Racial Preferences
October 16, 2024 — Steven Hayward
It took less than 24 hours for someone in the Harris campaign to wake up and recognize that, as John noted here yesterday, Harris proposal for federal aid of various kinds to black men was blatantly unconstitutional. It is not even a close call: it would be struck down in 10 minutes in any district court, and the appeals courts wouldn’t waste their time with it. You would think that
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October 15, 2024 — John Hinderaker
Earlier today, Kamala Harris tweeted this: Black men deserve a president who cares about making their lives better. pic.twitter.com/cUCdsvvYZ6 — Kamala Harris (@KamalaHarris) October 15, 2024 This agenda, intended to salvage Harris’s collapsing status with black men, would be outrageous even if it were not illegal. It is one of the topics that we discussed today on the American Experiment podcast. It was a fun installment, as it was hosted
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September 19, 2024 — Steven Hayward
After Brown vs Board of Education was decided in 1954, the Democrat-run segregationist South engaged in “massive resistance,” requiring years of follow-up court cases and Department of Justice action to enforce desegregation. It was understood that after the Supreme Court ruled against race-based affirmative action admissions last year in the Harvard and UNC cases that Democrat-run institutions would engage in massive resistance once again. And already we have the circumstantial
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August 22, 2024 — John Hinderaker
The company that owns Jack Daniel’s has abandoned its DEI program under threat of a boycott: Spirits giant Brown-Forman Corp. – with a market capitalization of $21.37 billion – is the latest company to scrap its diversity, equity and inclusion program, following Harley-Davidson, Tractor Supply and John Deere. Major firms who rely heavily on a red state clientele have been caving to boycott pressure from corporate activist Robby Starbuck, who
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May 23, 2024 — John Hinderaker
Insiders at UCLA’s medical school apparently have shared information with the Free Beacon that shows the destructive impact of racism–DEI–on medical schools. The story by Aaron Sibarium begins with an anecdote: [W]hen it came time for the admissions committee to consider one such student in November 2021—a black applicant with grades and test scores far below the UCLA average—some members of the committee felt that this particular candidate, based on
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March 10, 2024 — John Hinderaker
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
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January 17, 2024 — John Hinderaker
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
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January 3, 2024 — Scott Johnson
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
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January 1, 2024 — Lloyd Billingsley
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
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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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