Heather Mac Donald, When Race Trumps Merit

At Amazon, Heather Mac Donald, When Race Trumps Merit: How the Pursuit of Equity Sacrifices Excellence, Destroys Beauty, and Threatens Lives. 

Supreme Court Strikes Down Race-Based Admissions at Harvard and U.N.C.

This is really something. 

I've got CNN on. There's a bit of a freak-out happening, although I haven't been over to MSNBC yet, lol.

At the New York Times, "The decision is likely to reshape college admissions at elite schools. Here’s what to know":

Race-conscious admissions programs at Harvard and the University of North Carolina are unconstitutional, the Supreme Court ruled on Thursday, the latest decision by its conservative supermajority on a contentious issue of American life.

Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., writing for the 6-3 majority, said the two programs “unavoidably employ race in a negative manner” and “involve racial stereotyping,” in a manner that violates the Constitution.

Universities can consider how race has affected a student’s life — a topic they may write about in an application essay, for example — but he warned schools not to use such considerations as a surreptitious means of racial selection. “Universities may not simply establish through the application essays or other means the regime we hold unlawful today,” he wrote.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor summarized her dissent from the bench — a rare move that signals profound disagreement. The court, she wrote, was “further entrenching racial inequality in education, the very foundation of our democratic government and pluralistic society.”

“The devastating impact of this decision cannot be overstated,” she said.

President Biden assailed the ruling in remarks hours after it was handed down in a televised address, saying the court had walked away from decades of precedent. He also offered guidance to colleges about how to move forward, proposing they take into account the adversity a student has overcome.

“Discrimination still exists in America,” he said, pounding his lectern and repeating his words for emphasis. “Today’s decision does not change that.”

Mr. Biden paused before leaving his remarks as a reporter asked if the court was “rogue.” “This is not a normal court,” he responded...

Via Memeorandum.

Also at the Wall Street Journal, "Supreme Court Strikes Down Affirmative Action in College Admissions."

And, "Affirmative Action Timeline: Key Dates."

Corporate Diversity Pledges Fizzle Amid Layoffs, GOP Backlash

Ha!

At Bloomberg:

Workplace diversity and inclusion efforts adopted in the wake of George Floyd’s murder and ensuing protests are fading as sweeping layoffs blunt companies’ bold commitments to boost underrepresented groups in their C-suites and ranks.

The global Black Lives Matter movement that followed Floyd’s death in Minneapolis police custody in 2020 prompted a hiring boom for diversity, equity, and inclusion professionals and pledges by major employers to address racial inequality in the workplace.

But many of those hired—largely people of color—to diversify the workplace have been let go over the past year amid ongoing layoffs as a cost-cutting measure. Employers have cut DEI roles at a higher rate than others, according to a February study from workforce analytics firm Revelio Labs.

More than 300 DEI professionals departed companies in the last six months, including Amazon.com Inc., Twitter Inc., and Nike Inc., the report found. These diminishing roles have left observers questioning whether the sense of urgency to increase workforce diversity that corporate leaders made almost three years ago was genuine or simply a reactionary business decision to mitigate reputational risk.

“They heard concerns about the need for diversity, equity, and inclusion. Fast forward to three years later, that push isn’t that much present in the media every day and prevalent on social media,” said Robert Baldwin III, founder and managing attorney at Virtue Law Group, a plaintiff-side labor and employment firm.

“Since that push isn’t that prevalent,” they don’t feel the pressure to prioritize racial diversity and inclusion, he said.

DEI U-Turn

The slashing of these roles indicates that some companies don’t see DEI as essential, said Jean Lee, president and CEO of the Minority Corporate Counsel Association, which advocates for diversity in C-suites.

“This is concerning,” because prospective workers from underrepresented backgrounds might get discouraged from seeking employment at companies that have taken a drastic U-turn with their diversity and inclusion efforts, Lee said.

It may also take a toll on the output and morale of remaining workers, who would question their employer’s commitment to diversity and be forced to take on the responsibility of reporting workplace issues to management and advocating for their needs.

“I think the most important thing employers must consider is the message they’re sending” if they’re cutting back DEI initiatives, Lee said. “That affects your brand and communication.”

Lee, who advises employers on DEI matters, said many companies are grappling with how to use layoffs to cut costs amid inflation and rumblings of a looming recession without undermining their diversity efforts.

Liability Potential In addition to potentially harming employee morale and hiring efforts, employers risk exposing themselves to litigation because DEI leaders are often the ones who spot pitfalls and report unaddressed workplace issues that carry serious legal consequences, employment attorneys said.

Research by a US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission task force found that a lack of diversity and inclusion in the workplace can promote discriminatory behavior and allow such conduct to go unchecked.

“When you are gutting the roles of people tasked with holding you accountable and ensuring your workplace is diverse and inclusive, what follows is increases in instances of bias,” said Samone Ijoma, an employment attorney at Sanford Heisler Sharp LLP.

“I do think that getting rid of the people with that expertise, and who are working to change corporate culture, would likely lead to more lawsuits in that realm,” she added.

Diversity shouldn’t be treated as a project to fill a quota, but must be viewed as a business strategy that leads to better outcomes, she added...

