Category Archive

Last week the Washington Post has a big, front-page, above-the-fold article, headlined, “Budget would cut civil rights positions” and “Diminished federal role in fighting discrimination” and “Cuts part of broader effort to curtail federal programs on civil rights.” That’s quoting the hard copy; the online version is perhaps even worse: “Trump administration plans to minimize civil rights efforts in agencies.” The article itself declares as a matter of fact that the Trump administration wants “to rein in government programs that promote civil rights” and “dismantle compliance efforts” and that it is “reducing the role of the federal government in fighting …

I can report some good news this week. Last Friday, when President Trump signed the big appropriations bill keeping the federal government open, he included a presidential signing statement. Here’s the last sentence: “My Administration shall treat provisions that allocate benefits on the basis of race, ethnicity, and gender … in a manner consistent with the requirement to afford equal protection of the laws under the Due Process Clause of the Constitution’s Fifth Amendment.” The ellipsis is a list of examples of the federal programs the president has in mind, including minority contracting and subcontracting; preferred treatment for Native Americans, …

Last fall I wrote about some disturbing changes that the Obama administration wanted to make in the data gathered for the Census. A short 30-day window was given for public comments, but thankfully the Trump administration seems to have misgivings about the proposed changes. And so it has asked for more public comments (via the White House website no less), and extended the deadline to the end of this month. Mike Gonzalez of the Heritage Foundation has done yeoman’s work on this matter. I quoted his “Issue Brief” last fall: “The two most significant proposals [are] creating a new ethno/racial …

Here’s a sample of what the Center for Equal Opportunity has been up to in recent weeks. We have weighed in against racial preferences in government contracting with the following cities and counties:  Decatur, Illinois; Leon County, Florida; Guilford County, North Carolina; Asheville, North Carolina; and Fayetteville, North Carolina.  Here’s some typical language: It’s good to make sure contracting programs are open to all, that bidding opportunities are widely publicized beforehand, and that no one gets discriminated against because of skin color, national origin, or sex.  But that means no preferences because of skin color, etc. either — whether it’s …

The Federalist Society blogsite has an interesting post by James Scanlan on proposed legislation in New Jersey that would require racial and ethnic impact statements for any legislative measure that affects pretrial detention, sentencing, probation, or parole policies. Mr. Scanlan notes that racial-impact-statement laws have already, alas, been enacted in Connecticut, Iowa, and Oregon and that similar legislation has recently been introduced in Arkansas, Florida, Mississippi, and Wisconsin; and, what’s more, frequently the legislation addresses not just post-arrest and conviction policies, but what is made criminal in the first place. Mr. Scanlan does a wonderful job of pointing out how …

The Center for Equal Opportunity has been particularly active in recent months with its ongoing project of warning state and local governments (especially cities and counties) not to start down the road of awarding government contracts with an eye on race, ethnicity, and sex.  Here’s the sort of memorandum (citations and links omitted) we send to the relevant officials, most recently in Georgia, North Carolina, Florida, and Virginia: We are writing with regard to a recent news story, which was brought to our attention this week and which discusses the City’s minority contracting efforts. We urge the City to be …

At last week’s prayer breakfast, President Trump made fun of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s poor ratings as his replacement on Celebrity Apprentice, but he also said this:  “So in the coming days, we will develop a system to help ensure that those admitted into our country fully embrace our values of religious and personal liberty, and that they reject any form of oppression and discrimination.  We want people to come into our nation, but we want people to love us and to love our values — not to hate us and to hate our values.” The President’s remarks about Mr. Schwarzenegger were …

I had occasion recently to post on National Review Online this short summary of why the accusation of “white privilege” is poisonous: It is, for starters, a divisive phrase, much more likely to hurt race relations than help them, as it lumps together all white people — many of whom cannot be considered “privileged” by any reasonable standard — and points an accusatory finger at them, asserting, “You don’t deserve what you have.” It is, at bottom, just another way of complaining about stereotyping, even though all racial groups — indeed, all groups, period — face stereotyping, some negative and …

A couple of years ago, a bad Senate resolution was introduced, encouraging the entire private sector to adopt a ramped-up version of the National Football League’s “Rooney Rule”: That rule originally required that at least one racial minority be introduced for any head coaching vacancy, and the Senate resolution now wants interviewed at least two “qualified minority candidates for each managerial opening at the director level and above” and least two minority-owned businesses for vendor contracts. Well, that bad Senate resolution is back.  What remains especially lamentable is that it’s being proposed not by Bernie Sanders but by Tim Scott, who should …

Let me begin my take on Barack Obama’s farewell address last week and the state of race relations as he leaves office by quoting what I wrote in 2004, after he delivered the Democratic National Convention keynote that vaulted him into the public eye: Barack Obama gave a fine speech, but it was not a speech that reflects the current Democratic Party. It celebrated America as “a magical place”; it did not bemoan our racism and imperialism. It professed that this black man “owe[d] a debt to those who came before” him; it did not call for reparations. It spoke …