Free Republic

Maybe it is because many of us are working. It could be all the open stores and laundromats. But most people do not think that today’s federal holiday for the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. ranks up there as one of the nation’s important ones. Just 34% told the Rasmussen Reports survey team that it is “most important.” Another 13% called it the “least important” federal holiday. And the bulk, 48%, said its importance is “somewhere in between.” But the results also suggested that how the nation feels about the importance of the day should not detract from how they...

The new British Prime Minister Liz Truss on Tuesday selected a cabinet where, for the first time, a white man will not hold one of the country's four most important ministerial positions. Truss appointed Kwasi Kwarteng – whose parents came from Ghana in the 1960s – as Britain's first Black finance minister while James Cleverly is the first Black foreign minister. Cleverly, whose mother hails from Sierra Leone and whose father is white, has in the past spoken about being bullied as a mixed-race child and has said the party needs to do more to attract Black voters. Suella Braverman,...

Lack of representation in corporate boardrooms is not because of mythical white privilege. It is due to the breakdown of the black family.We haven’t yet reached the spectacle in which woke workplace zealots demand that NBA teams suit up at least one black, one white, one Asian, and one Hispanic player in their starting line-ups, but some private workplaces are coming close. The human resources protocols of one of the world’s largest financial investment firms are taking woke quotas to a surreal new level.According to the Times of London, hiring managers at State Street Global Advisors will need to seek...

The Jefferson fiasco underscores how activist school leaders and alumni, from California to Massachusetts, are conspiring to recklessly overhaul school policies, education standards, and curriculum this year.FAIRFAX COUNTY, Va. – After a crusade by educational arsonists targeting the nation’s No. 1 high school, America’s meritocracy is about to go up in flames. The Fairfax County School Board is set to vote Thursday night to gut the race-blind, merit-based admissions testing process at Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology. T.J. is a state-chartered magnet school legislated to serve academically gifted and advanced students. The school board plans to replace...

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...

The FDNY has finally fired its alleged woman-beater smoke-eater. Brooklyn firefighter Clyde Phillips was axed Wednesday after his third arrest stemming from charges of domestic violence, The Post has learned. Phillips was charged on Feb. 23 in Caldwell, NJ with contempt for violating a New York City restraining order put in place after a 2018 attack on an ex-girlfriend, said Katherine Carter, spokeswoman for the Essex County Prosecutor’s Office. Carter said a violation could include anything from phoning or texting to physical contact, but she would not elaborate. The FDNY suspended Phillips on Feb. 27, then fired him on March...

WASHINGTON—A federal court in Washington ruled Thursday that an Obama administration policy seeking to address the high proportion of black and Hispanic children in special-education classes must go into effect. The Trump administration attempted to delay the rule’s implementation last year, which would require school districts not to place disproportionate numbers of minority students—either too many or too few—into special-education tracks or isolated settings at school. The rule was originally set to take effect in July 2018, before the Trump administration delayed it. The federal judge, Tanya S. Chutkan, an Obama appointee on the District of Columbia district court, argued...

‘I am worried,” writes Harvard geneticist David Reich in the New York Times, “that well-meaning people who deny the possibility of substantial biological differences among human populations are digging themselves into an indefensible position, one that will not survive the onslaught of science.”Reich was responding to anticipated resistance to his forthcoming book, Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past. The “well-meaning people” Reich references are those who argue that race is a “social construct,” that there are no significant genetic differences among people of different racial ancestry. Maybe there...

As college football ramps into bowl games and playoffs, fans are being exposed to teams they don't normally see because they are in different conferences and divisions. For example, North Alabama is playing Northwest Missouri for the division 2 national championship as I write. Another example, is the 2016 Air Force Reserve Celebration Bowl which features North Carolina Central versus Grambling. During the game, announcers have cautiously walked into the phenomenon timidly referred to as HBCU. Those initials have become the preferred way of referring to a group of colleges known to be Historically Black Colleges and Universities. Oddly enough,...

Last week the Supreme Court of the United States voted that President Obama exceeded his authority when he granted exemptions from the immigration laws passed by Congress. But the Supreme Court also exceeded its own authority by granting the University of Texas an exemption from the Constitution's requirement of "equal protection of the laws," by voting that racial preferences for student admissions were legal. Supreme Court decisions in affirmative action cases are the longest running fraud since the 1896 decision upholding racial segregation laws in the Jim Crow South, on grounds that "separate but equal" facilities were consistent with the...