Huntington Park Police Shoot and Kill Black Double Amputee Wielding Knife (VIDEO)

The video is here.

At at the Los Angeles Times, "Video shows police fatally shooting double amputee who was holding knife," and "Video adds to questions about police shooting of a double amputee holding a knife."

Gail Heriot and Maimon Schwarzchild, eds., How Race Preferences Damage Higher Education

At  Amazon, Gail Heriot and Maimon Schwarzchild, eds., A Dubious Expediency: How Race Preferences Damage Higher Education.

Robert Samuels and Toluse Olorunnipa, His Name Is George Floyd

At Amazon, Robert Samuels and Toluse Olorunnipa, His Name Is George Floyd: One Man's Life and the Struggle for Racial Justice. 

Bette Midler, Tipping Point

I don't know if we're tipping or not, though I wouldn't have thought old Bette would be sounding the tocsin.

On Twitter:

Tipping point? https://t.co/5B1wkJxssq

— Bari Weiss (@bariweiss) July 4, 2022

Biden Administration Guts Due-Process Rights for College Students

From Emily Yoffe, at Bari Weiss's Substack, "Biden's Sex Police":

The White Houses's new regulations will gut due-process rights for college students accused of sexual misconduct.

Joe Biden has fulfilled one of the first promises he made upon becoming president. His administration has just announced a comprehensive set of regulations—701 pages worth—that will gut due-process rights for college students accused of sexual misconduct.

Apparently, Biden learned nothing from going through his own sexual assault accusation crucible.

During his vice presidency, Joe Biden was the Obama administration’s point man for a major domestic initiative: ending sexual assault on campus. There is no question bad, sometimes criminal, sexual behavior occurs on campus. Eliminating it is a worthy, if elusive, goal. But the Obama-Biden mandate expanded the definition of sexual misconduct so broadly that jokes, flirting, or “any unwelcome conduct of a sexual nature,” could be punishable offenses.

The Obama administration set out to change campus culture, and it did. But in doing so, it undermined women, demonized men, and diverted vast resources away from education. Under rules promulgated by Betsy DeVos, Secretary of Education under Trump, many of these policies were rolled back. The Biden administration now plans to restore much of this.

Male college students (the accusers were almost always female, the accused male) were subjected to quasi-criminal proceedings on campus in which many were never told explicitly what they had done wrong and were unable to mount a defense. An adverse finding could end an education and foreclose many career possibilities.

Biden traveled the country, describing campuses as places where male classmates put young women in relentless danger (“This is a toxin on college campuses”), and where indifferent campus officials disparaged the women willing to report assault. But Biden's portrait was at odds with the way the majority of such cases unfold—often beginning as consensual encounters, then later ending up in dispute, frequently due in part to alcohol, miscommunication, and hurt feelings.

In numerous college speeches, Biden declared alarming, inflammatory, and dubious statistics on the frequency of campus assault. Biden advocated that all sexual encounters on campus be governed by “affirmative consent.” This means that each touch, each time, even between established partners, requires explicit—preferably verbal, preferably enthusiastic—agreement. Affirmative consent was adopted widely on campuses, and became a law governing student behavior in California, Connecticut, and New York.

Then Donald Trump was elected president, and Betsy DeVos, decided to reform what the Obama administration had done. In one of the most uncharacteristic acts of that chaotic presidency, DeVos went through the lengthy and burdensome process of writing actual regulations (the Obama administration had only issued “guidance”). The rules she released were, on balance, careful and thorough, providing necessary protections for the rights of both accuser and accused. I spent several years reporting on what was unfolding on campuses, and I wrote at the time that the DeVos regulations were an example of an immoral administration doing the moral thing. (See, for example, here and here.)

The DeVos rules went into effect in August of 2020, in the midst of campus covid shutdowns, so they have hardly had a chance to be tested. Now they will be struck. They will be replaced by some of the most pernicious procedures of the Obama era. (These dueling Department of Education regulations come under the aegis of Title IX, the fifty-year old federal law that prohibits sex discrimination in education.)

The new rules recommend a return to a “single investigator” model that was barred under the DeVos reform. This means one administrator can act as detective, prosecutor, judge, and jury on a Title IX complaint. The new rules also undo many of the procedural protections for the accused—including the right to see all the evidence, inculpatory and exculpatory, gathered against him. “It’s an evisceration of the procedural protections given to the accused,” says historian KC Johnson, co-author of The Campus Rape Frenzy: The Attack on Due Process at America’s Universities.

Under the DeVos rules, adjudication of a formal complaint required a live hearing be held that included cross examination. The Biden administration lifts this obligation. The Biden rules also call for a return to investigations initiated by third parties, even if based on rumors or misunderstandings, in which male students can be subjected to Title IX proceedings over the objection of their female partners. (Robby Soave at Reason has a good summary of the Biden proposals.)

“It’s a document that validates all of the concerns we had about due process and free speech being on the chopping block,” says Joe Cohn, legislative and policy director at The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. He adds that the administration is giving schools the blessing of the Department of Education “to cut many corners that are essential for fundamental fairness.”

As vice president, Biden made clear that campuses were just the first stop in an effort to remake throughout society how males and females interact...

Keep reading.

James Baldwin on the Dick Cavett Show (VIDEO)

From the excellent documentary film, "I Am Not Your Negro." 

Happy Juneteenth everybody!

'Afro' Hair Pick Statue to Commemorate Juneteenth Unveiled in Lafayette Square, New Orleans, Louisiana

This is just dumb.

Sorry not sorry. 

Juneteenth is this coming Sunday. 

#Juneteenth #Shaft #IsaacHayes 🎶🎶🎶 https://t.co/AgGSAelnLx

— Donald Douglas 📘 (@AmPowerBlog) June 18, 2022

Not a 'Kitchen Table Issue,' Jen Psaki? (VIDEO)

From Abigail Shrier, "Actually, Our Kids Are All We're Thinking About":

Yesterday, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki accused Republican lawmakers of “engaging in a disturbing, cynical trend of attacking vulnerable transgender kids,” and exploiting them. “Instead of focusing on critical kitchen table issues like the economy, COVID, or addressing the country’s mental health crisis,” she said, “Republican lawmakers are currently debating legislation that, among many things, would target transgender youth with tactics that threaten to put pediatricians in prison if they provide medically necessary, life-saving care for the kids they serve.”

Life-saving care? Surely she must mean insulin or antibiotics?

No, she means “gender affirming care” that devilish euphemism for puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones and experimental surgeries whose benefits are unproven, but whose risks—permanent sexual dysfunction, infertility, cardiac event and endometrial cancer are a few—ought to nudge any doctor toward soul searching. As I’ve written many times, these treatments are often recklessly administered, of questionable benefit to children, and attended by forbidding risks.

For these reasons, in the last two years, national gender clinics in France, the UK, Sweden and Finland have all reevaluated or curtailed their use. But as Psaki made clear, any legislator who tries to follow suit will face double-barreled legal opposition from the current Administration. Psaki said:

Legislators who are contemplating these discriminatory bills have been put on notice by the Department of Justice and the Department of Health and Human Services that laws and policies preventing care that health care professionals recommend for transgender minors may violate the Constitution and federal law. To be clear, every major medical association agrees that gender-affirming health care for transgender kids is a best practice and potentially life-saving.

There is, in fact, no proof that “affirmative care” improves the mental health of gender dysphoric youth long-term—much less that its interventions are “life-saving.” An outstanding recent paper in the Journal of Sex & Marital Therapy is only the latest to expose the poor empirical basis for these treatments with minors. It’s a must-read paper for any policy maker, parent, or psychologist grappling with this fraught question.

The authors state, as if with a sigh: “The evidence underlying the practice of pediatric gender transition is widely recognized to be of very low quality.”

Activists often exaggerate the suicide risk to gender dysphoric minors—as well as the mental health efficacy of these treatments—in order to coerce parents into acceding to the interventions. But as the authors point out: “The ‘transition or suicide’ narrative falsely implies that transition will prevent suicides. [N]either hormones nor surgeries have been shown to reduce suicidality in the long-term.”

That the Biden administration would peddle an activist talking point with no solid factual basis signals how desperate it is to please the radical flank of its supporters. That is too bad. Leaders who mollycoddle the activists quietly corrupting nearly every institution of American life fool themselves that they are merely paying a tax. They don’t realize it’s a ransom, and that those who demand it will never be satisfied until they have despoiled every American institution. And much worse in this case: they encourage irreversible harm to children.

In an address chock-a-block with fictions, perhaps Psaki’s most surprising was the notion that unlike the “economy, COVID” and the “country’s mental health crisis,” the risks gender activists now pose to our children is not a “kitchen table issue.” It is - she means - the sort of thing that excites Twitter, not normal Americans.

In Psaki’s worldview, then, Americans are not shaking their heads at their talented daughters, wondering if they ought to bother helping them train in a sport. Nor does she think Americans are desperately worried about what radical teachers are pushing on their kids at school—from racial essentialism and division to phony gender science about their bodies and identities.

But in the real world, Americans are very, very worried about these things. I’ve been privileged with a special window into their terror: an inbox full of thousands of desperate parents who write me daily of their teen daughters caught in the grips of a sudden transgender epiphany. And Ms. Psaki, I can promise you this: given the widespread availability of medical gender treatments, on demand, without therapist oversight and often without requiring parental consent - that is not merely one of that family’s concerns. It is all that family is thinking about. Every minute of every day—dear God, how can I save my little girl from doing harm to herself?

America has essentially become an unlocked medicine cabinet for gender medicine seekers as young as 15. As a result, any family with a kid who announces she is trans —whether encouraged by peers or social media or an activist educator, or accompanied by serious mental health co-morbidities—is hurled into crisis. The only thing parents know for certain is that a quick medical transition will be encouraged by virtually every adult she encounters. Far less certain is whether the family can do anything to stop it...

Still more.

 

Massachusetts Institute of Technology Bring Back Scholastic Aptitude Test

I saw this first at NYT, "M.I.T. Will Again Require SAT and ACT Scores."

Now from Kathryn Paige Harden, at the Atlantic, "The SAT Isn’t What’s Unfair: MIT brings back a test that, despite its reputation, helps low-income students in an inequitable society."

