The Changing Politics of Race

Many posts have dealt with racial issues.

Joseph Simonson at The Washington Free Beacon:

Ibram X. Kendi’s Center for Antiracist Research made headlines this month when it announced it would axe a third of its workforce. But those layoffs may not have much of an impact, considering the center has hardly produced any original research at all.

The Boston University-based center has produced just two original research papers since its founding in June 2020, according to a Washington Free Beacon review. Output from the center’s scholars largely consists of op-eds or commentary posted on the center’s website. The group’s plans to "maintain the nation’s largest online database of racial inequity data in the United States" quickly fizzled out, and the database has been dormant since 2021.

The Center for Antiracist Research is the latest left-wing group to fall on hard times. George Soros’s Open Society Foundations, which gave $140,000 to Kendi’s center, cut 40 percent of its staff in June. The Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation’s revenues fell 88 percent from 2021 to 2022, as support for the movement plummeted to an all-time low.

It is unclear how much money remains in the Center for Antiracist Research’s coffers. Boston University did not respond to a request for comment.

Liam Knox at Inside HIgher Ed:

The Supreme Court’s June decision striking down race-conscious admissions may have been the most significant higher ed case in years, providing a concrete answer to questions that have spurred dozens of court cases since the 1990s. But it hardly put an end to the legal fight over affirmative action.

In fact, the outcome has unleashed a stream of new challenges to colleges’ race-conscious policies and revived cases that had been dismissed or lost before the ruling was handed down.

Just yesterday, Students for Fair Admissions, the group that spearheaded the Supreme Court cases against Harvard University and the University of North Carolina, filed a lawsuit challenging the race-conscious admissions policies of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. SFFA began building the case after the Supreme Court left open the possibility that military colleges could be exempt from the affirmative action ruling due to their “potentially distinct interests” in enrolling racially diverse student bodies.

The Closed Academy

Colleen Flaherty at Inside Higher Ed:

The recent wave of educational “gag orders” restricting the teaching of race, gender or other so-called divisive concepts is a dire threat to what makes American higher education unique and sought after. Such legislation is a far greater threat to free speech than any problem it might be trying to solve, and it also risks colleges’ and universities’ accreditation. Institutions must speak out against this kind of government censorship, which is not politics as usual.

These were the major themes that emerged during a Wednesday panel organized by the free expression group PEN America and the American Association of Colleges and Universities. The occasion was the release of a new joint statement from the two groups opposing legislative restrictions on teaching and learning, which notes that 70 such bills affecting higher education have been introduced in 28 states, and passed in seven states, since January of last year. (More states have passed bills affecting K-12 education.)

...

This isn’t the first time these groups, or others, have publicly opposed educational gag orders (PEN, in particular, has an ongoing legislation tracking project and regularly speaks out). But the joint statement expresses new “alarm” at the advancing trend toward censorship—as did panelists in their comments.

...

Not all presidents have openly opposed such legislation, however. Kent Fuchs, president of the University of Florida, for instance, recently told faculty members not to violate a new state law that he said governs “instructional topics and practices.” The law, known as HB 7, is better known among its supporters as the Stop the Wrongs to Our Kids and Employees (WOKE) Act, which Republican governor Ron DeSantis introduced in December as a bulwark against the “state-sanctioned racism that is critical race theory.” Faculty members were also warned that running afoul of this new law could result in "large financial penalties" for the university, based a separate new law enforcing HB 7

...

Addressing how the recent divisive concepts bans are part of an even larger trend toward legislators and other figures interfering in long-held higher education norms, Lynn Pasquerella, president of the AAC&U, said, “There’s certainly a growing sense of urgency around responding to and indeed redressing the overreach on the part of legislators, governors and state governing boards into curricula, hiring, tenure and promotion decisions and accreditation, alongside the monitoring of faculty and student perspectives and viewpoints that threaten to undermine academic freedom and shared governance on college and university campuses.” (Some recent examples: Florida introduced a mandatory survey on the climate for college viewpoint diversity and passed a post-tenure review law, the University System of Georiga made it possible to fire tenured faculty members without clear faculty input, and Mississippi’s Board of Trustees of State Institutions of Higher Learning changed how faculty members get and maintain tenure in near secrecy.)

Systemic Racism

 At National Affairs, Peter Schuck identifies four reasons to question the notion of systemic racism:

The best that the skeptic of this account can do is identify good reasons to doubt that racism in America today is truly systemic. As it turns out, there are four such reasons, the first of which is that rates of racist beliefs among individual Americans have declined over time. Public polling about white-black intermarriage, residential proximity, and other interactions shows dramatic increases in tolerant attitudes among whites since the 1960s. Although white-supremacist hate groups often loudly avow their racist beliefs, they remain a tiny, isolated fraction of the population, and are almost universally reviled by the political left and center as well as many on the right eager to distance themselves from fringe elements.

Of course, people harboring bigoted views often hide them in public, especially in social environments where racism is highly stigmatized. Answers in a survey are not proof that people do not hold racist views, although they do show that people are at least ashamed to admit them. That said, rates of behaviors related to or motivated by racism have fallen as well. In 2020, the FBI found that although the largest category of hate crimes (61.8%) were based on race/ethnicity/ancestry bias, the number of these incidents was under 6,000 nationwide. In a population of over 330 million, this surely does not qualify as systemic.

Second, the cohort of the U.S. population that has been most likely to hold racist views is slowly but inexorably dying out, to be gradually replaced by generations who tend to be far more accepting of racial differences. Though this theory is subject to some dispute, it is undeniable that members of younger generations seem to harbor less overtly racist beliefs than those of older generations. As these young Americans assume leadership roles in our nation's core institutions, their views will affect those institutions' structures, policies, and actions, as well as the people they influence. That virtually every major American institution in recent years has explicitly committed to combatting systemic racism suggests that we are already witnessing this trend taking shape.

A third reason to doubt the systemic-racism thesis is that anti-racist protests and highly publicized punishments of racist incidents have made racism much more newsworthy than it was in decades past. As a result, public discussion of the subject occurs much more often in our communities and traditional media today than it once did — and the tenor of this discourse is almost invariably opposed to racism. To the extent that systemic racism is inherently implicit or invisible, there is less room for it to hide now than there was in the past.

...
Even if one were to ignore these facts and insist that systemic racism remains widespread in today's America, there are good reasons to doubt that it represents the primary driver of continuing black disadvantage. For starters, the impressive upward mobility of other non-white groups — including immigrants of color — continues to confound the systemic-racism thesis. The most economically successful of these groups are Asians, particularly Chinese, Japanese, and Koreans — many of whom began life in America without American blacks' English-language advantage. In a recent study, researchers led by Raj Chetty — a leading analyst of economic mobility among different racial and ethnic groups — found that Hispanic and Asian Americans are closing much of the income gap with white Americans, while the upward mobility of lower-class black Americans has not kept pace.

Perhaps most discrediting of the ongoing systemic-racism account is the fact that black immigrants' economic mobility is much greater than that of blacks born in the United States. The median household income of the rapidly growing cohort of black immigrants is about 30% higher than that of American-born blacks. If systemic racism were the primary driver of blacks' disadvantages in America, we would expect it to hold back this population as well. Yet it seems not to have done so. Causal factors other than systemic racism, then, must be contributing significantly to black disadvantage in areas where it persists.

Public Opinion on Critical Race Theory

A lot of Americans have never heard of critical race theory.