Draft Democratic Platform | Center for Equal Opportunity

The draft Democratic platform that has just been released is about what you would expect on civil-rights issues, especially in the criminal-justice area. The draft language condemns our nation’s “institutional and systemic racism” and our “mass incarceration,” and it affirms that “black lives matter.” Felons should be allowed to vote, and our marijuana laws have an “unacceptable disparate impact” on African Americans. There’s also plenty on LGBT rights, where “there is still much work to be done.”

Speaking of “Black Lives Matter” – This USA Today op-ed explains how Black Lives Matter and anti-Israel Palestinian protestors are sharing notes — and this is supposed to make us more sympathetic to both of these groups. Somehow, that was not my reaction.

The ‘Wise Latina’ Dissents – And speaking of criminal-justice issues: I thought I should note Justice Sotomayor’s controversial dissent in a recent drug search case. A sample passage, citing the usual suspects:

[I]t is no secret that people of color are disproportionate victims of this type of scrutiny. See M. Alexander, The New Jim Crow 95–136 (2010). For generations, black and brown parents have given their children “the talk”—instructing them never to run down the street; always keep your hands where they can be seen; do not even think of talking back to a stranger—all out of fear of how an officer with a gun will react to them. See, e.g., W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (1903); J. Baldwin, The Fire Next Time (1963); T. Coates, Between the World and Me (2015).

More “White Privilege” – Campus social justice warriors are always complaining about “white privilege.” I wonder if they’ll say anything about this development: Fox News reports, “Al Qaeda urges lone wolves to target whites, to avoid ‘hate crime’ label.”

And just to be safe, I think they should focus on Episcopalian golfers.

The Problem with Diversity Training – The Washington Post reports: “In the cover story of the latest issue of the Harvard Business Review, sociologists from Harvard University and Tel Aviv University explore the counterintuitive idea that some of the most common tools for improving diversity — one of which is mandatory training — are not just ineffective. They could be detrimental to improving the number of women and minorities in the managerial ranks.”

The story elaborates on this and explains that it’s not just mandatory training but “other tactics often aimed at helping with diversity — such as skill tests to help prevent bias in the hiring process or grievance systems where employees can log complaints — [that can lead to] declines in the number of women and minorities in the companies’ workforces over time.”

Seems that those mandatory diversity sessions make people grumpy, and managers “don’t like being told whom they want to hire, so they often distribute tests selectively, … while grievance systems can make managers feel threatened and retaliate.”

Conversely, “In addition to voluntary training programs, [the] research found that college recruitment aimed at women and minorities, as well as the addition of mentorship programs, diversity task forces and diversity managers, all led to improved diversity among managers over time. Creating a diversity task force within a company, for example, led to a 30 percent increase in Asian men and a 23 percent increase in black women over five years.”

If you don’t like reading the Washington Post, you can read the Fox News version of the story here.

So, am I happy that even Harvard and the mainstream media are willing to concede the abuses and shortcomings that politically correct bean-counting has caused? Sure, but my happiness is tempered by two interrelated things. First, there is no mention of the fact that there are legal prohibitions on race-and sex-based hiring; and, second, it’s accepted that companies should be striving to achieve “diversity” rather than just hiring and promoting the best qualified people.

Clinton–McAuliffe Coordination on Felon Voting? – Sure looks like it, according to this Washington Examiner article, which begins:

New Clinton campaign emails show that there was communication with top ally and Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe on his plan to let 206,000 felons vote in the fall election, a move GOP officials said was aimed at guaranteeing Hillary Clinton the purple state.

My friend Hans von Spakovsky notes that the emails reveal that the governor was working with progressive groups, who are his political allies, instead of with state election officials, who were surprised by his action. That is, he was acting not like a government official but more in the mode of a campaign consultant for the Democratic party.

Hans and I, by the way, wrote a column on Governor McAuliffe’s felon reenfrachisement action right after he took it.

Justice Clarence Thomas’s Silver Anniversary – Clarence Thomas is marking his twenty-fifth anniversary as a Supreme Court justice, and to celebrate the occasion the Federalist Society sponsored a podcast with some of his former law clerks and C. Boyden Gray, who was White House counsel at the time of Justice Thomas’s nomination. You can listen to it here (I phone in with a question about how the justice chooses his law clerks, by the way).

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