Democrats Have Long Perverted MLK's Legacy

At Pamamas, Stephen Kruiser's "Morning Briefing."

Groundbreaking Career of Sidney Poitier (VIDEO)

When I was in elementary school, my dad had me and my sisters sit down and watch 'Guess Who's Coming to Dinner." Poitier was BIG for black America. Pathbreaking figure of the 20th century.

At Deadline, "Sidney Poitier: A Groundbreaking Career In Pictures."

And at the New York Times, "Sidney Poitier, Who Paved the Way for Black Actors in Film, Dies at 94":

The first Black performer to win the Academy Award for best actor, for “Lilies of the Field,” he once said he felt “as if I were representing 15, 18 million people with every move I made.”

Sidney Poitier, whose portrayal of resolute heroes in films like “To Sir With Love,” “In the Heat of the Night” and “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner” established him as Hollywood’s first Black matinee idol and helped open the door for Black actors in the film industry, has died at 94.

His death was confirmed by Eugene Torchon-Newry, acting director general of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in the Bahamas, where Mr. Poitier grew up. No other details were immediately provided.

Mr. Poitier, whose Academy Award for the 1963 film “Lilies of the Field” made him the first Black performer to win in the best-actor category, rose to prominence when the civil rights movement was beginning to make headway in the United States. His roles tended to reflect the peaceful integrationist goals of the struggle.

Although often simmering with repressed anger, his characters responded to injustice with quiet determination. They met hatred with reason and forgiveness, sending a reassuring message to white audiences and exposing Mr. Poitier to attack as an Uncle Tom when the civil rights movement took a more militant turn in the late 1960s.

“It’s a choice, a clear choice,” Mr. Poitier said of his film parts in a 1967 interview. “If the fabric of the society were different, I would scream to high heaven to play villains and to deal with different images of Negro life that would be more dimensional. But I’ll be damned if I do that at this stage of the game.”

At the time, Mr. Poitier was one of the highest-paid actors in Hollywood and a top box-office draw, ranked fifth among male actors in Box Office magazine’s poll of theater owners and critics; he was behind only Richard Burton, Paul Newman, Lee Marvin and John Wayne. Yet racial squeamishness would not allow Hollywood to cast him as a romantic lead, despite his good looks.

“To think of the American Negro male in romantic social-sexual circumstances is difficult, you know,” he told an interviewer. “And the reasons why are legion and too many to go into.”

Mr. Poitier often found himself in limiting, saintly roles that nevertheless represented an important advance on the demeaning parts offered by Hollywood in the past. In “No Way Out” (1950), his first substantial film role, he played a doctor persecuted by a racist patient, and in “Cry, the Beloved Country” (1952), based on the Alan Paton novel about racism in South Africa, he appeared as a young priest. His character in “Blackboard Jungle” (1955), a troubled student at a tough New York City public school, sees the light and eventually sides with Glenn Ford, the teacher who tries to reach him.

In “The Defiant Ones” (1958), a racial fable that established him as a star and earned him an Academy Award nomination for best actor, he was a prisoner on the run, handcuffed to a fellow convict (and virulent racist) played by Tony Curtis. The best-actor award came in 1964 for his performance in the low-budget “Lilies of the Field,” as an itinerant handyman helping a group of German nuns build a church in the Southwestern desert.

In 1967 Mr. Poitier appeared in three of Hollywood’s top-grossing films, elevating him to the peak of his popularity. “In the Heat of Night” placed him opposite Rod Steiger, as an indolent, bigoted sheriff, with whom Virgil Tibbs, the Philadelphia detective played by Mr. Poitier, must work on a murder investigation in Mississippi. (In an indelible line, the detective insists on the sheriff’s respect when he declares, “They call me Mr. Tibbs!”) In “To Sir, With Love” he was a concerned teacher in a tough London high school, and in “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner,” a taboo-breaking film about an interracial couple, he played a doctor whose race tests the liberal principles of his prospective in-laws, played by Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn.

Throughout his career, a heavy weight of racial significance bore down on Mr. Poitier and the characters he played. “I felt very much as if I were representing 15, 18 million people with every move I made,” he once wrote...

Still more.

 

Mike Gonzalez, BLM

At Amazon, Mike Gonzalez, BLM: The Making of a New Marxist Revolution.

All Three Defendants Convicted of Murder in Ahmaud Arbery Lynching

Very emotional and uplifting press conference.

Spiritual. Grateful for the grace of God.

At NYT, "Three Men Found Guilty of Murdering Ahmaud Arbery: Defendants Face Up to Life in Prison":

BRUNSWICK, Ga. — Three white men were found guilty of murder and other charges on Wednesday for the pursuit and fatal shooting of Ahmaud Arbery, a 25-year-old Black man, in a case that, together with the killing of George Floyd, helped inspire the racial justice protests of last year.

The three defendants — Travis McMichael, 35; his father, Gregory McMichael, 65; and their neighbor William Bryan, 52 — face sentences of up to life in prison for the state crimes. The men have also been indicted on separate federal charges, including hate crimes and attempted kidnapping, and are expected to stand trial in February on those charges.

The verdict suggested that the jury agreed with prosecutors’ arguments that Mr. Arbery posed no imminent threat to the men and that the men had no reason to believe he had committed a crime, giving them no legal right to chase him through their suburban neighborhood. “You can’t start it and claim self-defense,” the lead prosecutor argued in her closing statements. “And they started this.”

Though the killing of Mr. Arbery in February 2020 did not reach the same level of notoriety as the case of Mr. Floyd, the Black man murdered by a white Minneapolis police officer three months later, Mr. Arbery’s death helped fuel widespread demonstrations and unrest that unfolded in cities across the country in the spring and summer of 2020.

The case touched on some of the most combustible themes in American criminal justice, including vigilantism, self-defense laws, the effects of widespread gun ownership and the role of race in jury selection.

Like many other recent episodes involving the killing of Black people, the confrontation was captured on video that was eventually made public. Unlike many of the others, the video was made not by a bystander but by one of the defendants, Mr. Bryan.

From the beginning, Mr. Arbery’s family and friends raised questions about local officials’ handling of the case. The three men who were later charged walked free for several weeks after the shooting, and were arrested only after the video was released, a national outcry swelled and the case was taken over by the Georgia Bureau of Investigation.

Jackie Johnson, the local prosecutor who initially handled the case, lost her bid for re-election in 2020 and was indicted this year by a Georgia grand jury, accused of “showing favor and affection” to Gregory McMichael, a former investigator in her office, and for directing police officers not to arrest Travis McMichael. The case was ultimately tried by the district attorney’s office in Cobb County, which is roughly 300 miles away from Brunswick in metropolitan Atlanta.

The case brought political and legal upheaval. Gov. Brian Kemp, a Republican, signed a hate-crimes statute into law, and sided with state lawmakers when they voted to repeal significant portions of the state’s citizen’s arrest statute.

During the trial, defense lawyers relied on that citizen’s arrest law, which was enacted in the 19th century. They argued that their clients had acted legally when, on a sunny Sunday afternoon in February 2020, they set out in two pickup trucks in an effort to detain Mr. Arbery, an avid jogger and former high school football player who spent nearly five minutes trying to run away from them.

Eventually trapped between the two pickup trucks, Mr. Arbery ended up in a confrontation with Travis McMichael, who was armed with a shotgun and fired at Mr. Arbery three times at close range. Mr. McMichael testified that he feared that Mr. Arbery, who had no weapon, would get control of the shotgun from him and threaten his life.

Over the 10 days of testimony in the trial, prosecutors challenged the idea that an unarmed man who never spoke to his pursuers could be considered much of a threat at all.

“What’s Mr. Arbery doing?” Linda Dunikoski, the lead prosecutor said in her closing statement. “He runs away from them. And runs away from them. And runs away from them.”

The verdict, read aloud in a packed, windowless courtroom in the Glynn County Courthouse, came at a time when Americans were already divided over the acquittal, a few days earlier, of Kyle Rittenhouse. Mr. Rittenhouse, who asserted that he was acting in self-defense, fatally shot two men and wounded another during protests and violence that broke out after a white police officer shot a Black man in Kenosha, Wis.

Before the verdict in the Georgia case, some observers worried that the racial makeup of the jury — which included 11 white people and one Black person — would skew justice in the defendants’ favor.

Superior Court Judge Timothy R. Walmsley oversaw the proceedings. When he approved the selection of the nearly all-white jury, he noted that there was an appearance of “intentional discrimination” at play, but he said that defense lawyers had given legitimate reasons unrelated to race when they moved to exclude eight Black potential jurors in the final stages of the selection process.

Before the verdict, Wanda Cooper-Jones, Mr. Arbery’s mother, said she had faith in the power of the facts that the jurors were shown. “I’m very confident that they’ll make the right decision once they see all of the evidence,” she said.

Mr. Arbery’s family said he was out jogging on the day of his death, but defense lawyers said no evidence had emerged to show that Mr. Arbery jogged that day into the defendants’ neighborhood of Satilla Shores, just outside of Brunswick, a small coastal city.

Video footage showed Mr. Arbery, dressed in shorts and a T-shirt, walking into a partially built house in the neighborhood shortly before he was killed. It was a house he had walked into numerous times before. Each time, surveillance video showed him wandering around the property, but not taking or damaging anything. The owner of the house told police that items had been stolen from a boat that was sometimes stored on the property, though he was not sure the boat was there when the thefts occurred.

General concerns about property crime in Satilla Shores were widespread in early 2020, residents testified at the trial.

Travis McMichael told the police that he had seen Mr. Arbery outside the partially built house one evening 12 days before the shooting. During that encounter, Mr. McMichael said, Mr. Arbery put his hands in his waistband, as if reaching for a gun. Mr. McMichael called 911 that evening. Mr. Arbery ran away.

On the day of the shooting, a neighbor across the street saw Mr. Arbery in the house and called the police. Mr. Arbery left the house soon after, and ran down the street. Gregory McMichael spotted him and, along with his son, jumped into a truck and gave chase. Moments later, the third defendant, Mr. Bryan, began chasing Mr. Arbery as well.

