The silliness of this week almost meant no new Friday Funny. From a human rights tribunal musing over whether waxing a transgender woman’s testicles was a fundament right to the Bob Muller Comedy Hour, your humble writer felt the world maxed out on pure silliness. Then Erica Thomas’s story fell into my lap, and immediately I thanked the comedy gods.

Erica Thomas** is a Georgia representative, woman of color, mother, and a shopper at Publix. Now I’m by nature suspicious of people who shop at Publix, because despite their excellent customer service and the local store being the one place in town I can get a certain kind of spaetzle my better half prefers, Publix’s prices are rather inflated. So by nature, anyone who frequents a Publix has more money than sense.

Apparently on July 19, Representative Thomas had a bad day at the local Publix. In a video posted to Facebook, Thomas claimed tearfully that she’d been in the express checkout lane with fifteen items when an “angry white man” told her she was over the ten item express checkout limit. Continue reading →

Before you read that which I write next, listen to Judy Collins as she sings “Turn, Turn, Turn! / To Everything There Is A Season.” If nothing else, you will enjoy her magnificent voice.

As I watched Robert Mueller testify before Congress regarding his findings on the Trump investigation, the voice of Collins haunted me. Accurate or not, my impression was that Mueller was far past his “sell by” date. His fumbling, at times incoherent or inaudible responses, coupled with his apparent lack of knowledge of the written report to which he signed his name, reminded me of that which I fear most. Continue reading →

David Brooks, who receives little love from readers of the New York Times these days, posits why the extreme left of the Democratic Party is comprised of mostly educated whites.

One of the results is that, as my colleague Thomas B. Edsall put it this week, there are now three Democratic Parties. The most moderate faction is the most nonwhite and focuses on pocketbook issues like jobs and taxes. The most left-wing segment is the most populated by whites. It focuses on issues like abortion, global warming, immigration and race and gender equity.

To say that white educated Democrats have moved left is true, but it’s not the essential truth. The bigger truth is that this segment is now more likely to see politics through a racial lens. Racial equity has become the prism through which many in this group see a range of other issues.

The most curious aspect is that the “most moderate faction is the most nonwhite.” Since Brooks focuses on the most extreme, the comments to his column largely focus on rationalizing why they are so much more woke than others, mostly arguing that their exposure in college and travels to people of color has awakened them to the truth of race being a social construct. Continue reading →

Watching the competing Mueller twits during the pair of House committee hearings was a bit surreal, as the sides waged the battle of interpretation, that his testimony either conclusively nailed the coffin on Trump’s presidency or exonerated Trump of all wrongdoing. As Ken White perceptively twitted, the hearings conclusively proved that everyone’s beliefs were proved.

If you care to review the testimony, there is no shortage of passionate pundits in the bigly papers to tell you what to think, what it means and what will or should happen from here. Some of these brilliant folks are lawyers who should know better, but refuse to be humbled by either knowledge or capacity to understand what the Mueller Report said and found. They have a cause that needs their support, and they will use every tool at their disposal to spin this sucker as hard as they can. If they can convince you, convince a nation, they can put this matter to rest.

It’s likely that there will be no more public appearances by Robert Mueller, no more public discussions of what his report, available to be read over and over if that’s how you enjoy spending your leisure time, says. And there should be no doubt that it says exactly what Mueller and his people intended it to say. What it does not say is that either side wants it to say. Continue reading →

In the New York Times Magazine, a peculiar article by Claudia Rankine, a Yale English professor, muses about a provocative question. It’s peculiar not just in its putative subject matter, white privilege, but in its buried lede. The article purports to be about Rankine’s inquiry of white men about what they think of their privilege. This would be odd enough, since the perspective of white privilege exists primarily from the outside. It’s like asking a fish to talk about its feelings on water.

