Free Republic

As the nation's incipient racial reckoning following last May's killing of George Floyd morphed into the summer's riotous anarchy, the term "systemic racism" emerged as a fixture of our public discourse. What began as a somewhat arcane dialogue about purported police "militarization" and the "qualified immunity" legal doctrine soon took on a much more insidious tone. America, those like The New York Times' "1619 Project" fabulists told us, was rotten to its very core, blemished by the indelible taint of "systemic racism." In reality, as many courageously pointed out amid unprecedented "cancel culture" headwinds seeking to stifle all dissent, there...

A Cornell University course titled “BIPOC Rock Climbing,” was originally restricted to “people who identify as Black, Indigenous, Latinx, Asian, or other people of color.”.. When Campus Reform contacted the school, Cornell officials edited the course description to remove the race-based enrollment restriction. Cornell University altered the course description of a racially-segregated physical education course offered to students during the Spring 2021 academic semester after Campus Reform reached out for comment. The class, entitled “BIPOC Rock Climbing," was originally restricted to “people who identify as Black, Indigenous, Latinx, Asian, or other people of color," before its description was edited to...

On Tuesday, six days into Joe Biden’s administration, it became clear why Susan Rice, hitherto a foreign-policy specialist, was named director of the Domestic Policy Council. Rice — unconfirmable for a Cabinet post after her unembarrassed Sunday-show lying about the Benghazi terrorist attack — ventured into the White House press room to preview Biden’s “equity” initiative. With one possible exception, the specific policies announced were less important than the word ­“equity,” invoked 19 times by Rice and nine by Biden. Ending federal private prison contracts and combating “xenophobia” against Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders are small potatoes as federal policies....

Five of the largest U.S. banks publicly committed to mandating a diverse slate of applicants when hiring employees, part of a push to diversify an industry whose top ranks remain largely white and male. JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America Corp., Citigroup Inc., Wells Fargo and U.S. Bancorp all said they would either adjust policies for considering job candidates or disclose the ones they already have in place. Their policies mirror the so-called Rooney Rule, which started in the National Football League as a way of making sure people of color are considered for coaching jobs. In recent years, the rule...

Former Secretary of State Colin Powell said that he no longer considers himself a Republican in the wake of the riot that broke out at the Capitol building last week. Asked by CNN's Fareed Zakaria whether he believes "fellow Republicans" who have not criticized President Trump "encouraged, at least, this wildness to grow and grow," Powell responded that "They did, and that's why I can no longer call myself a Republican." "I'm not a fellow of anything right now. I'm just a citizen who has voted Republican, voted Democrat throughout my entire career, and right now I'm just watching my...

Has anyone noticed the change in television advertisement over the last few months. Most noticeably, the % of blacks, gays, transgenders and mixed race married couples featured Practically every commercial ad anymore has a black person, couple, child etc. represented. Blacks make up 13.4% of the US population yet if you were an alien from another planet and asked to guess what it actually was from television spots you would assume it's at least 50%! Same with mixed race couples.....Every third ad with couples features a mixed black/white union when in reality the actual % of such situations is ~...

The Balkanization of college campuses. When he wryly observed that “During times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act,” Orwell may well have had academia in mind, where challenging prevailing ideology can have a calamitous effect on one’s reputation and career—something especially true of faculty. In 1978, the significant Regents of the University of California v. Bakke case brought the term “diversity” into the lexicon of higher education Although the Court found that the medical school at the University of California at Davis had used an unconstitutional quota system in denying Alan Bakke admission, Justice Lewis Powell...

Proposition 16 in California, which would have allowed “diversity” to be a factor in hiring and school admissions, went down in flames on Election Day, largely because several majority-Hispanic counties voted against it.It wasn’t even close. While pro-affirmative action groups and every major Democratic organization in the state backed the measure and supporters outspent opponents $20 million to $1.5 million, the measure still lost by 14 points.It was a shocking defeat, especially since all the major Hispanic groups backed the measure. But something funny happened on the way to climbing aboard the diversity train; it had already left the station...

Senior administrators at Haverford College put their own jobs on the line in an effort to address concerns of racial inequities at the college and end a strike led by students of color, which has stretched into a second week. During a tense listening session via Zoom with Black student organizers and an audience of nearly 300 students and faculty members on Nov. 5, one student using a pseudonym asked President Wendy Raymond to resign “if effective change does not occur” to support students of color, who say they have been treated inequitably for decades. Raymond and other college leaders...

Californians were right to decline to give affirmative action a second life. People are much better off without it. Saying 2020 is full of surprises is a gross understatement. One of the good surprises — in contrast to, say, the coronavirus reaction — in this election cycle is that voters in California, the bluest of the blue states, rejected Proposition 16, a measure that sought to restore affirmative action in the state, meaning “universities and government offices could factor in someone’s race, gender or ethnicity in making hiring, spending and admissions decisions.” Prop 16 was the left’s latest attempt to...