At the trial, defense lawyers sought to show that the men were acting that day out of a “duty and responsibility” to detain a man whom they felt they had reasonable grounds to believe was a burglar, as Robert Rubin, a lawyer for Travis McMichael, put it. In her closing argument, Laura D. Hogue, a lawyer for Gregory McMichael, noted that Mr. Arbery had been on the property before and said he had become “a recurring nighttime intruder — and that is frightening, and unsettling.”

Travis McMichael was the only defendant to take the stand. He told the court he took his shotgun out during the pursuit because his U.S. Coast Guard training had taught him that showing a weapon could de-escalate a potentially violent situation.

He testified that he believed he had little choice but to shoot Mr. Arbery once they clashed...

More at Memeorandum.

And from Ed Driscoll, at Instapundit, "AHMAUD ARBERY CASE: Jury finds Travis McMichael, his father Greg McMichael and their neighbor, William “Roddie” Ryan, guilty of felony murder, among other charges."

Batya Ungar-Sargon tweets:

In a country with our ugly history, today is a good day. The tragic lynching of Ahmaud Arbery, the theft of a young man's life, cannot be undone by a just verdict. But it would have been compounded by an unjust one. We haven't overcome all our demons, but we are one step closer. https://t.co/Y8K8t2MijA

— Batya Ungar-Sargon (@bungarsargon) November 24, 2021

The Civil Rights Struggle of 2021

At FrontPage Magazine, "Mandated vaccines for all is the civil rights issue of our time":

The civil rights movement led to the end of legalized racial segregation and the beginning of the ability of African Americans to be free and equal citizens in the United States of America. But similar oppressive government injustice is happening in New York City today.

About a third of all citizens of New York City, among them the majority of African Americans, have not been vaccinated. De Blasio’s mandate to show proof of vaccination and IDs at NYC restaurants, bars, museums, gyms, theaters, concerts, and other indoor settings, discriminates against millions of unvaccinated New Yorkers, who will be prevented from engaging in normal everyday activities, and even students who are prevented from playing in high school sports. Forced vaccination mandates will prevent many New Yorkers from keeping their jobs. Unvaccinated New Yorkers will be legally prohibited from traveling by subway, bus, or plane. But it also normalizes the outrageous mandate that people are required to show their private health papers and personal identification.

Mandated vaccines for all is the civil rights issue of our time.

More.

 

Andrew Hacker, Two Nations

At Amazon, Andrew Hacker, Two Nations: Black and White, Separate, Hostile, Unequal.

The Fate of Affirmative Action

An excellent, in-depth report, from Nicolas Lemann, at New York, "Can Affirmative Action Survive?":

1. The History

In June, 2016, Justice Samuel Alito took the unusual step of reading aloud from the bench a version of his lengthy dissent in the case of Fisher v. University of Texas. A white applicant who had been denied admission had sued, saying that she’d been discriminated against because of her race. The Supreme Court, by the narrowest of margins and on the narrowest of grounds, upheld Texas’s admissions policy. Alito, with steely indignation, picked apart the logic of U.T.’s arguments and of his colleagues’ majority opinion. “This is affirmative action gone berserk,” he declared.

The civil-rights revolution ended the Jim Crow system of legally mandated racial segregation in the South. Its success made it obvious that much of the rest of the country was segregated, too, in fact if not always explicitly by law. In the years after the passage of the major civil-rights legislation, many colleges and universities made a concerted effort to become more racially integrated. Alito was complaining about U.T.’s version of this effort, but affirmative action has been controversial from the beginning, because more Black students usually means fewer students of other ethnicities. Students who weren’t Black used the laws banning racial discrimination to claim that universities were now discriminating in favor of Black people, and against them.

Alito concluded his dissent with an impassioned statement: “What is at stake is whether university administrators may justify systematic racial discrimination simply by asserting that such discrimination is necessary to achieve ‘the educational benefits of diversity,’ without explaining—much less proving—why the discrimination is needed or how the discriminatory plan is well crafted to serve its objectives.” In his view, the University of Texas, once the target of a civil-­rights lawsuit charging it with discriminating against Black people, was now discriminating, just as unacceptably, against others. He went on, “Even though U.T. has never provided any coherent explanation for its asserted need to discriminate on the basis of race, and even though U.T.’s position relies on a series of unsupported and noxious racial assumptions, the majority concludes that U.T. has met its heavy burden. This conclusion is remarkable—and remarkably wrong.”

Affirmative action is one of many policies—not just in admissions but also in employment, contracting, education, and voting—that take race into account, as a way of reversing the effects of many more policies, lasting for many more years, that openly discriminated against Black people. The Supreme Court has been ruling on these policies for half a century. In 1954, the Court joined the civil-rights revolution in a unanimous decision declaring legally segregated public schools to be unconstitutional. Since then, it has had a much harder time making up its mind in cases involving race.

The Court has considered affirmative action in university admissions six times. The first time, the Justices wound up declaring the case moot. The second time, they voted 5–4 against an explicit, numerical version of affirmative action, and 5–4 in favor of a less explicit version. The third and fourth times involved two lawsuits against the University of Michigan, which the Court decided simultaneously. In one, it ruled against another explicit, numerical version of affirmative action by a 6–3 vote, and in the other it once again voted 5–4 in favor of a less explicit version. The fifth time was the University of Texas case; the Court sent it back to a lower court for reconsideration. That led to the sixth time, in 2016. It decided, by a one-vote margin, in favor of keeping a soft-edged kind of affirmative action that relies on the judgment of an admissions office to use race appropriately when considering an applicant. Is there any issue on which the Supreme Court has produced less clarity? But one thing has been true every time the Court has upheld a form of affirmative action in admissions: the swing vote in the decisions came from a moderate Justice appointed by a Republican President—a breed that no longer exists.

