Category: Race and Race Relations
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The Alexandria Experiment
by James A. Bacon The election of Governor Glenn Youngkin may bring about changes in K-12 educational policy in Virginia, but those changes will take time to take hold, and they will not play out uniformly across the state. “Progressive” school systems are organizing a form of Massive Resistance (a term I use with deliberate…
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Grandparents Ask Supreme Court for Justice
Recommendation to readers: Be sure to delve deep enough into the story to read Asra Nomani’s personal story. She describes the values to which Asian-Americans owe their academic success. — JAB by Asra Q. Nomani WASHINGTON, D.C. — This past Friday, Dr. Mridula Kumari, 71, walked up the stairs to the U.S. Supreme Court, and…
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Racist Rant Results in Resignation
by Kerry Dougherty When a shockingly racist 2021 Facebook post from Hampton Electoral Board Chair David Dietrich surfaced late last week the reaction from his fellow Republicans — from Gov. Glenn Youngkin to the Hampton GOP chief — was swift and unequivocal. Resign, they said, or we will remove you from the board. “As governor,…
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Such Words Have “No Place in Virginia”
by James A. Bacon Governor Glenn Youngkin did the right thing by demanding the resignation of David Dietrich, a Hampton Republican Party official serving on the city electoral board, for making a racist Facebook post. In accusing certain senior military officials of persecuting “conservative, freedom-loving Americans,” Dietrich referred to them as “nothing more than dirty,…
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Racism as Anti-Social Defiance
by James A. Bacon Joel Mungo is a teacher at Menchville High School in Newport News. Over the past several months, he says, someone periodically left a banana outside his classroom door in what was “clearly a deliberate act.” As a Black person, he not unreasonably interpreted the bananas as a play upon the old…
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A Complete Disconnect from Reality
by James A. Bacon A group of Black leaders has launched an initiative to preserve the teaching of Black history against what it calls a “whitewashing” by Governor Glenn Youngkin. Black History Is American History, a collaboration of the Leadership Conference Education Fund, the NAACP, and People for the American Way, has formed in response…
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The Road to Hell…
by Phil Leigh About eighteen months ago Richmond Mayor Levar Stoney remarked that the removal of Confederate statues would not cost the city’s taxpayers any money because non-profit donors would provide the funds. About the same time the Mellon Foundation announced a $250 million grantmaking effort “to reimagine and transform commemorative spaces to celebrate America’s…
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How English-Learner Stats Debunk Woke Education Theory
by James A. Bacon It is dogma among practitioners of Critical Race Theory (or whatever other label you wish to apply to the doctrines of the Woke) that Hispanics are akin to Blacks in being “under-represented minorities,” or URMs for short. As URMs, Hispanics are said to be victimized by systemic racism, White privilege, and…
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Torturing Statistics Until They Confess: An RTD Primer
by James A. Bacon Sabrina Moreno with the Richmond Times-Dispatch has written a three-piece series arguing that disinvestment in the Virginia Department of Health led Latinos to being “the most likely to get infected, hospitalized and die” during the COVID-19 pandemic. The fourth paragraph of the story makes the following extraordinary assertion: Three months after…
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JMU, Social Justice and the Office of Student Accountability and Restorative Practices (OSARP)
by James C. Sherlock Yesterday I wrote of the pressures on Tim Miller, Vice President of Student Affairs at JMU, to balance competing views on masking. Mr. Miller has had plenty of practice. If he walked a tightrope on masks, he tried and fell flat on his face on diversity training. He also oversees something…
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Purging Asian-Americans from Top Virginia Schools to End
by Kerry Dougherty It’s dangerous to deal in ethnic stereotypes. There’s always a risk of being called racist. But if we can agree that the Irish are great raconteurs and the Canadians are relentlessly polite, can we not also say that many Asian-Americans place a high value on education? How else to explain the large…
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Does Virginia Really Need a “Tribal Consultation” Ombudsman?
by James A. Bacon The Washington Post takes note today of three bills affecting Virginia’s sovereign Indian tribes moving through the General Assembly. One would update state code to reflect federal recognition of the tribes. One would make tribes eligible for grants from the Virginia Land Conservation Fund. And third would give federally recognized tribes,…
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UVa Needs Facts and Reason, Not an Opinion Survey
by Charles L. Weber, Jr. Recently Jim Bacon argued that the University of Virginia needs to conduct another Climate Survey to compare the results with the one conducted in 2018. He argued as follows: The premise of the Ryan administration is that making African-Americans feel more welcome at UVa requires rooting out the racism endemic…
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The Fiscal Challenge of Educating Immigrant Children
by James A. Bacon Last week Victoria Manning, a member of the Virginia Beach school board, posted a comment on her Facebook page noting that the school system had added 300 additional English-as-a-Second-Language (ESL) students the past year, mostly from “South America.” The city’s ESL budget had increased more than $1 million over two years,…
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We Won! Coalition for TJ Won Against Racism.
by Asra Q. Nomani My hands are trembling as I share this news. We won! Two years of moral courage by parents from around the world with names like Suparna, Harry, Yuyan, Glenn, Marissa, Helen, Hemang. We won today. The American Dream won today. You won today. PRESS RELEASE Pacific Legal Foundation Kate A. Pomeroy…