When last surveyed, the results were pretty clear. Hispanics didn’t care to be called Latinx.

More recently, a new, gender-neutral, pan-ethnic label, Latinx, has emerged as an alternative that is used by some news and entertainment outlets, corporations, local governments and universities to describe the nation’s Hispanic population.

However, for the population it is meant to describe, only 23% of U.S. adults who self-identify as Hispanic or Latino have heard of the term Latinx, and just 3% say they use it to describe themselves, according to a nationally representative, bilingual survey of U.S. Hispanic adults conducted in December 2019 by Pew Research Center.

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After release of the report by outside counsel prepared under the auspices of New York Attorney General Letitia James, there was a near-universal call for Governor Andrew Cuomo to resign. From President Biden, irony aside, to the New York Times, irony aside, to people in his own office, irony aside, the report sealed the deal.

It was, to be sure, a serious and devastating report. Much of it was the usual empty “inappropriate” stuff, the normative rhetoric that Cuomo said things that people found unpleasant or creepy, at least after the fact. There were also some actual claims about touching breasts and buttocks, and some other touching that was just weird and creepy. Continue reading →

It was clear that the end of the pandemic eviction moratorium was going to produce our now normal toxic mix of mindless hysteria, as if it comes as a surprise that it would, eventually, end and tenants would have to pay up what they didn’t pay, whether because they couldn’t afford to pay or could get away with not paying, since the moratorium began.

Did renters think that once the moratorium was over, they would be forgiven the rental payments they didn't make during the pandemic?

— Scott Greenfield (@ScottGreenfield) August 1, 2021

With Congress away on vacation, except for thrice-evicted Rep. Cori Bush who has taken to sleeping on the steps of capital to get her name in the paper, the moratorium reached its sunset as the Supreme Court anticipated when it gave the case a pass until the end of July, despite the clear admonition that the CDC had no authority to issue such a mandate. Continue reading →

It was always a crime to assault a cop, much as it is to assault anyone else unless you’re a cop. But the “Fireman’s Rule” precluded a civil suit by a cop for injuries sustained in the line of duty. That was part of the job, a risk assumed when one put on the shield. The Nassau County, New York, legislature passed a law to change that by adding police as a protected class under its anti-discrimination law.

The legislation, which is up for a vote in the Republican-controlled county legislature on Monday, would add police officers and other “first responders” to the county’s Human Rights Law, which protects individuals from discrimination based on their race, religion, gender and sexual orientation. No other profession is included in the law.

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In the CNN story about the release of Curtis Crosland, one would get the impression that he had been proven innocent after 30 years in prison for murder in Philadelphia, all because of systemic racism.

[Crosland’s lawyer Claudia] Flores said every level of the criminal justice system is permeated with systemic racism, which contributed to Crosland’s wrongful conviction.

“Most people serving life in prison without parole in Pennsylvania are Black men. Probably most of these police officers involved are white. It’s a system saturated with systemic racism at every step. From the way crimes are investigated, to jury selection, to the fact that most prosecutors and judges are white,” she said.

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If you can’t turn to Harvard Business Review for “management wisdom,” where else can a CEO turn? And HBR delivers, even if the message may not turn out the way the brilliant minds there assume it will. First, the corporate dilemma.

Black employees are exhausted. Over the past year, their cognitive, emotional, and physical resources have been disproportionally depleted due to two deadly and intertwined pandemics: Covid-19 and structural racism. Black people are more likely to lose their jobs and be hospitalized or die from Covid-19, while still facing disproportionate threats of brutalization and death from policing compared to white people. Continue reading →

Much of the law cheaps out by making a test of language and conduct subject to the “reasonable person,” a theoretically objective standard that tests a claim against what some mythical “reasonable person” would think. Its purpose being that the law does not require a person to conduct themselves in such a way as no claim of harm is based on the most the sensibilities of the most “delicate flower.”

There’s always someone who will claim harm, offense, trauma or victimhood over something that most people would shrug off. Call me a dope and I won’t sue. Give me a little shove on the subway and I won’t run to the cops. When I get a papercut, I don’t call Turkewitz to sue. There is an old legal maxim, de minimis non curat lex, the law doesn’t bother with trifles. Reasonable people don’t lose their heads over every petty slight. Continue reading →

It might have helped had the United States Olympic men’s epee team not blown the team competition. They went into the third round up against Japan by seven touches. They ended up losing by six touches, Curtis McDowald giving up eight touches in his final bout, as he stood there, dancing, watching, guaranteeing that the US would lose.

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It was going to be our savior. It was going to remove the human factor, the bias whether explicit or implicit, from the mix. Artificial intelligence would rid us of the inherent racism of humans that we spent decades trying to shake but just never seemed to go away. After all, an algo can’t be racist. An algo has no feelings. An algo can’t love or hate. An algo is just an algo. Algorithms would save us.

Neither “woke” nor “social justice” were in vogue yet, so it would be unfair to characterize its proponents as such. They were against racism in the legal system, as were we all, but they weren’t “anti-racists” as that word is used today to characterize the new racism. That was back when eliminating racism was the goal rather than substituting new racism for old racism. And algos were the answer. Continue reading →

Sheriff Roy Templeton was in a grumpy mood. Of all the weeks for his wife to try and get him to quit coffee, this was the absolute worst. Instead of a delicious hot cup of black coffee, the Sheriff found himself drinking a mushroom extract tea tasting as if it were strained with a smelly athletic sock.

His rumblings over the disgusting brew were interrupted by a knock on his office door. It was his right-hand man, Deputy Ernesto Miranda, holding the one thing the Sheriff wanted more than anything else: a mug of coffee. Continue reading →