Legal Commentary

Lame Brain

Posted on June 23, 2008
Some of you may recall my criticisms of Emory University psychologist Drew Westen and his new instruction book for Democrats, THE POLITICAL BRAIN: THE ROLE OF EMOTION IN DECIDING THE FATE OF THE NATION. (See here, here, and here.) If you don?t, the gist (actually, the entire substance) of his argument is nicely conveyed in this passage from an unintentionally hilarious article about the book in the Los Angeles Times, which I quoted in the first ?here? above: ...

?Affirmative Action,? Or Not?

Posted on June 22, 2008
The Kansas City, Kansas, Community College (KCKCC) is launching a new program to hire minorities, but for some reason it is reluctant to call this program ?affirmative action.? Kansas City Kansas Community College announced this week they would actively seek qualified minorities to fill open positions at the college...

Michelle II

Posted on June 21, 2008
According to this article in the New York Times, Obama?s campaign is attempting to give Michelle?s image ?a subtle makeover,? making her available to to such stalwart, critical interviewers as Barbara Walters and Whoopi Goldberg on The View. The intent is to bury what the Times is pleased to call ?the caricatures of Mrs...

UPDATE!

Posted on June 21, 2008
This post has been UPDATED.

To access this complete feed in the blog feed reader login or register for free.

Common Cause Or Common Joke?

Posted on June 21, 2008
Common Cause for years has seemed like a one-trick (if that) pony, issuing press releases and other pontifications calling for campaign finance reform. You would thus expect it to be outraged at Obama?s recent flip-flop, supporting public financing up to the point it was no longer in his interest to do so...

Obama Plays Race And Bigot Cards

Posted on June 21, 2008
Even NPR is now blasting Obama for his hypocrisy over campaign finance and even for playing the race and bigot cards. In a Jacksonville fund raiser (why does he still need fund rasiers?), he accused his opponent of preparing to run a racist and bigoted campaign...

Is There A Pattern Here? If So, Is There A Name For It?

Posted on June 20, 2008
Barack Obama opposes school vouchers for poor families but sends his own children to a private school; supports ?campaign finance reform? but opts out of public financing since he can raise more money privately under the old, presumably corrupt system; attests to the centrality of his religious experience in shaping his identity but regards others, who are less privileged and culturally and politically different, as ?clinging? to religion; promises an end to bitter partisanship even though his own record (what there is of it) is one of the most partisan in the Senate and his opponent?s is one of the most bi-partisan; promises to transcend race even though he a) married, sat passively for 20 years in the pews of, and raised his children in a church led by and permeated with a militant afro-centrism that often found expression in parnoid (they invented AIDS to kill us), anti-white (?greedy whites? etc...

Chinese Are Black? Who Knew?

Posted on June 18, 2008
A reader has alerted me that the BBC reports today that ?The High Court in South Africa has ruled that Chinese South Africans are to be reclassified as black people.? It made the order so that ethnic Chinese can benefit from government policies aimed at ending white domination in the private sector...

EXTRA!! Michigan Sky Did Not Fall!

Posted on June 18, 2008
Yesterday, in the post immediately below, I took the editors of the Michigan Daily to task for their rejection of the principle of colorblind equality, for their implication that minorities are afraid to compete on a level playing field, and for encouraging the UM administration to violate the law...

All About The Beat

Posted on June 16, 2008
Anyone interested in the politics of hip-hop, or John McWhorter?s new book on it, may want to take a look at this review.

Michigan Daily Fears Equality, Implies Minorities Fear Equality, Encourages Lawlessness

Posted on June 16, 2008
An unsigned editorial in today?s Michigan Daily sets out to ?talley[] the damage? imposed racial equality has had at the University of Michigan. The edit is sadly revealing. First, it is disappointing that presumably bright college students would regard the legal obligation to treat all applicants without regard to their race, ethnicity, or gender as ?damage? to be assessed, an ?unnecessary restriction? on the university?s freedom to discriminate to produce ?diversity...

Will Black (And Other) Conservatives Abandon McCain Because Of Race

Posted on June 16, 2008
Many people have been attracted to Obama ? or at least to the idea of Obama, to the image of Obama created by his biracial campaign biography, etc. ? because of their belief (more like a hope) that his biracialism embodies the prospect of moving beyond race, of transcending the racial divide...

Obama Supporters, Like Obama, Support/Oppose Race Preferences

Posted on June 15, 2008
Yesterday?s Wall Street Journal has a long article, ?Fair Enough,? on the disagreements over affirmative action, mainly among Obama supporters. One McCain spokesperson, whose comment I?ll discuss below, makes a brief, cameo appearance, but in general McCain has no presence in this article, which pretty accurately reflects what he?s said about the issue so far...

Obama?s Brain: Not Just A New Politics But A New Epistemology

Posted on June 12, 2008
I?m beginning to think that many critics ? and I certainly include myself in this group ? may have done Rev. Wright a grave injustice. I?m not referring to the denunciation he so richly deserves for his rants against AmeriKKKa, AIDS as purposeful genocide, 9/11 as deserved retribution, etc...

Blind Faith In Colorado

Posted on June 11, 2008
Predictably, the Colorado Council of Churches is opposing the Colorado Civil Rights Initiative, Amendment 46, that would bar the state from engaging in preferential treatment based on race, sex, or ethnicity. The group says Amendment 46 would eliminate things like science and math tutoring for young women and closing the gender gap in pay...

