The College Fix

‘I don’t know why so few people are pointing this out,’ says former Department of Ed lawyer

George Orwell famously predicted an all-consuming state would also butcher language to endlessly confuse and disorient its citizens. War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.

Advocates of so-called antiracism appear to have created their own internally contradictory ideology, for its precepts are deeply racist in both theory and practice.

D.C. lawyer Hans Bader, who served in the Department of Education under the two most recent Republican administrations, told The College Fix that he’s baffled that the overt racial discrimination in the movement gets so little attention.

“I don’t know why so few people are pointing this out,” he wrote in an email: “This is both a huge source of potential illegal racial discrimination and retaliation, and a huge violation of academic freedom.”

Bader expands on this disconnect in a column for Liberty Unyielding, noting that leading antiracism popularizer Ibram Kendi has intoned that racial disparities are best explained by racism and there’s no such thing as a “not-racist idea.” (Cornell University is promoting Kendi’s “How to Be an Antiracist” to students.)

The solution is not equal treatment of everyone, but discrimination against the purported discriminators, Bader says, quoting Kendi:

The only remedy to racist discrimination is antiracist discrimination. The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination.

And there’s professional danger for researchers who undermine the popular narrative that racial disparities invariably result from racist behavior, Bader warns:

Researchers have often found that racial and gender disparities are explained by factors other than prejudice. But at universities across America, such conclusions are now taboo. Faculty are at risk of losing their jobs if their research discloses that something other than racism explains a racial disparity.

Duke University effectively put faculty on notice that they aren’t allowed to question the premises of antiracism dogma, since that would undermine Duke’s incorporation of antiracism throughout the curriculum. Princeton faculty ganged up on a peer who challenged their illiberal demands for illegal preferences for nonwhite faculty.

Harvard demoted a black professor on dubious charges of sexual harassment, almost certainly because his research on race and police shootings undermined the popular (and groundless) narrative that blacks were more likely to be shot.

Yet these antiracist assumptions, and the policies based on them, run headlong into core legal precedents, Bader explains:

In a 6-to-3 ruling, the Supreme Court said that it is “completely unrealistic” to think that in the absence of racism, minorities will be represented in a field “in lockstep proportion to their representation in the local population.” (See Richmond v. J.A. Croson Co. (1989)).

In an 8-to-1 ruling, the Supreme Court emphasized that there is no legal “presumption that people of all races commit all types of crimes” at the same rate, since such a presumption is “contradicted by” real world data showing big differences in crime rates. Thus, racial disparities in arrest or incarceration rates don’t violate the Constitution’s ban on racial discrimination (See United States v. Armstrong (1996)).

Faculty who are subjected to antiracism mandates might want to consult this caselaw and warn their institutions that they are promoting ideologies that have no grounding in law, and may in fact violate the rights of faculty when put into practice.

MORE: Harvard punishes another black professor for independent thinking

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