Free Republic

With her wedding just two months away, Icilma Cornelius arrived at the Lilburn office of Dr. Windell Boutte to prepare for her special day. The 54-year-old bride-to-be came to the doctor’s full-service medical spa and cosmetic surgery center for Botox and another anti-wrinkle treatment. While there, the staff recommended cosmetic surgery that could give her a flat stomach before she married. Cornelius agreed to the surgical makeover by Boutte, whose website promotes the doctor as “nationally and internationally known” and a “doctor to the stars!”

An Atlanta plastic surgeon is facing a slew of lawsuits after it was revealed she had filmed herself singing and dancing over her exposed patients during surgeries. Dozens of videos have been found that show Dr Windell Boutte cavorting in the operating room, even while making incisions on her patients. In one video Boutte sings the to the rap lyric 'I'm 'bout to cut it', from an OT Genasis rap song, before slicing into one of her patients.

Identity politics has engulfed the humanities and social sciences on American campuses; now it is taking over the hard sciences. The STEM fields—science, technology, engineering, and math—are under attack for being insufficiently “diverse.” The pressure to increase the representation of females, blacks, and Hispanics comes from the federal government, university administrators, and scientific societies themselves. That pressure is changing how science is taught and how scientific qualifications are evaluated. The results will be disastrous for scientific innovation and for American competitiveness. A scientist at UCLA reports: “All across the country the big question now in STEM is: how can we...

**SNIP** A new “Witnessing Whiteness” workshop in the Centennial State encourages participants to form groups that can “dismantle the systems of white supremacy that support current structures of inequity.” The 11-part series, first reported by the educational watchdog Campus Reform, was created by Shelly Tochluk, who is also known in academic circles for organizing the “Unmasking Whiteness” conference. Indicators of “white culture” include “individualism, consumerism, meritocracy as an ideal, superficiality, competition, ambition, productivity, [and] extreme exploitation of labor/resources for profit,’” an online workshop document tells readers.

If we valued black art, Kendrick Lamar’s Pulitzer would have been for literature. When will the education system wake up to black creativity? I can’t help thinking that the Pulitzer prize committee missed a trick in their award to the rapper Kendrick Lamar this week. If they had given him the Pulitzer for literature rather than for music it would have elevated his artform and sent a message that would have resonated around the world: that rap is a legitimate form of poetry and should be put on a par with, and treated with the same deference as, Shakespeare and...

Comedian Amy Schumer said her starring role in “I Feel Pretty” should have gone to a minority actress with a “harder” life story. [snip] “It’s not about an ugly, vile troll getting beautiful,” the actress said in response to critics of the movie’s premise. “It’s about a girl who really struggles with self-esteem, which is something we can all relate to. So, it just made me excited for people to see the movie. But also, I think it is fair to say that, you know, that it’s a lot harder for other people … and I recognize that I am...

Gov. Phil Murphy didn't do what his predecessor, Chris Christie, might have done. A day after state Senate President Stephen Sweeney said he's holding up the confirmation of the governor's two nominees to oversee education in New Jersey, Murphy responded not by hammering Sweeney or denouncing him by name. Instead, Murphy said Thursday that the nominees -- Lamont Repollet for education commissioner and Zakiya Smith Ellis for higher education secretary -- are "extraordinary individuals" and that "there's no reason not to confirm" them.

(Reuters) - The U.S. Justice Department said on Friday it might formally enter a lawsuit accusing Harvard University of discriminating against Asian-American applicants as the agency probes its admissions policies for potential civil rights violations.The department disclosed its plan in a brief urging a federal judge in Boston to not allow the Ivy League school to file pre-trial court papers and documents provisionally under seal. Harvard had cited the need to protect the privacy of applicants and students as well as the inner workings of its admissions process, arguing that various documents should be initially filed under seal pending the...

By threatening to disrupt classes, Black Lives Matter unintentionally proves that professor who criticized affirmative action is correct Amy Wax, a professor who teaches at University of Pennsylvania law school, said the school has lower admission standards for blacks than for whites.Her claim is backed up by this New York Times article:A 2009 Princeton study showed Asian-Americans had to score 140 points higher on their SATs than whites, 270 points higher than Hispanics and 450 points higher than blacks to have the same chance of admission to leading universities.Since University of Pennsylvania is an Ivy League school, if falls under that...

The campus mob at the University of Pennsylvania Law School has scored a hit. Prof. Amy Wax will no longer be allowed to teach required first-year courses, the school’s dean announced last week. Now the leader of Black Lives Matter Pennsylvania wants Ms. Wax’s scalp. According to a weekend newspaper report, if she isn’t fired within a week, “he plans to make things on the West Philadelphia campus very uncomfortable.” Ms. Wax’s sin this time was to discuss publicly the negative consequences of affirmative action. Her punishment underscores again the dangers of speaking uncomfortable truths in a university setting. The...