The nine Justices are now considering whether to hear Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, which accuses Harvard of discriminating against Asian American candidates. The case was organized by Edward Blum, a financial adviser who for more than twenty-­five years has been bringing lawsuits against various efforts to take race explicitly into account with the aim of helping people of color—including the Texas case. Another of Blum’s cases, which accuses the University of North Carolina of rejecting white and Asian American applicants because of their race, is currently moving through the lower courts.

The country appears to be embarking on a great racial reckoning. A year ago, the murder of George Floyd by the white police officer Derek Chauvin set off some of the largest public demonstrations in American history, and prompted forceful official statements of opposition to racism by just about every prominent institution in America. Joe Biden has repeatedly called for racial equity, using unusually strong language. Many organizations have issued public pledges to recommit themselves to racial diversity, to more fully acknowledge Black history, and to more extensively represent Black perspectives. And a conservative resistance to all these changes is under way, in Congress and state legislatures, in the media, and in the courts, where there are new legal challenges to race-­conscious Biden Administration programs. It’s distinctly possible that the Supreme Court, as early as next year, could signal that it considers efforts aimed explicitly at helping Black people to be unconstitutional.

In June, the Court asked the Biden Administration to give its views on the Harvard case. If the Court decides to take it, that would be seen as good news by the plaintiffs and bad news by Harvard, which has won in the lower courts. It would be the Court’s first affirmative-­action case involving a private university, although Harvard, like all major research universities, receives a great deal of government funding. Given the current makeup of the Court, it’s hard to imagine that it would be inclined to build a bigger, friendlier space for race-­conscious policies. There is no reason to believe that Justice Alito has changed his mind in the five years since his dissent in the U.T. case.

Two other conservative Justices who have been consistently hostile to affirmative action—Clarence Thomas and Chief Justice John Roberts—signed on to Alito’s dissent. Roberts has referred to race-conscious policies as “a sordid business.” Anthony Kennedy, the now retired, moderate Republican-appointed Justice who wrote the majority opinion in the Texas case, had in the past been inclined to vote against affirmative action. Joan Biskupic revealed in her recent biography of Justice Sonia Sotomayor that when the case first came before the Court, in 2012, Sotomayor had initially drafted a “heated opinion,” offering “a fierce defense of affirmative action.” When she sensed that Kennedy was moving away from his former position, she decided not to issue it and instead wound up voting for his opinion, in 2016, when the case came back to the Court. Now there are six Republican-appointed Justices on the Court, three of them—Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett—appointed in the past four years, by Donald Trump.

A particularly firm conservative decision would amount to an invitation to further lawsuits challenging state and local measures designed to increase Black employment, electoral power, and economic resources. On race, it’s by no means clear that the Supreme Court has shared in the resurgence of passion for racial-justice issues that has swept through many other leading American institutions. This could be one of those Court decisions which set off not just private legal readjustments but public demonstrations, and years of political organizing. There is little common ground between people who see explicitly racial remedies as justifiable and necessary and people who see them as morally indistinguishable from the Jim Crow laws.

It will be fitting if the Court takes the Harvard case. The long-running battles over affirmative action involve a clash between two opposing principles, both arguably invented at Harvard: meritocracy and diversity. At large universities, it is possible to employ both principles at once, since the institutions have to balance many goals that sometimes seem at odds. But in the national debate, because people tend to choose either meritocracy or diversity, it’s important to understand where the ideas came from.

In 1933, James Bryant Conant, a chemist, became the president of Harvard. Unlike his immediate predecessors, who were Boston Brahmins, Conant grew up in middle-class Dorchester, not one of Boston’s patrician precincts. During Harvard’s almost four-hundred-­year history, it has organized itself along a number of different principles, beginning with its founding mission to train ministers. Conant’s predecessor, Abbott Lawrence Lowell, had overseen an institution dominated by students from wealthy families in the Northeast who had been educated at New England boarding schools. Lowell had introduced a quota restricting the number of Jewish students and a policy of residential segregation for Harvard’s few Black students. Conant wanted to make Harvard more purely academic, like the great research universities in Europe, so the clubby atmosphere of the place struck him as something that had to change.

Conant became entranced with the idea of using standardized intelligence tests as a way to attract academically outstanding public-school graduates from all over the country, regardless of their socioeconomic backgrounds. He decided that the best test available was the SAT, a multiple-choice test adapted from an I.Q. test given to Army inductees during the First World War. Immensely influential in the world of education, Conant led a successful effort to make the SAT a critical part of the admissions process for millions of college applicants, and to make other I.Q.-like tests a key screening device for graduate and professional schools. This consequential policy was established with no legislative action and little or no public debate.

