Political Correctness — Racial Diversity and Speech Uniformity

Two items of note late last week, race-wise (alas, of course, there are always more than that, but just two for now).

First — as we noted early but was since then widely discussed here, there, and everywhere — the head of the Spokane branch of the NAACP now stands accused of being white. Of course, you can be white and still be a member of the NAACP, but the claim is that this lady knowingly misrepresented her melanin content. Comparisons with faux–Native American Elizabeth Warren and faux-woman Caitlyn Jenner were, of course, inevitable.

Second, there was an interesting article in the New York Times headlined, “Report Says Census Undercounts Mixed Race.” It’s worth reading, even though I’ll be suing the Times for plagiarism:

The Times article last week: “Today, the United States is increasingly not only a multiracial country, but also a country of multiracial individuals, including the first biracial president . . . ”

Yours truly in ScotusBlog, 2012: “ . . . as America becomes an increasingly multiracial, multiethnic society and as individual Americans are themselves more and more likely to be multiracial and multiethnic (starting with our president).”

I won’t really sue the Times, of course. Glad to have them on board with me in recognizing that, in such a country, it’s an “untenable legal regime” to give preferences to some Americans and discriminate against others on the basis of skin color and what country their ancestors came from. The Times does recognize that now, right?

And this goes double if we can all choose our own racial identities, right? I don’t particularly care if people want to identify themselves as being of this or that race, so long as being classified a particular way doesn’t mean that you will get treated any better or any worse. But, alas, such preferential treatment is vehemently insisted upon by the forces of political correctness.

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Speaking of political correctness: Timothy Lewis is apparently angling to get the William J. Brennan, Jr., Prize, awarded annually to the worst Republican-appointed ex-judge (the slightly more prestigious Earl Warren Prize goes to the worst Republican-appointed sitting judge).

In a recent speech, he assailed Chief Justice Roberts’s famous 2007 statement that “the way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race”; the ex-judge opined that “the chief justice should like [sic] to spend a little more time in the ’hood before making pronouncements on discrimination.”

Mr. Lewis, who was appointed to both a federal district judgeship and the Third Circuit by former President George H.W. Bush, went on to “stake[] out a number of liberal positions in his speech,” demanding greater “diversity” and “multiculturalism” at law firms and endorsing two bad bills, the Paycheck Fairness Act and the End Racial Profiling Act.

You can read all about it here (behind a pay-wall).

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And one last note on political correctness (this time the “speech police” kind rather than the “racial diversity” kind).

There was a Hill hearing earlier this month on “First Amendment Protections on Public College and University Campuses, a subject much in the news, which heard from witnesses Greg Lukianoff, Kim Kolby, Jamie Raskin, and Wendy Kaminer. I want also to flag here this statement submitted by Hans Bader of the Competitive Enterprise Institute.

Relatedly, I participated last week in an exchange at The Chronicle of Higher Education, in which I noted:

Laura Kipnis’s inquisition (she was accused of sexual harassment for writing an article in [The Chronicle of Higher Education]) under Title IX happened because her university, Northwestern, adopted an extraordinarily broad definition of “sexual harassment” that can punish even a single “unwelcome” comment, as Jessica Gavora recently chronicled in an essay entitled “How Title IX Became a Political Weapon.”

That extraordinarily, unconscionably broad definition is precisely what the [Obama administration’s] Office for Civil Rights [at the Education Department] and the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division demanded the University of Montana adopt, over the objectionsof free-speech advocates like the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE).

As FIRE has described at length, the Office for Civil Rights has sent conflicting signals ever since then about whether the definition it urged on the U. of M. should be adopted by all colleges, or need not be (sometimes suggesting it is a blueprint for all colleges, and sometimes not), but it is not surprising that colleges that want to avoid a Title IX inquisition have adopted it to avoid potential harassment by the Office for Civil Rights, as many in fact have.
The fact that the Office for Civil Rights once supported free speech during the previous administration (way back in 2003) says little about its stance toward free speech now.

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