Racism and Inequality: an Introduction to Difficult Debates Racism and Inequality: an Introduction to Difficult Debates
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In the Supreme Court of the United States ______
No. 15-1293 In the Supreme Court of the United States __________ Michelle K. Lee, Under Secretary of Commerce for Intellectual Property and Director, United States Patent and Trademark Office, Petitioner, v. Simon Shiao Tam, Respondent. __________ On Writ of Certiorari to the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit __________ BRIEF OF THE CATO INSTITUTE AND A BASKET OF DEPLORABLE PEOPLE AND ORGANIZATIONS AS AMICI CURIAE SUPPORTING RESPONDENT __________ Ilya Shapiro Counsel of Record Thomas A. Berry CATO INSTITUTE 1000 Mass. Ave., N.W. Washington, DC 20001 (202) 842-0200 [email protected] [email protected] December 16, 2016 i QUESTION PRESENTED Does the government get to decide what’s a slur? ii TABLE OF CONTENTS Page QUESTION PRESENTED .......................................... i TABLE OF AUTHORITIES ...................................... iv INTEREST OF AMICUS CURIAE ............................ 1 SUMMARY OF ARGUMENT .................................... 1 ARGUMENT ............................................................... 7 I. “DISPARAGING” LANGUAGE SERVES AN IMPORTANT ROLE IN OUR SOCIETY ........... 7 A. Reclaiming Slurs Has Played a Big Part in Personal Expression and Cultural Debate ... 7 B. Rock Music Has a Proud Tradition of Pushing the Boundaries of Expression ...... 10 II. THE GOVERNMENT SHOULD NOT BE DECIDING WHAT’S A SLUR .......................... 12 A. It Is Impossible to Draw an Objective Line as to What Is Disparaging .......................... 12 B. Brands That Do Not Wish to Offend Can Change Their Names Voluntarily .............. 19 III. THE DISPARAGEMENT CLAUSE VIOLATES THE FIRST AMENDMENT ......... 22 A. The Disparagement Clause Is a Viewpoint-Based Unconstitutional Condition ..................................................... 22 B. A Trademark Is Neither a Subsidy Nor an Endorsement .......................................... 23 1. Choosing which artists and speakers to fund with limited resources is different than trademark registration. -
Linguistics.Pdf
Linguistics 1 Reyes Llopis-Garcia (Latin American and Iberian Cultures) LINGUISTICS David Lurie (Japanese; East Asian Languages and Cultures) Kathleen McKeown (Computer Science) Director of Undergraduate Studies: Prof. Meredith Landman, John McWhorter (American Studies) [email protected] Yuan-Yuan Meng (Chinese; East Asian Languages and Cultures) Program Director: Prof. John McWhorter, [email protected] Michele Miozzo (Psychology) Fumiko Nazikian (Japanese; East Asian Languages and Cultures) In any discussion of linguistics, in popular or academic contexts, the Youssef Nouhi (Arabic; MESAAS) first question is always, what is linguistics, after all? This is remarkable. Christopher Peacocke (Philosophy) Language informs most of our mental and cultural activity, and linguistics John Phan (East Asian Languages and Cultures) is the just study of language. Robert Remez (Psychology, Barnard) Linguistics, especially since the 1960s, has become a highly multifarious, Francisco Rosales-Varo (Latin American and Iberian Studies) and even sprawling, field of inquiry. This requires that a major acquaint Carol Rounds (Hungarian; Italian) students with a number of subfields, all of which are crucial to José Plácido Ruiz-Campillo (Latin American and Iberian Studies) understanding what modern linguistic analysis is about, and foster Richard Sacks (English and Comparative Literature) interdisciplinary inquiry as well. To wit, the person with a basic Ann Senghas (Psychology, Barnard) foundation in what constitutes linguistic study in our times (including -
Full Brief (.Pdf)
No. 15-1293 In the Supreme Court of the United States __________ Michelle K. Lee, Under Secretary of Commerce for Intellectual Property and Director, United States Patent and Trademark Office, Petitioner, v. Simon Shiao Tam, Respondent. __________ On Writ of Certiorari to the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit __________ BRIEF OF THE CATO INSTITUTE AND A BASKET OF DEPLORABLE PEOPLE AND ORGANIZATIONS AS AMICI CURIAE SUPPORTING RESPONDENT __________ Ilya Shapiro Counsel of Record Thomas A. Berry CATO INSTITUTE 1000 Mass. Ave., N.W. Washington, DC 20001 (202) 842-0200 [email protected] [email protected] December 16, 2016 i QUESTION PRESENTED Does the government get to decide what’s a slur? ii TABLE OF CONTENTS Page QUESTION PRESENTED .......................................... i TABLE OF AUTHORITIES ...................................... iv INTEREST OF AMICUS CURIAE ............................ 1 SUMMARY OF ARGUMENT .................................... 1 ARGUMENT ............................................................... 7 I. “DISPARAGING” LANGUAGE SERVES AN IMPORTANT ROLE IN OUR SOCIETY ........... 7 A. Reclaiming Slurs Has Played a Big Part in Personal Expression and Cultural Debate ... 7 B. Rock Music Has a Proud Tradition of Pushing the Boundaries of Expression ...... 10 II. THE GOVERNMENT SHOULD NOT BE DECIDING WHAT’S A SLUR .......................... 12 A. It Is Impossible to Draw an Objective Line as to What Is Disparaging .......................... 12 B. Brands That Do Not Wish to Offend Can Change Their Names Voluntarily .............. 19 III. THE DISPARAGEMENT CLAUSE VIOLATES THE FIRST AMENDMENT ......... 22 A. The Disparagement Clause Is a Viewpoint-Based Unconstitutional Condition ..................................................... 22 B. A Trademark Is Neither a Subsidy Nor an Endorsement .......................................... 23 1. Choosing which artists and speakers to fund with limited resources is different than trademark registration. -
