Category Archive

One of my articles that I link to most is “A Half-Dozen Push-Backs for Faculty Hiring Committee Meetings,” which the National Association of Scholars kindly published on its website eight years ago.  It’s useful whenever I’m responding to a suggestion that this or that faculty should increase its “diversity” — and those suggestions appear practically every day on higher-education websites.  Many of the points it makes, alas, apply as well to Corporate America these days and its “celebration of diversity” (I testified specifically against those practices before the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which you can read here and here). …

A never-ending project of the Center for Equal Opportunity is setting the record straight when the media get it wrong on a civil-rights issue — or, less frequently, applauding them when they get it right.  Below are some examples from this year of each (the first was published in the Washington Post, the next on the following day in the Wall Street Journal, etc.). Washington Post: The April 7 editorial “Disparate school discipline, in black and white” wrongly urged the Education Department to leave in place an Obama administration “Dear Colleague” letter that coerces schools into imposing racial quotas when …

Chief Justice John Roberts and his colleagues debate Brown v. Board of Education. Limiting the ability of public school districts to use race in making school assignments, a five-Justice majority generated five opinions taking up 185 pages that mentioned the Brown case a total of 90 times. My piece on the case, originally published by The Weekly Standard, discusses the “colorblind Constitution,” Justice Harlan’s still persuasive interpretation of our supreme law of the land. The Supreme Court, in its very last decision of the term, limited the ability of public school districts to use race in determining the schools that …

Linda Chavez is the Chairman of RTP’s Race & Sex working group and the Center for Equal Opportunity. In this short video, she explains the need for a working group dedicated to examining race and sex regulations “to try to evaluate whether or not those regulations help or harm in our efforts to end discrimination.” Visit our website – https://www.RegProject.org – to learn more, view all of our content, and connect with us on social media. Watch Related posts: TESTIMONY OF ROGER CLEGG, PRESIDENT AND GENERAL COUNSEL, CENTER FOR EQUAL OPPORTUNITY BEFORE THE U.S. COMMISSION ON CIVIL RIGHTS REGARDING THE …

This month marks the 50th anniversary of the report by the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, better known as the Kerner Commission. This blue-ribbon panel was put together by President Johnson after the summer 1967 Detroit riots to analyze what caused such riots and how to prevent them, and it delivered, predictably, liberal claptrap. There are a couple of new books that use the anniversary as a news hook and lots of newspaper articles about it — some of which I discuss below — so let me offer as a quick antidote this link to a Heritage Foundation panel …

For one of LBJ’s advisers, a great society was one in which there would be no poverty, hunger or illiteracy; nor would leisure time be wasted. In February I reviewed for the Wall Street Journal Joshua Zeitz’s insightful book, Building the Great Society. That was LBJ’s big, domestic-side endeavor, which he pursued throughout his five-year presidency. And it led to the use of racial preferences in federal hiring and contracting. The government still pushes for preferential treatment in those areas. But it is past time for the government to get out of the business of counting and hiring by race. …

In her Oscar acceptance speech Sunday night, Best Actress winner Frances McDormand endorsed “inclusion riders.” I’m not an entertainment-law specialist, but apparently this is a proviso that top actors and actresses are being urged to stick into their contracts which demand “diversity” in the hiring of other employees by the employer. Putting aside whether this is a good idea artistically and morally, I want to point out here that there can be legal problems with it. The devil is in the details, but just to give you the idea: Suppose that a top salesman for a company said that he’ll …

A regional branch of the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights late last year entered into a resolution agreement with the Milwaukee public school system that requires schools to assess whether there are racial disproportions among students being disciplined and, if so, to “consider steps that can be taken to eliminate the disproportion to the maximum extent possible.” But racial disproportions don’t prove racial discrimination, and the fact is that there is not uniformity among all racial and ethnic groups at all times and in all places when it comes to school discipline infractions.  The Center for Equal Opportunity …

A couple of months ago, an important paper by Althea Nagai — research fellow at the Center for Equal Opportunity — was published by the Heritage Foundation and released at a special event there.  At the event the paper, “The Implicit Association Test: Flawed Science Tricks Americans into Believing They Are Unconscious Racists,” were discussed by Dr. Nagai, myself, and Heather Mac Donald of the Manhattan Institute.  You can listen to the panel here and read the paper here. The following week, the Heritage Foundation’s Hans von Spakovsky and I wrote a column on the paper for National Review Online, …

Under Sessions the Justice Department is following a process that affirms good government and respects the rule of law This is a piece on “guidance” first published at The Weekly Standard. Constraining what agencies do in the name of guidance is essential to the administration’s deregulatory project. Already the Justice Department has withdrawn 25 guidance documents found to be improper or unnecessary. Officials confirm the department is reviewing additional guidance documents and expect more to be withdrawn. A major theme of the Trump administration lies in its effort to discipline the regulatory state, with the Justice Department playing a key …