Bed Bath and Beyond apologized for its “lack of sensitivity” in selling “blackface.” Not actual blackface, but jack-o’-lanterns that were black. Black, as in scary for Halloween, but which, if you consider that they are carved faces in a pumpkin that was black, could be construed as blackface if you squinted hard and desperately wanted to find blackface when it was a scary Halloween pumpkin.

Wilbur Aldridge, the regional director at the NAACP, said in a statement that the pumpkin design “shows an extreme lack of sensitivity.”

“By now I would believe everyone [would] know that anything in Black face is offensive… Equally as offensive is that a retail store would have such an item in [their] inventory for general purchase.”

A survey into the offensiveness of statements on social media by a Michigan State professor brought a backlash of outrage for its inclusion of statements that were offensive. It included a warning that offensive statements might be offensive, but that wasn’t sufficient for some students. Continue reading →

It would be very different if it happened today, but on the day before graduation for the Harvard Class of 2013, as Damilare Sonoiki spoke as the Male Orator chosen by his classmates, he had no idea what to expect would be coming his way.

90. On May 29, 2013, Damilare spoke before his graduating class as the male Harvard Orator, and on May 30, 2013, Damilare walked in Harvard’s graduation ceremony.

91. When Damilare participated in Harvard’s graduation ceremony, he had completed all of the requirements to graduate.
92. As of his graduation day on May 30, 2013, no charges had been issued against Damilare by the Ad Board, and he was a student in good standing.
93. Harvard impermissibly withheld Damilare’s degree.

On the one hand, Damilare was the recipient of the Annual Senior Award from The Association of Black Harvard Women, as part of its 15th Annual Tribute to Black Men, celebrating the leadership and contributions of black men at Harvard. Continue reading →

There was never any serious question that the prosecution would be prohibited under RAV v. St. Paul, the 1992 Supreme Court holding that the First Amendment prohibited criminalizing expressions of racism. And the actions of the UConn students didn’t even violate the elements of the offense charged, as Adam Steinbaugh at FIRE noted:

The statute under which the students are charged reads, in full:

Sec. 53-37. Ridicule on account of creed, religion, color, denomination, nationality or race. Any person who, by his advertisement, ridicules or holds up to contempt any person or class of persons, on account of the creed, religion, color, denomination, nationality or race of such person or class of persons, shall be guilty of a class D misdemeanor.

The Connecticut statute is a rarely-enforced relic dating to 1917 and intended to address advertisements for businesses, not every use of derogatory language.

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At first blush, the sentence imposed by Justice Mark Dwyer seemed very harsh. Four years each for two “Proud Boys” who, after being goaded by Antifa protesting a Gavin McInnes speech at the Metropolitan Republican Club, went on the attack.

By no stretch of law or reality could the beating that followed be called “self defense.” It wasn’t that the preceding conduct was good, although it wasn’t criminal, but that there was a clear break and the group of Proud Boys went after the few Antifa, chasing them down, catching them, beating them.

They were arrested, tried and convicted. Continue reading →

The harder an industry tries to make you believe it cares deeply about you, the less it does. Health insurers don’t love you. They love your premiums. They want you to pay them, but they don’t want to return the favor. That they suck, however, doesn’t mean the alternative of Medicare for All is necessarily better.

There are three things you need to know about Medicare for all, which in the current debate has come to mean a pure single-payer health insurance system, in which the government provides all coverage, with no role for private insurers.

There are millions of things we need to know, because each of us has different needs and expectations of health insurance, but that would make for an unwieldy discussion. So Paul Krugman simplifies it for us groundlings. Continue reading →

Up to now, only one state supreme court, Vermont, held a revenge porn law constitutional, and it was largely due to the inadequacy of the arguments. Even so, the court recognized two fundamental aspects of First Amendment law, that speech that did not fit within an established categorical exception was protected, and that protected speech was subject to strict scrutiny. Rather, Vermont claimed to apply strict scrutiny, but didn’t.

Recognizing the failing of Vermont’s effort, the Illinois Supreme Court took a different tack in State v. Austin, reversing the lower court’s holding that the law was, clearly, unconstitutional. The court didn’t dispute that this was a content-based statute and it didn’t fit into any categorical exception. Therefore, it was protected speech. But it then played a trick.

First,the Illinois Court explicitly claims, at *10-*12, not to identify a new category of speech that falls outside of First Amendment protection. Continue reading →

Much of intergenerational wealth comes from the ownership of property. It’s a problem. Between deliberate schemes to keep certain people out of neighborhoods, like redlining, and the inability to earn and save sufficient wealth to buy property, a significant cohort has been squeezed out of the market. Needless to say, minorities have not been welcomed with open arms over the years, and so have not been able to accumulate the intergenerational wealth that allows a family to build security and become vested in their community.

But it’s not as if this hasn’t been recognized before, and well-intended programs haven’t been tried to correct this problem by making home-ownership more readily available to black buyers.

Richard Nixon gave voice to a shift in government policy in 1968 when he declared that “people who own their own homes don’t burn their neighborhoods.” The Housing and Urban Development Act of 1968 created policies that let low-income black renters, long excluded from conventional mortgages and other standard ways of financing homes, become homeowners. Continue reading →

Are there not enough black mathematicians? That’s much like asking how long a person’s legs need to be, but then, if the measure is the expectation that there should be the same percentage of people by race, gender, etc., in any particular field of study, occupation, profession, then the answer is yes, there are not enough. Why is a complicated but critical question, since you can’t fix something when you don’t know why its broken.

Seattle doesn’t seem to care. Or to be more precise, they lept to a conclusion that math isn’t sufficiently relevant to black kids’ lives as to make them care about math, want to be mathematicians, and begged the question by creating a Menckian solution.

The Seattle school district is planning to infuse all K-12 math classes with ethnic-studies questions that encourage students to explore how math has been “appropriated” by Western culture and used in systems of power and oppression, a controversial move that puts the district at the forefront of a movement to “rehumanize” math. Continue reading →

We have a president who’s 73 years old. The leading challengers are 78, 76 and 70 years of age. I’m no spring chicken, but damn, these people are old. Is that a bad thing?

Older people today hold disproportionate power because they have the numbers and the means to do so. People 65 and older, for example, are more than three times as likely to make political donations as those under 30. As a result, their voices, amplified by money, carry farther politically than those of the young and impecunious.

There are, of course, obvious reasons for this, though they’re not the sort of reasons that would interest Astra Taylor, for whom age seems to be a stand-alone hurdle to fixing our democracy. Continue reading →

The Supreme Court will consider whether to grant certiorari to Bobby Bostic. It’s a case that cries out for appeal as a flagrantly excessive punishment in desperate need of fixing. But that’s not what the Supreme Court does, despite the fact that it could and should face a bad legal outcome and correct it.

It’s a pompous Court, a Court that announces big issues of legal doctrine. It’s not a janitor court that cleans up the mess the system left behind. It’s too important to deal with the mere details of lives wrongly ruined. Correcting error is too trivial for the Supremes, rock stars of the legal world whose time and attention are far too valuable to be squandered on simple error. Even retired Missouri circuit court judge Evelyn Baker’s admission isn’t likely to help.

“You will die in the Department of Corrections.” Those are the words I spoke as a trial judge in 1997 when I sentenced Bobby Bostic to a total of 241 years in prison for his role in two armed robberies he committed when he was just 16 years old.

Continue reading →