Category Archive

The federal government wittingly and unwittingly endorses a great deal of racial discrimination in America. A 2011 report by the Congressional Research Service catalogued literally hundreds of government-wide and agency-specific set-aside and preference programs and grants throughout the entire executive branch that amount to some form of racial discrimination. If Congress wants to do something about it, and drastically reduce the amount of discrimination that goes on, it should look carefully at each of four bills that the Center for Equal Opportunity — working with the Heritage Foundation — recently drafted as model legislation. (The bills are described in detail …

Ta-Nehisi Coates has gotten some attention with his essay “The Case for Reparations” in The Atlantic, but I’m not impressed.  There’s no dispute that America has a long sad history of racial discrimination and that it and its effects are still with us, despite inspiring progress, and there’s also no shortage of talk and scholarship (serious and otherwise) on this topic.  The other part of Mr. Coates’s thesis is, as the title of the essay says, some sort of “reparations,” but he is openly vague about what that would look like, though he does endorse Rep. John Conyers’s proposed bill …

An AP story this week laments: “U.S. teachers are nowhere near as diverse as their students,” and says liberal groups “want more to be done to help teachers mirror more accurately the students in their classrooms.”  Those groups say that minority students do better if they have a teacher “who looks just like them” and — rather contradictorily — that white students benefit by “engaging with people who think, talk, and act differently than them” (uh, stereotype much?).  But, the article concludes, it “will take political will” and better “programs and policies” designed “to increase the number of minority teachers.” But …

Last week the Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of a Michigan ballot initiative that banned, among other kinds of affirmative action, racial and ethnic preferences in admissions to public universities.  This is a case that the Center for Equal Opportunity has been involved with for a long time.  We had joined amicus briefs with the court of appeals and the en banc court of appeals, and then also joined two briefs in the Supreme Court: one urging the Court to take the case and, when the Court did so, another urging it to rule the way it did.  What’s more, …

The federal government wittingly and unwittingly endorses a great deal of racial discrimination in America. A 2011 report by the Congressional Research Service catalogued literally hundreds of government-wide and agency-specific set-aside and preference programs and grants throughout the entire executive branch that amount to some form of racial discrimination. If Congress wants to do something about it, and drastically reduce the amount of discrimination that goes on, it should look carefully at each of four bills that the Center for Equal Opportunity and the Heritage Foundation recently drafted as model legislation. (The bills are described in detail here, and this …

Last year I wrote here about the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission’s ridiculous “disparate impact” lawsuit against Kaplan Higher Learning Corp. The Obama administration sued Kaplan for running credit checks on employee applicants – similar, by the way, to the ones the EEOC itself uses.  Kaplan had learned that some of its employees had misappropriated student payments and, to provide safeguards against this behavior, it began screening its applicants for major red flags in their credit histories. The EEOC sued Kaplan, arguing that it cannot use credit checks, because use of credit checks has a disparate impact on black applicants. Anyway, …

In his remarks at the “Strengthening the Relationship Between Law Enforcement and Communities of Color Forum” last week, Associate Attorney General Tony West gets the ball rolling this way: “Let me also express appreciation to Reverend Al Sharpton, not only for joining us this morning but for his leadership, day in and day out, on issues of reconciliation and community restoration.”  Al Sharpton — a leader for “reconciliation”?  Really? Mr. West also praises New York City mayor Bill de Blasio: “In the short time the Mayor has been in office, the Justice Department has established a productive working partnership with the City of …

Here’s an interesting story from Bloomberg View about the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. The CFPB likes to use the “disparate impact” approach in its regulation of banks, but the American Banker has obtained data showing that the Bureau’s own employment practices might not fare very well under this approach (which puts a premium on racial/ethnic/gender bean-counting).  “Specifically, CFPB managers show a pattern of ranking white employees distinctly better than minorities in performance reviews used to grant raises and issue bonuses. Overall, whites were twice as likely in 2013 to receive the agency’s top grade than were African-American or Hispanic employees, the data …

But first, before turning to “My Brother’s Keeper”:  Senator Harry Reid has filed cloture on President Obama’s nomination of Debo Adegbile to head the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, and set the full Senate’s vote on it for Tuesday.  I’m told that red-state Democrats are not happy about this vote, and rightly so, especially in light of Mr. Adegbile’s enthusiastic and politicized defense of convicted Philadelphia cop-killer Mumia Abu Jamal (among other radical credentials). I’ve written about the nomination here and here, and the Wall Street Journal ran an excellent op-ed last week opposing the nomination, by Republican Pennsylvania senator Pat Toomey and Democratic Philadelphia district attorney R. Seth Williams. …

It’s been a busy year so far at the Center for Equal Opportunity, and it’s only February. Earlier this month I spoke at Vermont Law School, and this week I’m traveling to Minnesota to speak to the law schools at St. Thomas University and William Mitchell College of Law.  (Some Florida law schools, rather than Vermont and Minnesota, might have been a better choice for this month, but I’m not complaining.)  Last month I spoke at the Greater McLean Republican Women’s Club in Northern Virginia. The Center for Equal Opportunity was quoted in an AP story on desegregation and a …