I have two bones to pick with the left. Okay, many more, but these are the biggest.
First, much of the left has transmogrified from free-speech champions 50 years ago into dark lords of groupthink conformity, wrongthink censorship, and intolerant presentism. Second, they have also lurched from civil rights champions of color blindness into racialism and anti-white bigotry, seeing and judging everything through the skin-colored glasses of “anti-racism,” Critical Race Theory, and victimization.
There is a bright line between the left’s noble and historical pursuit of justice and its conversion to victimhood and revenge for power’s sake. That line has long been crossed and left behind in a blinding cloud of resentment and demolition.
This “progressive” march is cloaked in “diversity, inclusion, and equity” (DIE, although some reverse the order of “equity” and “inclusion,” or DEI). A new study by Nathan Honeycutt and Lee Jussim on anti-meritocracy DIE programs in academia best sums it up:
“Diversity” has two meanings: i. Variety (pluralism, people from all walks of life); ii. making extra efforts toward welcoming and providing extra benefits toward groups progressives consider deserving of special protections (emphasis added). DEI implementation is often disingenuous in that much academic rhetoric is about the first meaning of diversity, but the implementation of DEI is almost entirely focused around the second.
Talk about the “soft bigotry of low expectations.”
Meet Coleman Hughes. I first became acquainted with his work when he testified against reparations for slavery before a US House Judiciary Subcommittee in 2019.
He was 23 years old. Now with the Manhattan Institute, Hughes, of African-American and Puerto Rican heritage, writes and podcasts on various cultural issues. A ripe-old 26 years of age, the former Presidential Scholar and Columbia graduate’s work can be found on the pages of the Wall Street Journal, National Review, the New York Times, and personal favorites, Quillette and The City Journal. He’s impressive, courageous, and one to watch.
Hughes has penned a terrific post via “The Free Press” that defends color blindness in the context of two US Supreme Court cases (Students for Fair Admissions, Inc., are the plaintiffs in both cases, against Harvard and the University of North Carolina, respectively) that will be decided this year. SCOTUS may overturn race-based affirmative action on college campuses. I certainly hope so.
And by the way, slavery reparations aren’t just a bad idea; they are blatantly unconstitutional. Someone, please, tell California Gov. Gavin Newsom.
A sample from Hughes’s post:
Critics of color blindness argue it lacks teeth in the fight against racism. If we are blind to race, they say, how can we see racism? Robin DiAngelo, in her hugely successful 2018 book White Fragility, sums up the color-blind strategy like this: “pretend that we don’t see race, and racism will end.” But this argument is no more than a cheap language trick. It’s true that we all see race. We can’t help it. What’s more, race can influence how we’re treated and how we treat others. In that sense, no one is truly color-blind.
But to interpret “color-blind” so literally is to misunderstand it—perhaps intentionally.
“Color-blind” is an expression like “warm-hearted”: it uses a physical metaphor to encapsulate an abstract idea. To describe a person as warm-hearted is not to say something about the temperature of that person’s heart, but about the kindness of his or her spirit. Similarly, to advocate for color-blindness is not to pretend you don’t notice color. It is to endorse a principle: we should strive to treat people without regard to race, in our public policy and our private lives.
Speaking of SCOTUS, I’m betting that the 1943 Hirayabashi case is likely to be cited, especially this from Chief Justice Harlan Stone’s majority opinion:
Distinctions between citizens solely because of their ancestry are by their very nature odious to a free people whose institutions are founded upon the doctrine of equality. For that reason, legislative classification or discrimination based on race alone has often been held to be a denial of equal protection.
Read Hughes's complete post here: