Posted by Kemberlee Kaye
on May 10, 201721 Comments
Education Secretary Betsy DeVos received a chilly greeting from graduating students at Bethune-Cookman University earlier today.
While giving the commencement keynote address, graduating students booed and turned their backs on DeVos.
Posted by Leslie Eastman
on April 30, 201711 Comments
Last weekend, I covered the #MarchForScience, an organized series of nationwide demonstrations supposedly in support of funding all science by the American government...but more an excuse for railing against the policies of President Donald Trump.
This weekend, there was the "People's Climate March", supposedly in support of funding climate science by the American government...but more an excuse for railing against the policies of President Donald Trump.
Posted by Mike LaChance
on April 25, 201721 Comments
Elizabeth Warren says she's not running for president in 2020. She could have fooled us. Her actions suggest not only is she running, she has already begun. Still, she denies it.
The Washington Free Beacon reported:
Warren: ‘I’m Not Running for President in 2020’
Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D, Mass.) stated that she is not running for president in 2020 during an interview with MSNBC's Rachel Maddow on Wednesday night.
Posted by Fuzzy Slippers
on March 06, 201716 Comments
Having worked their destructive magic in Detroit, the United Auto Workers union (UAW) has set its greedy sights on the South. Roundly rejected by Tennessee workers at a Volkswagen auto plant in 2014, the UAW picked itself up, dusted itself off, and redoubled its thirteen-year efforts at a Nissan plant in Canton, Mississippi.
The South has long rejected unions, including the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers union who tried and failed to unionize Boeing workers in South Carolina last month. But the UAW is undeterred, even dragging avowed socialist and failed presidential candidate for the 2016 Democratic nomination down from Vermont to try to convince Mississippians that he—and the UAW—knows what is in their best interests.
Posted by Fuzzy Slippers
on February 04, 201744 Comments
The Congressional Black Caucus is facing an existential quandary: to allow a Dominican-American to join or not to allow it? Is a Dominican-American black? Hispanic? Afro-Latino? Who decides? And what if that person tried to unseat Charlie Rangel (twice)?
We might think, based on the Rachael Dolezal case that one can just identify as whatever race one wants, just as progressives expect people to pick their gender from a long (long) list of choices. And we might be right. Or we might be wrong. Who knows? Certainly not the CBC.
Posted by Fuzzy Slippers
on September 27, 201637 Comments
We've been covering the Charlotte protests here at LI, and the lasted development is quite a doozy. They've released a list of demands that boggles the mind and steps perilously close to the federal definition of terrorism.
Mediaite reports:
Protestors in Charlotte have made quite a few demands over when they’ll end their rallies, not the least of which are the “demilitarization” and “defunding” of the city’s police department.
The death of Keith Lamont Scott sparked major unrest over the past few days, which created enough pressure on Charlotte police that they released their body cam footage of the fatal encounter. Even so, protest participants of are circulating an online set of terms for when they’ll call it quits completely, and…it’s a pretty sizable assortment.
Posted by Kemberlee Kaye
on September 21, 201637 Comments
Tuesday night Charlotte police shot and killed an African-American man later identified as Keith Lamont Scott.
A woman claiming to be Scott's daughter says Scott was unarmed, reading a book when he was shot and killed. Officers say that story is false, that they recovered a handgun and there was no book to be found.
Following the shooting, hundreds crowded into streets and freeways to protest police brutality, maintaining Scott was unarmed, equipped with nothing but a book.
Donald Trump made a speech recently in an appeal to black voters.
I've noticed many pundits on both left and right treating this as a very unusual thing for a Republican to do (see this, for example). And here's how one commenter on my blog described it:
Trump makes the best speech of the campaign, and is the one of the first, if not the first, Republican to reach out to the black community in 50 years, a brilliant move both substantively and strategically...
Let's put aside for a moment the question of how much difference a speech can make, and treat the question of whether this sort of outreach in a speech is unusual for a Republican.
On what is that assertion based? Memory? But memory can play funny tricks; that's why Google is our friend.
Posted by Leslie Eastman
on May 19, 20167 Comments
The last time we looked at Flint, the courts arraigned three bureaucrats over their roles in allowing lead-infused water to contaminate the municipal drinking water supply.
Now, in an apparent bid to regain some relevancy, one national group is filing a lawsuit over the water-crisis.
Another big name has surfaced in the tsunami of Flint water lawsuits: the NAACP [National Association for the Advancement of Colored People], which is suing several state officials and two engineering firms, alleging they poisoned a city with toxic drinking water by failing to detect that something was wrong, pretending a problem didn't exist and ignoring numerous red flags.
"Just the color of Flint's water should have led any reasonable engineer to the conclusion that Flint's pipes were dangerously corroded," the 103-page lawsuit states.
The NAACP announced the lawsuit today, though it was filed on March 31 in U.S. District Court, where at least two dozen other Flint-related lawsuits are pending. This one blames Gov. Rick Snyder, several state officials and two engineering firms for the crisis, claiming they engaged in "gross negligence" and "outrageous conduct" that harmed many. Not only did officials fail to detect a water problem, the lawsuits says, but they made the problem worse by not properly treating the water. And even when they knew the water was tainted, the suit says, public officials repeatedly maintained that it was safe to drink, despite a deadly Legionnaires' disease outbreak linked to the water.
