Keith Lamont Scott and Daniel Kevin Harris

Roger CleggUncategorized

“Keith Lamont Scott Is Sixth Person to Die in Police Shooting in Charlotte This Year,” says an NBC News headline.  Well, yeah, but if you actually read the story, near the end you learn some interesting facts.  All those shot were men.  Each was 43 or younger.  Four were black, one was Asian, and one was white.  And all except for one was armed. What’s more, here are the details on the one who was not armed:  “Daniel Kevin Harris, a white, unarmed, 29-year-old, was shot on Aug. 18, after a state trooper tried to pull him over for speeding …

A conservative successor to Justice Scalia?

Roger CleggUncategorized

The Supreme Court will be back in a week or two, so I thought this would be a good time to share with you an essay I did over the summer and at the request of the website SCOTUSblog: I’ve been asked to discuss what will happen in the area of racial preferences – a.k.a. “affirmative action” – if Justice Antonin Scalia’s successor is a conservative. Well, since Justice Scalia was a conservative, then what will happen is basically what has been happening. The new Justice will line up with Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence …

Dave Davis’s right to vote

Roger CleggUncategorized

I am proud to announce my first publication in the Guam Daily Post, which ran earlier this month: On Sept. 1 at the federal courthouse, Dave Davis will argue that the much-discussed status plebiscite should at last be put out of its misery. It is commonly understood everywhere else that, under the United States Constitution, the right to vote is violated when you parcel out voting rights based on your ethnic group. But in Guam, it will take judges to enforce the law. The same thing happened, by the way, in Hawaii, and the Supreme Court ruled in Rice v. …

More Cypress, Less Facebook

Roger CleggRacial Preferences

George Leef has a fine column in Forbes that discusses why it’s a bad thing if the federal government leans on corporations to have more “diversity” on their boards.  The whole discussion is excellent, but I especially liked this: In May, 1996, Sister Doris Gormley wrote a letter to T.J. Rodgers, the founder and then-CEO of Cypress Semiconductor. She argued that Cypress ought to diversify its board by adding some women. Replying to her, Rodgers wrote, “Choosing a Board of Directors based on race and gender is a lousy way to run a company. Cypress will never do it. Furthermore, …

Dorm Segregation in 2016: The UConn Con

Roger CleggGovernment Activity

It’s back-to-school time, and Michael Meyers of the New York Civil Rights Coalition and I posted this column on National Review Online last Friday. Segregation is back. These past few weeks have seen controversy over black-student housing ads for roommates directed to “people of color” only, and over colleges and a law school that created separate class sections restricted for black students. What is going on? It appears, alas, that public universities have formally reintroduced and made fashionable racial segregation, in the guise of creating safe spaces for “their” minority students — to endorse, fund, and foster black separatism in …

Facebook Breaks the Law

Roger CleggUncategorized

The Wall Street Journal had an article last week about how Facebook, in an attempt to increase its workforce “diversity,” gave its in-house recruiters a paid incentive to encourage applications from people who weren’t white or Asian males. That is: “Previously, recruiters were awarded one point for every new hire. Under the new system, they could earn 1.5 points for a so-called ‘diversity hire’ — a black, Hispanic or female engineer — according to people familiar with the matter. More points can lead to a stronger performance review for recruiters and, potentially, a larger bonus, the people said.” As I immediately pointed out (on …

Racial Preferences in Higher Education

Roger CleggEducation

A couple of months ago, the Supreme Court handed down its disappointing decision in Fisher v. University of Texas, and race and higher education continue to be in the news.  This past week has seen controversy over student housing ads expressing a preference of “people of color” and separate student sections in courses for minority students, and there’s been a call this week for “diversity” to be graded in school rankings by U.S. News & World Report — all bad ideas, in my humble opinion, and each showing in its own way why politically correct racial discrimination should not be …

Some Blunt Talk on Race

Roger CleggUncategorized

Many African Americans have blown it.  By no means all, but many.  By no means only African Americans, as I’ll discuss in later, but a disproportionate number of them. African Americans finally and rightly achieved great equality of law, and along with it much greater equality of opportunity than they had ever had, as a result of the Civil Rights Movement that culminated in the 1960s.  But they have failed to take advantage of it.   It’s a sad irony that, at the same time something good was happening for them, sometime bad was happening, too.  This is not to …

School Discipline and Political Correctness

Roger CleggUncategorized

My response to a Richmond Times-Dispatch editorial was published last week by that paper in its “Correspondent of the Day” feature, and I thought I would make the issues it discusses the focus of this week’s email.  My response was titled “Undisciplined students hurt the entire class,” and here it is: You made two points in your recent editorial “Political Correctness” that were spot on. Both issues involved the Obama administration’s Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights. In each instance, the administration has indeed “fixated on leftist identity politics.” In the first instance, the department has reacted to the …

Wise Latinas, Felons Voting, and the Racial Divide

Roger CleggVoting Rights

NPR and Wise Latinas – A researcher at Harvard has concluded that black federal trial judges get overturned at a rate 10 percent higher than white federal trial judges. Now, I’m skeptical that this proves anything about anything, but what’s interesting is the way this National Public Radio story looks at the study.  All kinds of explanations are considered, except for the most obvious one: If, in the name of “diversity,” less qualified African Americans are appointed to the bench, then they would be more likely to commit reversible errors.  NPR gives more credence to the possibility of “unconscious biases” or, …