Good News: America’s Most Litigious Racists Want to Hear From YOU
The Supreme Court's decision to ban affirmative action last year is yielding record levels of saying the quiet part out loud.
Earlier this month, the conservative legal movement’s vilest little freaks filed a lawsuit against Northwestern University, purporting to tackle what everyone who has ever attended law school knows is the most urgent crisis in legal academia: faculties that do not include enough white guys with monosyllabic first names.
“For decades, left-wing faculty and administrators have been thumbing their noses at federal anti-discrimination statutes and openly discriminating on account of race and sex when appointing professors,” the lawsuit reads. “They do this by hiring women and racial minorities with mediocre and undistinguished records over white men who have better credentials, better scholarship, and better teaching ability.”
Especially for people who are used to legal challenges to affirmative action getting framed in terms of, say, discrimination against Asian-American applicants, the racism that permeates the Northwestern lawsuit is visceral, ugly stuff: It characterizes Black professors, sometimes by name, as “mediocre,” “undistinguished,” and “lazy,” and bemoans their success at the expense of “white men who have vastly superior publication records and far more impressive educational and professional credentials.” The emphasis is mine, but it might as well be theirs, too; you can tell by the triumphant adverbs scattered throughout this thing that these days, the people who simply do not think Black people belong in positions of authority are really, really feeling themselves.
But ever since the Supreme Court banned affirmative action in college admissions last year, this sort of thing is happening all over the country, in contexts that range from corporate diversity initiatives to inclusive hiring practices to scholarship awards. Even when the conservative legal movement notches a win as significant as the affirmative action cases, it is never really done attacking multiracial democracy; it is just choosing what aspect of multiracial democracy to attack next.
We’ll have more to say about this lawsuit on Balls & Strikes next week and in the weeks to come. In the meantime, I would like to draw your attention to the website operated by the plaintiff in this case—Faculty, Alumni, & Students Opposed to Racial Preferences, or FASORP. I would like to do so because its only content is a web form that allows you, the courageous citizen, to submit “evidence of race and sex discrimination in academia.” You can upload documents, emails, and even audio recordings that support your case. Best of all, you can do so anonymously, right now, from the privacy of your own home, as many times as you want.
Do with this information what you will. Just don't say anything about legacy admissions. That's not the type of “race preference” they want to hear about.
As always, you can find everything we publish at ballsandstrikes.org, or follow us on Twitter at @ballsstrikes, or get in touch by emailing contact@ballsandstrikes.org. Thanks for reading.
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