During the nineteen-forties, Conant wrote a series of manifestos proposing a vast remaking of American society. The best known of these, titled “Wanted: American Radicals,” was published in The Atlantic Monthly. Conant hoped to create a Cold War version of Plato’s Republic, with a new class of brainy, selfless, superbly educated men leading the competition with the Soviet Union. As he perceived it, standardized tests would bring to the best universities the most talented students, who would go on to become highly influential public servants. This position wasn’t completely wrong. One of the first SAT-selected scholarship students to attend Harvard, which was all-male at the time, was James Tobin, the son of a sports-information director at the University of Illinois, who distinguished himself as a Nobel Prize-winning economist, a professor at Yale, and a member of the White House Council of Economic Advisers. One of Tobin’s students was Janet Yellen, the daughter of a Brooklyn family doctor, who is now the Secretary of the Treasury.

But Conant was mistaken in believing that he could use the SAT as a way to create a classless society. He liked to predict that, in the postwar world, inherited privilege would be abolished. In 1958, Michael Young, a British sociologist, introduced the word “meritocracy,” warning that the widespread use of I.Q. tests as a sorting device would result in a new and deeply resented kind of hereditary class system. But that’s not how people came to understand the term. To many, it denoted an almost sacred principle: that tickets to success, formerly handed out by inheritance or luck, were now given to the deserving. Inevitably, the system became widely understood not as an entry point into public service but as a promise of financial reward and social prestige. And fortunate parents learned how to manipulate the system, insuring that their children received every possible advantage—or even, in extreme cases, bribing their children’s way into élite universities.

White establishment liberals of Conant’s generation almost never considered race when they thought about the American future. In the summer of 1948, Henry Chauncey, an assistant dean under Conant who became the first president of the Educational Testing Service, was stunned to read an article co-written by one of the most prominent Black academics in the country, the anthropologist Allison Davis, who argued that intelligence tests were a fraud—a way of wrapping the privileged children of the middle and upper classes in a mantle of scientifically demonstrated superiority. The tests, he and his co-author, Robert J. Havighurst, pointed out, measured only “a very narrow range of mental activities,” and carried “a strong cultural handicap for pupils of lower socioeconomic groups.” Chauncey, who was convinced that standardized tests represented a wondrous scientific advance, wrote in his diary about Davis and Havighurst, “They take the extreme and, I believe, radical point of view that any test items showing different difficulties for different socioeconomic groups are inappropriate.” And: “If ability has any relation to success in life parents in upper socioeconomic groups should have more ability than those in lower socioeconomic groups.”

But that thought contradicted Co­nant’s assurance that the American radical he wanted to put in charge of the country would be “a fanatical believer in equality,” committed to “wielding the axe against the root of inherited privilege.” As the civil-rights movement grew, universities wanted to integrate more seriously, and standardized tests complicated their commitment. Testing made it possible to create a numerical ranking of all applicants, which helped enormously in handling the crush at the gates of selective institutions. Yet there had always been substantial average Black-white gaps in test scores—a reflection of the divergent quality of education and other resources in the lives of Black and white Americans. Conant’s efforts had resulted in greatly increasing the importance of tests, but the enhanced integration, beginning in the nineteen-sixties, of Harvard and other colleges and universities required decreasing their importance.

By the early nineteen-seventies, rejected white applicants at a number of universities were beginning to sue—charging that the schools had engaged in reverse discrimination. The plaintiffs based their legal arguments on two landmarks in the country’s historic quest for racial justice, the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution and the Civil Rights Act of 1964, both of which forbade racial discrimination. Those measures were aimed at helping Black people, but, the plaintiffs argued, they applied equally to white people who had been rejected even though their test scores were higher than those of admitted Black applicants. In these lawsuits, admissions based on standardized test scores had risen to the level of a constitutional right.

The first celebrated white litigant against an affirmative-action program was Marco DeFunis, who had been turned down by the University of Washington’s law school. In 1974, the Supreme Court declared DeFunis’s case moot because a lower court had ordered that he be admitted to the law school, and by the time the Court ruled he was close to graduating. Supporters of affirmative action were worried. Mainstream Jewish organizations, seeing affirmative action as a possible harbinger of a return of Jewish quotas at universities, took DeFunis’s side. Alexander Bickel, of Yale Law School, one of the country’s most prominent legal scholars, co-wrote an anti-affirmative- action friend-of-the-court brief for the Anti-Defamation League. The sociologist Nathan Glazer wrote a book called “Affirmative Discrimination.” The Supreme Court’s most theatri­cal­ly liberal white member, William O. Douglas, wrote a solo opinion that treated affirmative action as unconstitutional. The Fourteenth Amendment, he wrote, “commands the elimination of racial barriers, not their creation in order to satisfy our theory as to how society ought to be organized.” The feeling that issues involving race had obvious solutions, which had prevailed at the Court in 1954, had evaporated. Justices were predisposed to see affirmative action as presenting a bewildering conflict between two competing values: the impulse to integrate universities and the impulse to organize admission as an open competition in which each individual applicant would be judged solely on the basis of grades and test scores...

Still more. 

Derrick Bell, And We Are Not Saved

At Amazon, Derrick Bell, And We Are Not Saved: The Elusive Quest for Racial Justice.