Among the many takeaways from watching the brilliant play “Hamilton” was how little it mattered that George Washington, generally believed to be a white guy, was played by Christopher Jackson. He did what an actor is supposed to do, make me believe. It didn’t matter a whit that he wasn’t white when the real George was. What mattered was that he was George Washington in the play. It worked. He made it work.

The Academy Awards has announced a new regime for consideration of films in the Best Picture category. As others from across the political spectrum have already figured out, the new regime isn’t likely to change much, if anything, because the four categories, two of which must be met for consideration, are largely already met or, with the most insignificant of tweaks, will be met. Continue reading →

Traffic stops have long been one of the gravest dilemmas in police reform, and the pop reaction has been calls to remove armed police from performing them, whether replaced by unarmed traffic enforcement agents, cameras or, to the truly aspirational, robots. They constitute the foremost incidence of interactions between police and the public. Dangerous driving can kill. And they sometimes turn angry, violent and tragic.

At the same time, it is indisputable that black and Hispanic people are disproportionately stopped and, because why squander an opportunity, subject to search. If one focuses solely on this fact, then it’s understandable why removing police from the scene would be simple answer. But if one looks at all the competing factors, it’s clear that taking cops off traffic stops trades one set of untenable problems for another. Continue reading →

It was curious that he was a member of the board and former president of the National Book Critics Circle if he was such a disagreeable fellow. Yet, Carlin Romano, writer, philosopher, critic, was on the board and, accordingly, did what a board member is supposed to do.

One critics circle board member, Columbia University professor John McWhorter, an African American, agreed with him on the substance of the anti-racism pledge, but told the website Vulture that Romano’s way of expressing his dissent was a bit tone-deaf.  He “was not being a modern person in the way he responded” to the anti-racism pledge, McWhorter said, perhaps referring to Romano’s charge that some of the arguments of the anti-racism pledge were “absolute nonsense.”

How exacty does a “modern person” express himself? Continue reading →

Ed. Note: Greg Prickett is a former police officer and supervisor who went to law school, hung out a shingle, and now practices criminal defense and family law in Fort Worth, Texas. While he was a police officer, he was a police firearms instructor, and routinely taught armed tactics to other officers.

In the middle of West Texas is Midland County. It’s due south of Amarillo and due east of El Paso. Just to the west is Odessa. This is the heart of both West Texas and “good ol’ boy” country. It is also where a prosecutor worked as a law clerk for a state district judge at the same time that he was actually prosecuting the same case. Continue reading →

For a while, Eugene Volokh has been arguing the case of using the “n-word” when accurate reading or discussing caselaw. He’s personally unapologetic about using the language accurately, it being a matter of fact rather than a political performance.

As I always do, I discussed the facts, without expurgation or euphemisms. A few weeks after the class, I learned that some students had disapproved, but I didn’t discuss it further with any students.

The question isn’t whether Eugene is right or wrong. Some contend that the word should not, cannot, be used (except by a black person) under any circumstances. Some may contend that racist epithets are free speech, so they can use it with abandon. Others, like Eugene, argue that when the word is accurate and relevant, used not to attack but as part of pedagogy, the word is just a word. Continue reading →

No, it’s not a violation of anyone’s First Amendment rights. It’s Facebook. They can make their own rules, and they have. When it comes to Kyle Rittenhouse, who wounded one and killed two in Kenosha, they made their rules.

By taking down links to pay Mr. Rittenhouse’s legal fees, the company is interfering with his ability to raise money for his defense in a way other criminal defendants might. The fact that the platform may only be used to declare Mr. Rittenhouse’s guilt, but not his innocence—though lawyers say the self-defense argument is plausible—could prejudice a jury pool in the high-profile case. One of America’s most powerful companies is effectively giving its official imprimatur to Wisconsin prosecutors’ case against a specific defendant.

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Her revelation was as bizarre as her prior pretense at being black, using the vernacular of the street as heard through the ears of a Jewish girl from Kansas.

To an escalating degree over my adult life, I have eschewed my lived experience as a white Jewish child in suburban Kansas City under various assumed identities within a Blackness that I had no right to claim: first North African Blackness, then US rooted Blackness, then Caribbean rooted Bronx Blackness. I have not only claimed these identities as my own when I had absolutely no right to do so — when doing so is the very epitome of violence, of thievery and appropriation, of the myriad ways in which non-Black people continue to use and abuse Black identities and cultures — but I have formed intimate relationships with loving, compassionate people who have trusted and cared for me when I have deserved neither trust nor caring. People have fought together with me and have fought for me, and my continued appropriation of a Black Caribbean identity is not only, in the starkest terms, wrong — unethical, immoral, anti-Black, colonial — but it means that every step I’ve taken has gaslighted those whom I love.

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The word “dog-whistling” is one of those cool new compound words, like “pearl-clutching” and “gaslighting,” that captures the evils perpetrated against the woke. No explanation needed. Just utter the word and, boom, you negated whatever was said, whether well-reasoned or not. In the case of “dog-whistling,” it means that you put out seemingly neutral ideas into the ether that may be silent to some, but can be heard by racist ears to be a call to their prejudice.

A lawyer friend on the twitters accused me of dog-whistling. He didn’t use the word, but his point was the same. My dog-whistle? The call to end the riots, the looting, the violence and destruction. As the discussion fleshed out, it wasn’t that he was suggesting that my condemnation against violence was intended to be a dog whistle. Indeed, he told me that he, too, was against violence because violence was an inherently bad thing. Continue reading →

My father once sent me to a neighbor to borrow a left-handed monkey wrench. I was five or so, and believed my father needed this strange device. The neighbor, understanding the ruse, gently told me that all monkey wrenches worked whether the user employed his right or left hand. I returned and promptly told my Dad. He smiled and thanked me for my effort. He added that perhaps next time it might be good to question a request from others. Did a request make sense? I can still feel the warm blush of shame that covered my face.

During her 2010 Supreme Court confirmation hearings, Elena Kagan, Barack Obama’s solicitor general and former Dean of the Harvard Law School, created a stir in legal circles by stating, “We are all originalists.” Of course, she was correct but not as commonly understood. She was being honest, but not in the way the true believers—whether liberal or conservative—feared or wished. Continue reading →

Remember the many times we were outraged at the police denying people the right to take video of their actions in public? It was against the law, they claimed. They arrested people for doing so. They seized their phones. They deleted the video. It was outrageous, wrong and nothing more than an obvious ploy to conceal their misconduct from scrutiny.

Welcome to Portland, where it’s happening again, but not by the cops this time.

“YOU’RE NOT ALLOWED TO FILM!” is a cry you hear incessantly at protests in Portland, Oregon, always shouted at close range to your face by after-dark demonstrators. You can assert that, yes, you can film; you can point out that they themselves are filming incessantly; you can push their hands away from covering your phone; you can have your phone record them stealing your phone—all of these things have happened to me—and none will have any impact on their contention that “YOU’RE NOT ALLOWED TO FILM” and its occasional variation, “PHOTOGRAPHY EQUALS DEATH!”

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