complained in an email this morning about being anonymized by the Democratic Party press: Lost in the shuffle is the fact
»
June 27, 2020 — John Hinderaker
Via Ann Althouse, check out this confrontation between a young woman who is a BLM activist and an older African-American man. They are standing in front of, and arguing about, the Emancipation Statue that freedmen paid for and where Frederick Douglass spoke. You don’t have to understand the words the young woman is screaming to know that you are witnessing a dialogue between a normal person and one with serious
»
June 27, 2020 — Steven Hayward
Yesterday while out on a walk I was inspired to post this Tweet: Well, today comes this announcement from the president of Princeton, which has decided to strip Woodrow Wilson’s name from everything: To the Princeton community: When I wrote to you on Monday morning, I noted that the Princeton University Board of Trustees was discussing how the University could oppose racism and would soon convene a special meeting on
»
June 26, 2020 — Paul Mirengoff
Few who are paying attention will be surprised that, in Maryland public schools, black students make up a disproportionate number of those arrested by police officers working in the schools. According to the Washington Post, black students make up 56 percent of those arrested (but only 34 percent of the student population), while white students make up only 28 percent (compared to 37 percent of the student population). Eight percent
»
June 24, 2020 — John Hinderaker
The newsroom at the Los Angeles Times is being roiled by complaints that the paper hasn’t done enough to recruit and retain minority journalists. Earlier today, Executive Editor Norman Pearlstein conducted a Zoom staff meeting to address the complaints. The town hall, which spanned roughly four and a half hours on a Zoom webinar, came a day after the Black Caucus of the paper’s guild sent a letter to the
»
June 24, 2020 — Steven Hayward
It’s barely noon here out here on the Left Coast, and already my Krazy Kup overfloweth. A (very) few highlights: • What is it with liberals and Hollywood types and blackface? Now the NBC hit “30 Rock” is memory-holing four episodes that featured white characters in blackface: Four episodes of 30 Rock, including two featuring Jane Krakowski’s Jenna character in blackface, are being removed from subscription streaming services Hulu and
»
June 23, 2020 — John Hinderaker
On Sunday, a normally sane part of the world went crazy when a “noose” was discovered in a garage stall at the Talladega race track that was used by a NASCAR team that included driver Bubba Wallace, who is black. You can imagine the uproar. Everyone involved in NASCAR stood in solidarity with Bubba and against racism. Wallace himself jumped to conclusions: I understand that Wallace even humiliated himself by
»