"All the while — despite public assurances of safety — government officials in Flint quietly switched to bottled water while the citizens and businesses of Flint continued to drink dangerously contaminated water,” the lawsuit states.
Posted by Kemberlee Kaye
on November 04, 201510 Comments
Best Freudian slip ever or THE best Freudian slip ever?
We report, you decide.
According to Slate, at an NAACP banquet in Charleston, South Carolina Friday night, Democratic Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton used "president" in lieu of "prisoner."
Posted by Amy Miller
on October 21, 201520 Comments
This story just keeps getting weirder.
Remember Ahmed Mohamed? He's the Texas teen who sailed into his (extended) 15 minutes of fame after one of his teachers mistook a "homemade clock" for a homemade bomb.
The Social Justice Warriors rushed to Ahmed's cause, crying racism; President Obama even invited him to the White House. After the incident, Ahmed used the media attention to his advantage, saying that his teacher and the authorities made him "feel like he was a criminal," and that the whole thing seemed contrary to America's live-and-let-live spirit.
Posted by William A. Jacobson
on October 09, 20158 Comments
Shirley Sherrod sued Andrew Breitbart, Larry O'Connor and others over a video of Sherrod giving a speech before an NAACP group, in which she recounted how in the distant past when she worked for a state agency, she had discriminated against a white farmer. Breitbart's widow was substituted as a defendant after his death.
Sherrod was fired by the US Dept. of Agriculture as a result of their (over)reaction, and despite her clarifications and denials, indicating she had given some help to the farmer, and had learned from the experience to treat people fairly.
We have analyzed that original tape, frame by frame, and the tape was not deceptive. See these posts:
Nonetheless, the myth lives on, and is perpetuated by Bloomberg news in a lengthy article about the Chairman of the Breitbart news organization, Steve Bannon (emphasis added):
Can we be done with Rachel Dolezal? I think we're ready to be done with Rachel Dolezal.
If the left's reaction to the general backlash against a decades-long exercise in blackface is any indication, we may be nearly free of seeing her face in the news. Acknowledging that the story is quickly fading into the background, Salon (#SalonPitches, still going strong!) published a missive dragging the issue back into the racial limelight: "What we can’t afford to forget about Rachel Dolezal: A master class in white victimology." I'm not going to pull a quote from this thing, because to do so would be to jump down the rabbit hole, through the looking glass, and into a world of intellectual pain; suffice it to say, the author attempts to make academic hay and fails (or succeeds, depending on how you feel about academia) spectacularly.
On a more serious note, officials associated with the NAACP and other organizations continue to take Dolezal to task, bristling at the idea that we can change our racial heritage as a matter of "identity."
The rest of the world, however, seems happy to hand over the story to comedians and the entertainment establishment. On a recent episode of Late Night with Seth Meyers, Maya Rudolph succumbed to demands that she take on the character and pulled it off with flair (and an afro):
Posted by William A. Jacobson
on June 17, 201567 Comments
If Rachel Dolezal didn't exist, someone would have had to invent her because she so embodies everything that is wrong with race-based politics and theories so prevalent in Higher Ed.
Dolezal is white. Elizabeth Warren white. As Mark Steyn once put it with regard to Warren, "the whitest white since Frosty the Snowman fell in a vat of Wite-Out."
Warren passed herself off as Native American, but mostly in secret so she could get put on a list of Minority Law Teachers in a 1980s directory used for hiring.
Dolezal was very public in her adoption of a black identity. And she's standing by it.
Because Dolezal feels black, she says she is. It's what is called among the campus activist class "lived experience."
It is a well-worn script:
I officially need a flowchart to handle the strange and offensive racial evolution of Rachel Dolezal.
Last week, the internet exploded with stories about Rachel, a white woman who has spent the majority of her career "identifying" as an African-American woman. While I still haven't figured out how one can with a straight face "identify" as someone of another race, especially in the historical context of slavery and discrimination, I think it's pretty clear that Dolezal's actions have activists on both sides of the aisle crying foul.
Today, The Smoking Gun revealed that she has a history of playing both sides of the race card. Back in 2002, Dolezal (then Rachel Moore) sued Howard University on the basis of racial discrimination after she claimed she was discriminated against---as a white woman:
Dolezal, then known as Rachel Moore, named the university and Professor Alfred Smith as defendants in a lawsuit filed in Washington, D.C.’s Superior Court. During the pendency of the civil case, Smith was chairman of Howard’s Department of Art.
When I first saw the story break on Twitter about Rachel Dolezal's politically unfortunate natural skin color, I set out to write some sort of think piece about how the racial movement in America has become so convoluted that activists would now rather alter their appearances than admit to any sort of connection with anglo heritage. Then, I thought about it some more and concluded that giving this issue the actual intellectual treatment wasn't really worth the time.
In case you've been hiding from the Internet, Rachel Dolezal, 37, identifies as an African-American woman and is the president of the Spokane chapter of the NAACP. A Howard U grad and civil rights activist, she's spent the majority of her career positioning herself as a fierce advocate for equality.
I said "identifies as" because she's not African-American at all---and she just got called out for it. Behold:
"Our daughter is Caucasian" say parents of Spokane NAACP President Rachel Dolezal. pic.twitter.com/6VHxm9v4Wt
