It wasn’t too long ago that the orchestral world recognized that it might have a race and gender problem, largely because symphonic orchestras were pretty much all white and all male. It’s not that they weren’t great, but they weren’t diverse. And there was a solution that would not only serve to eradicate bias in the audition process with almost no pain required, but would enhance the quality of music. Blind auditions were born.

Blind auditions, as they became known, proved transformative. The percentage of women in orchestras, which hovered under 6 percent in 1970, grew. Today, women make up a third of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, and they are half the New York Philharmonic. Blind auditions changed the face of American orchestras.

Problem solved? So everyone thought at the time. But no more. Continue reading →

Over the years, I’ve watched fellow bloggers take their voice legit. My old pal Radley Balko went from being the Agitator to being a WaPo columnist and writing two books of exceptional importance to criminal law.

My friend and former colleague, Cristian Farias used to write on the intersection of criminal law and immigration at Fault Lines, before anybody outside of lawyers gave a hoot about such matters, and then wound up doing a stint on the New York Times’ editorial board, and writes for Vanity Fair and New York Magazine. I’m particularly proud of Cf, as he still thinks in Spanish, yet he writes brilliantly in English. I am amazed at his skills, and thrilled for him that his issues on immigration have finally captured the public’s attention. Continue reading →

Not that this wasn’t obvious years ago, when I admonished academics to take back their classrooms. Some wanted to, but they didn’t stand a chance. As a result, classrooms have become, in the words of history prof Steven Mintz at Inside Higher Education,* “contentious.” But Mintz has the solution!

Too often, students’ concerns like these are dismissed as the product of overindulged, hypersensitive, easily offended snowflakes who consider themselves paying customers who are always right. But I think that it is a terrible mistake to trivialize the student concerns.

Many undergraduates are convinced that important alternate perspectives and noncanonical texts and works of art are ignored or disparaged, and that too many faculty members are insensitive to how their assignments and classroom activities are perceived and experienced by students. Continue reading →

Ibrim X. Kendi is the patron saint of the “Anti-Racist” movement, which promotes the argument that if you are not anti-racist, meaning that you do not dedicate yourself, your “privilege,” your time, money, assets and, perhaps, even your physical existence, to the cause of affirmatively fighting racism, then you are a racist. In the long parade of horribles, there is none worse than being racist.

To be fair, he comes by it honestly, in the sense that he’s an academic who has argued this, written about this (See How To Be An Antiracist, inter alia) and been unabashedly clear about this long before it was fashionable. As someone who has done anti-racist things for most of his career, I might take some comfort in trying to claim the mantle. I can point to a few things, like decades of defending black people and Hispanics from the cops to prove my bona fides. Continue reading →

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is a heroine of the first order.[1] She has suffered multiple bouts of cancer. Chemotherapy and radiation treatments beat the living hell out of you. I know in a very personal way.

There is no doubt that today’s announcement (quoted below) sent chills down the spine of all Democrats and even some Republicans. Yet, more than a few on the Right I suspect silently welcomed the news with grim glee. Below is what she said (through the Court’s public affairs officer).

Statement from Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg: Continue reading →

There’s been quite a bit of back and forth over at Arc Digital and lesser publications about the merits of the Harper’s Letter. One of the signatories, Cathy Young, addressed it at some length in as straightforward and substantive a way possible. It’s not exactly a quick read, but it’s a worthwhile read. Unlike the sophist apologias, where people explain why they’re all for free speech, but the other side is worse, or they’re hypocrites so we can do it too, Cathy makes no excuses and refuses to bog down in ever-shifting parameters of “cancel culture.”

But there were many signatories to the letter, one of whom caught my eye in particular because, well, she’s regularly found egging on the townswoke with their pitchforks and torches. And when she signed onto the Letter, how could she know that instead of coming off as one of the elites, alongside such luminaries at Noam Chomsky, she would find herself in the midst of a shitstorm of anger and excuses by her very own tribe, defending destroying people because they deserve to be destroyed. Continue reading →

It’s been more than 50 nights of protests and riots in an American city. Like it or not, Portland is still an American city, even if it seems more like Somalia or, as President Bush called it, Little Beirut. You can call it “peaceful protests,” and there certainly is peaceful protest, but that doesn’t make the riots disappear. Or the damage caused by the riots. Of the many shocking things that happened, the attacks on the Portland federal courthouse loomed large.

Even if you support the general cause of the protesters, you can’t rationally deny that when they decided to go after the courthouse, shoot commercial grade fireworks into it, break into it, the rioters were begging for trouble. And they got it. Continue reading →

Deputy Ernesto Miranda saw a lot during his law enforcement career. From his time as a DEA agent to his current post at the Mud Lick Sheriff’s Department, the veteran cop thought he’d come across just about every unusual encounter possible.

Nothing compared to what was happening in the Driftwood County Circuit Courtroom right in front of his eyes.

He was a witness for the District Attorney’s office on a case, patiently waiting for the call to the witness stand. The case currently before Judge Daniel Spaulding was bizarre in its own right. Continue reading →

Traffic stops have problems. They’re used as a pretext to stop drivers for other reasons to circumvent the Fourth Amendment. They’re used for racial profiling. And then there’s always the potential in any police interaction that someone is going to end up dead, like Philando Castille. There is no question that problems exist and they’re real.

But did Berkeley come up with a viable solution?

After hours of emotional public testimony and a middle-of-the-night vote by Berkeley leaders, the progressive California city is moving forward with a novel proposal to replace police with unarmed civilians during traffic stops in a bid to curtail racial profiling.

Continue reading →

While his day job is teaching at the University of Illinois, Nick Grossman’s side hustle is being a senior editor at Arc Digital, where I’ve posted a few things. I rarely do so anymore as I write like a lawyer and that’s really not what Arc is about. I try to pick words with some precision, whereas the more philosophically-minded try to pick words they can easily weasel out of. I don’t want to play “Rhetorical Calvinball.”* Others hope to be Olympic champions at the game.

So when Nick wrote a post exposing the “real questions” about cancel culture following the Harper’s Letter, it received a very warm reception as being the most “fair” perspective. But after reading it, I had some issues. Continue reading →