Some Americans are discriminated against because of their race, but it is not who you think. The clearest definition of “racism” is treating people differently according to their race. Systemic or institutional racism is racism “expressed in the practice of social and political institutions.” Many American policies and laws are designed to ensure that people of all races, creeds, ethnicities, genders, and sexualities are treated equally, such as the Sixth Amendment, guaranteeing the right to “a fair and speedy public trial by jury,” the Thirteenth Amendment, abolishing slavery, the Fifteenth Amendment, prohibiting the denial of the right to vote based...

I have worked in academic science my entire life and I have never seen any sign of racism, systemic or otherwise. On the contrary, I have seen people go to considerable lengths to aid able minorities. Yet a petition is circulating nationally complaining that: women and “people of color” are under-represented in STEM (science, technology, engineering, math); that this is “systemic racism;” and that the cure is to change science (although it isn’t put quite like that). If enough signatures can be gathered, the petition is apparently to be published in Science, one of the two leading general-science journals (the...

As if the Academy Awards wasn’t enough, ABC Entertainment recently announced a new set of “inclusion standards” regarding their primetime programs. It’s yet another installment of the left trying to ruin everything it touches. On September 30, ABC Executive Vice President of Development and Content Strategy Simran Sethi released a new list of standards regarding on-screen talent, creative leadership, set workers, and industry representation. She wrote broadly, “[W]e want to take this moment to evaluate systems and habits in an effort to remove barriers to access and opportunity. It’s important for us to look around the room, see who’s not...

President Trump has ordered an end to training on “white privilege” and “critical race theory” in the federal bureaucracy. The directive is a good first step toward removing identity politics from federal operations. Next up should be the millions of taxpayer dollars devoted annually to cultivating race- and sex-based grievance in the sciences. The National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have all embraced the idea that science is pervaded by systemic bias that handicaps minorities and women. Those agencies have taken on the job of extirpating such inequity on the...

President Trump plans to announce that Amy Coney Barrett will be his nominee to the Supreme Court to fill the seat vacated by the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, multiple sources told Fox News on Friday.

Institutional racism and systemic racism are terms bandied about these days without much clarity. Being 84 years of age, I have seen and lived through what might be called institutional racism or systemic racism. Both operate under the assumption that one race is superior to another. It involves the practice of treating a person or group of people differently based on their race. Negroes, as we proudly called ourselves back then, were denied entry to hotels, restaurants and other establishments all over the nation, including the north. Certain jobs were entirely off-limits to Negroes. What school a child attended was...

RE-LITIGATING PROPOSITION 209 IN CALIFORNIA: Twenty-four years ago, California voters adopted Proposition 209 by a margin of 55% to 45%. I am proud to have co-chaired that campaign. Its operative clause, which is now part of the California Constitution, reads as follows: “The state shall not discriminate against, or grant preferential treatment to, any individual or group on the basis of race, sex, color, ethnicity, or national origin in the operation of public employment, public education, or public contracting.” Proposition 209 thus outlaws race-preferential admissions policies, race- and sex-preferential hiring, and preferences for minority- or women-owned businesses. The California Legislature...

Stanford University will remove admissions test requirements for the upcoming school year in response to COVID-19... Most notably, Stanford Medicine, one of the top medical schools in the country, will not require the MCAT. ... Stanford’s School of Medicine will not require students to take the Medical College Admission Test (MCAT), the standardized test for medical degree candidates. Stanford Medicine said that applications can be submitted without the MCAT through September 30, 2020 “in fairness to all applicants.” ... Stanford's physics department will not have to submit scores for the Graduate Record Examinations (GRE) or the GRE subject test in...

ROCHESTER, N.Y. (WROC) — “We’re worth the whole dollar,” that’s what Black women proclaimed during an event to combat pay equities across Monroe County. Monroe County Executive Adam Bello signed an executive order to crack down on companies who aren’t paying women of color equally. The order said he will hold companies accountable if they don’t follow equal pay laws. Thursday morning Bello was joined by the Pay Equity Coalition during his signing at the South The Alarm event organized to recognize Black Women’s Equal Pay Day.

As bad as the New York Times can be right now, that will be nothing compared to how truly miserable it can become if it institutes the asinine race quotas and other demands that the paper's worker union is demanding. In a series of tweets on Friday, the News Guild of New York, representing the New York Times editorial staff, laid out several race-based items for the paper's leadership to start working on. Among them were for the company's workforce demographics to reflect that of New York City (race quotas); for each stage of the hiring process for a new...