Racial Preferences
July 15, 2023 — John Hinderaker
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
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July 15, 2023 — John Hinderaker
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
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July 13, 2023 — John Hinderaker
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
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July 4, 2023 — Scott Johnson
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
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July 1, 2023 — Scott Johnson
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
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June 30, 2023 — Scott Johnson
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
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June 29, 2023 — Steven Hayward
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
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June 29, 2023 — Scott Johnson
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
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June 27, 2023 — Scott Johnson
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
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June 24, 2023 — John Hinderaker
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
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June 18, 2023 — John Hinderaker
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,
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June 11, 2023 — Steven Hayward
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
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March 2, 2023 — John Hinderaker
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
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February 8, 2023 — John Hinderaker
The Left’s attack on meritocracy is one of the most dangerous elements of its effort to undermine our society. Heather Mac Donald has been writing and speaking about this issue for a while, and in April she has a new book coming out titled When Race Trumps Merit: How the Pursuit of Equity Sacrifices Excellence, Destroys Beauty, and Threatens Lives. It is available now for pre-order on Amazon. This is
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January 22, 2023 — Steven Hayward
One of Stan Evans‘s many great quips was that it was fortunate Republican politicians were pro-life, since they spend so much time in the fetal position. The lack of fight in congressional Republicans was a source of endless frustration for Stan, and despite some indications the new House GOP majority may pick some worthy fights, in some areas they are already proving to be a colossal failure. The Washington Free
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January 16, 2023 — John Hinderaker
We wrote here about a task force of the State of California that is developing a proposal to pay reparations to the state’s black residents, to the tune of perhaps $800,000 apiece. But that is chump change compared with what is being demanded in San Francisco. The City of San Francisco appointed an African American Reparations Advisory Committee which delivered its draft Plan in December. The Plan is embedded below,
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January 15, 2023 — John Hinderaker
Perhaps the saddest fact in a sad era is that we are officially a racist society. Our governments at all levels, along with all of our major private institutions, divide Americans into a bizarre schema of racial categories and treat them differently based on those classifications. The whole system is both crazy and corrupt. Law professor David Bernstein is the author of Classified: The Untold Story of Racial Classification in
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