Perhaps this is why one day in New Haven, staring into the semicircle of oak trees in my backyard, I wondered what it would mean to ask random white men how they understood their privilege. I imagined myself — a middle-aged black woman — walking up to strangers and doing so. Would they react as the police captain in Plainfield, Ind., did when his female colleague told him during a diversity-training session that he benefited from “white male privilege”? He became angry and accused her of using a racialized slur against him. (She was placed on paid administrative leave, and a reprimand was placed permanently in her file.) Would I, too, be accused? Would I hear myself asking about white male privilege and then watch white man after white man walk away as if I were mute? Would they think I worked for Trevor Noah or Stephen Colbert and just forgot my camera crew? The running comment in our current political climate is that we all need to converse with people we don’t normally speak to, and though my husband is white, I found myself falling into easy banter with all kinds of strangers except white men. They rarely sought me out to shoot the breeze, and I did not seek them out. Maybe it was time to engage, even if my fantasies of these encounters seemed outlandish. I wanted to try.*

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In a weird way, we lucked out with Jessica Yaniv. First, because the story happens in Canada, but second and more importantly, because we’re usually confronted with the easy problems when the critical choices are made, with the harder, more absurd problems, coming only after we’re locked into a position. Yaniv served up the absurd early enough to realize the consequences of foolish policy.

This week, British Columbia’s Human Rights Tribunal (CHRC) — a self-described “quasi-judicial body created by the B.C. Human Rights Code” — held hearings on whether or not female beauticians should be forced to handle male genitalia. The complainant, known until Wednesday under the alias “J. Y.” owing to a court gag order, is Jonathan/Jessica Yaniv, a self-identified transgender woman.

Yaniv has filed 16 different complaints against estheticians in the past year. Yaniv argues that, as a transgender woman, being denied services on account of her gender identity was discriminatory.

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In the rush to empty prisons nicely evidenced by the passage and implementation of the federal First Step Act, I fear that the policy wonks and the judges who follow them disregard a patent truth.[i] There is evil lurking among those who are elderly, yet seek release.

By using the word “evil,” I mean an existential threat to a civilized society. I do not intend the foregoing to be provocative. I mean it literally.

Before Harry Potter’s train leaves, transporting us magically to a world where good consistently triumphs, we need to remember that the journey would not be worth taking without Voldemort showing us that we are risk. We would do well to remember him. Continue reading →

Lawyers have long used the well-told story to persuade jurors. There’s nothing like a heart-wrenching story to delude and manipulate the feelings of the unwary, and it’s our job to take advantage of every manipulative tool available to serve our client’s cause.

But that’s fine for individual cases, where the worst that can happen is one guilty man goes free. When it comes to making public policy, there’s a sad story to serve every purpose, but our policy choices should be based on detached facts, empiricism if available and legitimate, rather than the last tear-jerker story told. And that’s what made the New York Times article about 77-year-old Albert Flick so wrong.

Had Mr. Flick been imprisoned longer or remained on probation, the authorities might have been able to keep a closer eye on him. But Mr. Flick had served his sentence and had the right to live freely.

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When I was in law school interviewing for jobs, I learned that there were Jewish firms and non-Jewish firms. It was worthwhile interviewing with the former. The latter, not so much. It wasn’t clear to me why any law firm would care about its lawyers’ religion, since my understanding of the point of hiring associates was to find the ones who would do the best job representing clients. What else could possibly matter?

Years later, sitting outside on the coast of Long Island Sound with friends, having a glass of red wine, it was explained to me. My friend’s father was there with us. He had been a partner in a white shoe law firm, as they were called, back when I was a snot-nosed kid lawyer, so I asked him. He explained that it wasn’t anything personal. They didn’t hate Jews. They didn’t think much about it at all.

“So what was the problem,” I asked. It was “culture,” he explained. We didn’t know what fork to eat with at dinner. We didn’t know where to buy our suits. We tended to be a little too loud, too vulgar, too funny. We weren’t raised in the ways of Choate and Harvard. We weren’t like them, with “them” being the WASPs. They had nothing against us, but didn’t feel comfortable letting us in their club, where everyone understood how to be. Continue reading →

There is no dispute that racism exists and, where it exists, should be condemned. But that banal statement doesn’t answer the question of what’s racist. More importantly, it fails to address the ubiquitous cries of racism at every ill, whether real and flagrant, imagined or perceived by the accuser even if unintended by the accused.

Charles Blow uses three rhetorical questions to make a point about racism. It’s putatively about Trump’s “go back” comments, and the dichotomy in America in appreciating the racist nature of the comments and labeling them so, but it goes much further.

When did we arrive at the point where applying the words racist and racism were more radioactive than actually doing and saying racist things and demonstrating oneself to be a racist? Continue reading →