Democratic Defections

Posted on June 11, 2008
Jonathan Martin reports on Politico that Oklahoma Democratic Rep. Dan Boren, the only Democrat in the delegation and the son of former Sen. David Boren, regards Obama as too liberal to endorse. In a similar vein, Michael Ubbens, co-chair of the Pennsylvania Federation of College Republicans, pointed me to these mentions of an influential member of the George Washington University College Democrats stating his intention to support Sen...

Obama Opposes Colorblindness, Supports Preferences

Posted on June 11, 2008
Sen. Obama has reassured pro-preference columnist DeWayne Wickham that he has not wavered in his support for racial preferences. ?In response to a question I put to him,? Wickham writes, Obama answered that he opposes efforts to pass constitutional amendments this year in Arizona, Colorado and Nebraska to ban affirmative action in state contracting and college admissions...

UPDATE!

Posted on June 11, 2008
This post has been UPDATED

What Senator McCain Should Say

Posted on June 08, 2008
An article by Jonathan Kaufman appeared recently in the Wall Street Journal discussing the ways race will hurt, or help, Obama in the coming election. Kaufman refers to the usual evidence suggesting that some whites will vote against Obama because of his race, virtually ignores the mounds of evidence suggesting that some whites and large numbers of blacks will vote for him because of his race, and mentions the somewhat less familiar argument that Obama?s race may insulate him from some criticism...

UPDATE!

Posted on June 08, 2008
Once more, alas, Prof. Evelyn Hu-DeHart of Brown has been heard from, and so once more there is an UPDATE to this post.

?Diversity? And Political Correctness At Brown

Posted on June 05, 2008
In a recent post I discussed a speech criticizing college ?diversity? officials by Prof. Evelyn Hu-DeHart of Brown, whose point was that they only gave their colleges the appearance of caring about ?diversity? when in fact they weren?t doing nearly enough...

Rev. Pfleger As A Modern John Brown

Posted on June 03, 2008
I was tempted to describe Mary Mitchell as a Chicago Sun Times columnist who sees Barack Obama as the Second Coming, but upon re-reading her column today it strikes me that she may well see him as the First. Her heart goes out to the eight thousand congregants of Rev...

A Diversiphile Dumps On The ?Diversity? Industry

Posted on June 02, 2008
About a year ago, in a post discussing a blistering speech the Chronicle of Higher Education?s Peter Schmidt delivered to a gathering of education apparatchiks concerned about ?diversity,? etc., I noted that ?I would like to have had the Tums or Rolaid concession outside the door to that luncheon...

Is Racial Preference Merely ?Differently Negotiating? The Job Market?

Posted on June 02, 2008
Once again Penn Prof. John L. Jackson Jr. brings his keen anthropological insight to the Chronicle of Higher Education?s ?Brainstorm? blog (earlier examples are here, here, and here), this time discussing, in ?Graduating While Black,? hiring preferences for black PhDs...

Michelle?s Mouth: News Or Rumor?

Posted on June 02, 2008
I concluded my last post by noting that, given Obama?s proclivity for throwing overboard family members and long-time, close associates who become liabilities to his campaign, ?if I were Michelle, I?d watch my mouth from now on.? Apparently a lot of other people have been watching it as well, and there?s now a loud buzz around the blogosphere that news of Michelle making Wright-like remarks (railing against ?Whitey,? etc...

Amen

Posted on June 01, 2008
Let?s see. Barry Obama was a bi-racial boy raised primarily by his white grandparents. As a young man he abandoned his bi-racialism for blackness, became Barack, and was nurtured in the bosom of Rev. Wright?s militantly black Trinity church. In the process of explaining why his long, close association with Wright and his church was not wrong, Obama said many times that his church was nothing to get excited about, that he had never heard or heard of anything ?particularly controversial in Reverend Wright?s statements,? that he is ?proud of his pastor and his church,? that Trinity Church is ?conventional,? ?a very traditional African-American church? that ?embodies the black community...

What He Said

Posted on May 30, 2008
Regular readers will know that Peter Schmidt of the Chronicle of Higher Education is one of the few journalists who cover affirmative action whose work I respect, and that is true even though I often disagree with what he writes. He?s often wrong, in my view, but never devious, duplicitous, or dumb...

Social Downgrading: The Logic Of Affirmative Action

Posted on May 29, 2008
A blockade by thousands of protesters from India?s Gujjar tribe brought Delhi to a standstill today, paralysing trains by squatting on tracks and setting up a ring of burning tyres around the perimeter of the city. The Gujjars, traditionally nomadic farmers, are demanding to be socially downgraded in order to gain government jobs and university places...

Broder Broods

Posted on May 29, 2008
Drawing on a 27-year old interview with the recently deceased Hamilton Jordan, Jimmy Carter?s chief of staff, David Broder worries about some troubling parallels between Carter and the new would-be outsider come to clean up Washington, Obama. Both have relied on splintering and ideological division inside the Democratic Party...

Enough Is Enough ... Isn?t It?

Posted on May 27, 2008
Peter Schmidt has an important and typically thorough article today in the Chronicle of Higher Education on a new lawsuit against the University of Texas?s ?top 10%? plan that could have far-reaching implications for the future of race preferences in higher education...

Bloggers, promote your law blog by nominating your blog for inclusion in USLaw.com's Law Blog Directory and RSS Reader. Benefits described.