Category: Race and Race Relations
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You Can’t Make This Stuff Up: Fairfax Courts Edition
by Hans Bader A judge in Virginia’s Fairfax County has ruled that portraits of white judges must be removed from a courtroom to protect a black criminal defendant’s right to a fair trial. The idea that white people are so scary or racially offensive that just seeing them deprives minorities of a fair trial would…
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Media Bashing at Bacon’s Rebellion
by Peter Galuszka Two recent blog posts critical of The Washington Post and The New York Times are way out of line. They assume that two leading newspapers have a definite agenda on race. Jim Bacon goes after the Post for reporting about the bad experiences a Black student, Rafael Jenkins, endured during ‘”Rat Week”…
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The Thought Police Have Her on Video
by James C. Sherlock You know how some things play out exactly as you expect and you still can’t figure out why they happen? Such a thing happened to me this morning when I opened the New York Times. On the front page was an article that was a rehash of reporting that had been…
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WaPo Convicts VMI of Racism. Again
by James A. Bacon Sigh. I am weary of writing about race in Virginia, I really am. But the Washington Post never tires and never rests. America-as-endemically-racist nation has become a dominant narrative of 2020 and the newspaper’s enthusiasm for stories alleging racism everywhere (but itself) shows no sign of abating. This is profoundly discouraging…
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The Nonsensical Narrative of an Impending White Minority
by James A. Bacon America’s media and cultural elites are increasingly obsessed with race and ethnicity, viewing every public policy issue through a racial prism. But the American people aren’t cooperating. In their real-world behavior, race and ethnicity are becoming less important. The distinction between “whites” and “Hispanics,” never clear to begin with, is steadily…
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Prince William Republicans Walk Out of “Bias” Training Session
by James A. Bacon First comes bias training, then comes anti-bias enforcement. Can the thought police be far behind? In Prince William County last week, three Republican members of the Board of Supervisors walked out of a presentation, “Raising Awareness of Unconscious Bias to Foster Inclusivity and Equity,” at a joint meeting of the supervisors…
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Governor Northam, If You Want to See Educational Equity in Schools, Visit Southwest Virginia
by James A. Bacon The Northam administration’s education equity initiative declares that “equity” will have been achieved when outcomes can no longer be predicted on the basis of race, gender, zip code, ability, socioeconomic status or languages spoken at home. The administration does not acknowledge it, but there is a region of Virginia that has…
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Racism Does Not Explain the Variability in Public School Suspensions
by James A. Bacon Across the Commonwealth of Virginia, black students comprise 22% of total student enrollment but 52% of all students suspended. Black students are 4.5 times more likely to be suspended from school than white students are. So states the Northam administration’s “road map to equity,” “Navigating EquityVA.” The disproportionate suspension of black…
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UVa Vice Provost’s Tough Job: Recruiting More Blacks to a “Racist” University
by James A. Bacon Pity poor Stephen Farmer. The newly appointed vice provost for enrollment at the University of Virginia has a thankless job: fulfilling the goal of admitting more African Americans and Hispanics, even as Virginia’s flagship university has inadvertently branded itself as a racist institution. Farmer’s appointment was highlighted in the most recent…
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Part III – Questions raised by Attorney General Herring’s Loudoun County Schools Determination
by James C. Sherlock The citizens of Loudoun and LCPS need to understand all the implications of the Attorney General’s determination. This essay will offer questions that I sincerely recommend that LCPS pose to the Attorney General in order to get enough information to decide what to do. The AG’s office was given 60 days…
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Unemployment of Blacks Exceed that of Whites at Every Level of Educational Attainment
by Dick Hall-Sizemore Here is another salvo in the culture wars that have been reflected on this blog. An article in a newspaper today begins with this sentence: “From advanced-degree holders to high-school dropouts, Black workers have substantially higher unemployment rates at every level of educational attainment than white workers….” And which woke newspaper with…
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Herring’s Academies of Loudoun Ruling – Part I – Only Cure for Disparate Impact is Fewer Asians
by James C. Sherlock I just finished reading the 61-page “Final Determination of the Office of Attorney General Division of Human Rights in DHR Case No.: 19-2652, NAACP Loudoun Branch v. Loudoun County Public Schools.” The first thing I discovered is that the Democrats in the last session created a kangaroo court within the Attorney…
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Virginia AG: Selective Admissions Are Racist
by Hans Bader The Virginia attorney general’s office has ruled that the Loudoun County school system committed illegal racial discrimination by admitting relatively few black and Hispanic students to its selective schools, the Academies of Loudoun. For reasons that have nothing to do with racism, the Academies of Loudoun are much more heavily Asian than…
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Darkness Descends upon Mr. Jefferson’s University
by James A. Bacon In the previous post I gave a chronological account of how a classroom joke delivered by Associate Professor Jeffrey Leopold in University of Virginia business class exploded into a full-fledged racial controversy. The post was a straightforward, just-the-facts-ma’am narrative of what happened. I made every effort to give all sides of…
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Anatomy of a Racial Incident at UVa
by James A. Bacon Jeffrey Leopold, a University of Virginia assistant professor, was assigned this fall to teach “COMM 1800 — Foundations of Commerce,” a prerequisite for students entering the McIntire School of Commerce. On October 22 he lectured the class on the topic of globalism. His purpose was to explain the necessity of adopting…