A white University of Pennsylvania law school professor who said she has never seen a black student graduate in the top quarter of the class has been removed from teaching required first-year law courses. Law school dean Ted Ruger said professor Amy Wax spoke “disparagingly and inaccurately” about the performance of black students during an interview with Brown University economics professor Glenn Loury on the “downside of affirmative action” last year.

Matt Damon and Ben Affleck are adopting inclusion riders for projects made through their Pearl Street Films, according to head of strategic outreach at the production company, Fanshen Cox DiGiovanni. "On behalf of Pearl Street Films, Matt Damon, @BenAffleck, Jennifer Todd, Drew Vinton & I will be adopting the #InclusionRider for all of our projects moving forward," Cox DiGiovanni tweeted Monday, responding to Michael B. Jordan's tweet from last week in which he announced that his production company, Outlier Society, would also begin adopting inclusion riders. An inclusion rider is a reference to the belief by some that there should...

Small Businesses Get $2 Billion If They Hire Alien Grads Instead Of American Grads The Federal government is still incentivizing businesses to favor immigrants over Americans, to the tune of $2 billion in subsidies across the country, according to the Center for Immigration Studies. They do this via the Optional Practical Training (OPT) program. This program by the Federal government provides money to businesses that discriminate against American citizens in favor of immigrant ones. At this point, this is just par for the course. According to the CIS, this program was used to scrape $2 billion from the Federal tax...

Saying she should be “deeply ashamed of herself,” the head of the National Hispanic Media Coalition has called on renowned acting coach Lesly Kahn to meet with him to discuss an audio file that surfaced yesterday in which she can be heard telling a non-Hispanic student that she would have a better chance of landing an agent and acting gigs if she pretends to be Latina. Kahn, who has apologized, went so far as to suggest that the young actress change her name to Rosa Ramirez and to get headshots to further advance the deception. On the tape, Kahn told...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dmE2tSe5EBA

SOUTH THOMASTON, Me. — A former mayor of Poway, a small city in Southern California, wrote a column in August in his local newspaper with this headline: “A gun to my head.” He was upset about how a state law had forced Poway to redo its voting districts so Latinos would have a better chance of winning elections. Reading the piece on his computer 3,000 miles away, Edward Blum knew he had found his newest case. Seeing one of his bêtes noires — racial gerrymandering — at work, Mr. Blum recruited the former mayor, Don Higginson, as a plaintiff, and...

An alarming discovery coming out of City Schools. Project Baltimore analyzed 2017 state testing data and found one-third of High Schools in Baltimore, last year, had zero students proficient in math. But that’s not all we found. In the midst of that troubling number, there are some bright spots. Most mornings, at Baltimore Collegiate School for Boys, start the same way – with students chanting the school’s motto in the gym. “There’s an urgency about the work we’re doing,” said Jack Pannell, the school’s founder. That urgency was born out of need. “Nine out of ten black boys in Baltimore...

Whatever the original, presumably high-minded intent of affirmative action (AA), the program has long since morphed into a weapon of class warfare. It neither benefits the underprivileged, as it claims, nor does it address the legacy of historical inequality for which it was ostensibly invented. Nor does it reduce the unfair advantages of the nation’s social and economic elite, as it promised. On the contrary, it protects elites at the expense of everyone else, including some of society’s most vulnerable. And while failing to do what its promoters said it would do, it poisons civil society by fostering a battle...

Apple’s Denise Young Smith, the newly minted Vice President of Diversity at the tech giant, has caused outrage in the industry over comments she made in defense of diversity of thought. Silicon Valley has been in an all-out push to bring in more women and minorities, so when Smith said, “I focus on everyone. Diversity is the human experience,” without focusing specifically on race or gender, liberal publications criticized her.Smith ultimately apologized for the sentiment.Smith, an African-American woman, continued, I get a little bit frustrated when diversity or the term diversity is tagged to the people of color or the...

Few academic ideas have been as eagerly absorbed into public discourse in recent years as “implicit bias.” Embraced by a president, a would-be president, and the nation’s top law-enforcement official, the implicit-bias conceit has launched a movement to remove the concept of individual agency from the law and spawned a multimillion-dollar consulting industry. The statistical basis on which it rests is now crumbling, but don’t expect its influence to wane anytime soon. Implicit bias purports to answer the question: Why do racial disparities persist in household income, job status, and incarceration rates, when explicit racism has, by all measures, greatly...