If anyone still has any doubt about the utter cynicism of the Obama administration, a recent agreement between the federal government and the Minneapolis Public Schools should open their eyes. Under the Obama administration, both the Department of Education and the Department of Justice have been leaning on public schools around the country to reduce what they call the "disproportionate" numbers of black male students who are punished for various offenses in schools. Under an implicit threat of losing their federal subsidies, the Minneapolis Public Schools have agreed to reduce the disparity in punishment of black students by 25 percent...

In our episodic “national conversation about race,” perhaps it is time to take notice of Rothe Development Corporation of San Antonio, Texas, which, you could say, has been having its own conversation about race—in the federal courts. Rothe is a government contractor that has now brought two lawsuits challenging racial preferences in federal contracting, winning the first, which was filed in 1998 and decided in 2008, and hoping, of course, to win the second, which was filed in 2012 and could go to the Supreme Court while President Obama is in office. At stake, ultimately, is whether the government will...

Our “All In” campaign is focused on increasing the enrollment of African American, Latino, and Native American students in AP® courses. We know that you, too, are committed to equality and helping all students achieve at a higher level. This is a tremendous opportunity for you to help by joining the College Board’s All In campaign. By registering below, you pledge to review the master schedule at your school or in your district to ensure that 100 percent of African American, Latino, and Native American students with AP Potential™ are enrolled in courses in the 2014-15 school year.

Politics takes a lot of brass. And Bill Clinton is a master politician. His rousing speech at the Democrats' convention told the delegates that Republicans "want to go back to the same old policies that got us into trouble in the first place." That is world class brass. Bill Clinton's own administration, more than any other, promoted an unsustainable housing boom, which eventually and inevitably led to a housing bust that brought down the whole American economy. Behind all the complex financial processes that reached to Wall Street and beyond, there is one fundamental fact: many people stopped making their...

Many years ago, I learned of an episode in the life of a promising young black man that is relevant to things happening now. He had been educated at a good school, and went on to receive degrees at good colleges and universities. Then he went for a Ph.D. in mathematics at one of the leading departments in that field. When he encountered difficulties, his professors essentially wrote his doctoral thesis for him. No doubt they felt good about doing something to help a promising young black man, and perhaps took pride in doing so. But what about his...

Barack Obama has deftly begun what could be his most significant legacy on racial equity. Did you miss it? Most people did. In early December, the administration sent new guidelines to the nation’s 17,000 school districts about how to address “racial isolation” in primary and secondary schools. It also sent new guidelines to college administrators about promoting racial diversity in admissions policies. The new directives are notable for the ways in which they reverse the spirit of George W. Bush’s 2008 dictate against race as a consideration for school admissions. Obama’s message was that schools and universities need to stay...

ABIGAIL FISHER, a white student, says she was denied admission to the University of Texas because of her race. She sued in Federal District Court in Austin, causing Judge Sam Sparks to spend time trying to make sense of a 2003 Supreme Court decision allowing racial preferences in higher education. “I’ve read it till I’m blue in the face,” Judge Sparks said in an early hearing in Ms. Fisher’s lawsuit. But the meaning of the central concept in the decision — “this esoteric critical mass of diversity of students,” he called it — kept eluding him. The 2003 Supreme Court...

It's meant to be racist, and it's meant to be discriminatory. But the controversial "Increase Diversity Bake Sale" hosted by the Berkeley College Republicans is still on, the club's president said, despite "grossly misguided comments" and threats aimed toward supporters of the University of California Berkeley student group.During the sale, scheduled for Tuesday, baked goods will be sold to white men for $2, Asian men for $1.50, Latino men for $1, black men for $0.75 and Native American men for $0.25. All women will get $0.25 off those prices.The bake sale is meant to draw attention to pending legislation that...

Beaverton School District has a $543,000 hole to fill in its special education fund next school year because staff disciplined a higher ratio of Latino students in special education than in the general school population. The district is one of three in the Portland area to get dinged for suspending and expelling a disproportionate ratio of minorities in special education, based on a federal law the state began enforcing in 2008. The law, part of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, was created to help deal with a decades-old national problem -- minorities are over-represented in special education. Under the...

It's racially discriminatory to prohibit racial discrimination. That's the bottom line of a decision issued Friday, just before the Fourth of July weekend, by the United States Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit. The case was brought by an organization called By Any Means Necessary to overturn a state constitutional amendment passed by a 58 percent majority of Michigan voters in November 2006. This was not BAMN's first challenge to the proposition. It staged a mini-riot in the secretary of state's office to try to block submission of the signatures that put the proposition on the ballot. The ballot...