Race, Post-Race and the Question of Making It Over
Reflection on a Dream World: Race, Post- Race and the Question of Making it Over Mario L. Barnes* We Dream A World A world I dream where black or white, Whatever race you be, Will share the bounties of the earth And every man is free' INTRODUCTION 2 Fifteen years ago, as a third-year law student, I published my book note in the inaugural issue of the African-American Law and Policy Report (ALPR). The note was inspired both by the book reviewed-Derrick Bell's, Confronting Authority. Reflections of an Ardent Protester3-and an Alice Walker poem that encouraged African Americans to help each other in our mutual struggle against oppression.4 The note sought to analyze the pitfalls, and ultimately, what I saw as the triumph in Professor Bell's protest against Harvard Law School's refusal to hire a tenured/tenure track black female professor. Even though his immediate efforts ended well before Harvard Law School ever tenured an African-American woman, a central theme of ConfrontingAuthority is that protest and struggle are often more about the journey than the destination. * Associate Professor of Law, University of Miami School of Law; Visiting Professor of Law, University of Connecticut School of Law. B.A., J.D., University of California, Berkeley; LL.M., University of Wisconsin. 1. THE COLLECTED POEMS OF LANGSTON HUGHES 311 (Arnold Rampersad, ed. 1994). 2. Mario L. Barnes, "Each One, Pull One": The InspirationalMethodology Behind and Impassioned Though Somewhat FlawedProtest, I AFR.-AM. L. & POL'Y REP. 89 (1994). 3. The book retold the events that lead up to Professor Derrick Bell giving up his tenured position at Harvard Law School, due to their failure to offer a tenured/tenure track position to an African-American woman. -
The Social Construction of Racism in the United States | Manhattan Institute
REPORT | April 2021 THE SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION OF RACISM IN THE UNITED STATES Eric Kaufmann Adjunct Fellow The Social Construction of Racism in the United States About the Author Eric Kaufmann is an adjunct fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a professor of politics at Birkbeck College, University of London. Kaufmann’s scholarship focuses on cultural politics, religious and national identity, and demography. He is the author of Whiteshift (2019), Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth? (2010), The Rise and Fall of Anglo-America (2004), and The Orange Order (2007), among others. Kaufmann has coauthored reports on academic freedom and the political response to demographic change and edited books on demography and ethnicity. An editor of the journal Nations & Nationalism, he has written for the New York Times, Newsweek, Foreign Affairs, New Statesman, National Review, and Prospect. Kaufmann holds a Ph.D. from the London School of Economics and Political Science. 2 Contents Foreword .................................................................................4 Executive Summary ..................................................................5 Introduction ..............................................................................7 The Media and Public Perception of Racism ..............................8 The Decline of Racist Attitudes .................................................8 The Racism Paradox ...............................................................10 The Great Awokening .............................................................11 -
"The Dehumanizing Condescension of White Fragility," Mcwhorter
CLL | 2020 Fall | Kessler | Race Relations in American Political Thought | for Oct 27 | Page 1 The Dehumanizing Condescension of White Fragility The popular book aims to combat racism but talks down to Black people. John McWhorter | The Atlantic | July 15, 2020 I must admit that I had not gotten around to actually reading Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility until recently. But it was time to jump in. DiAngelo is an education professor and—most prominently today—a diversity consultant who argues that whites in America must face the racist bias implanted in them by a racist society. Their resistance to acknowledging this, she maintains, constitutes a “white fragility” that they must overcome in order for meaningful progress on both interpersonal and societal racism to happen. White Fragility was published in 2018 but jumped to the top of the New York Times best-seller list amid the protests following the death of George Floyd and the ensuing national reckoning about racism. DiAngelo has convinced university administrators, corporate human-resources offices, and no small part of the reading public that white Americans must embark on a self-critical project of looking inward to examine and work against racist biases that many have barely known they had. I am not convinced. Rather, I have learned that one of America’s favorite advice books of the moment is actually a racist tract. Despite the sincere intentions of its author, the book diminishes Black people in the name of dignifying us. This is unintentional, of course, like the racism DiAngelo sees in all whites. Still, the book is pernicious because of the authority that its author has been granted over the way innocent readers think. -
Do Charter Schools Help Their Students? Caroline Hoxby
Civic Bulletin No. 44 October 2006 CiC CENTER FOR CIVIC INNOVATION AT THE MANHATTAN INSTITUTE Moving Men into the Mainstream: The Next Steps in Urban Reform Black Men Left Behind: Reflections on Current Research This bulletin is adapted from the first panel of three at a Manhattan Institute conference, "Moving Men into the Mainstream: The Next Steps in Urban Reform," held in New York on June 21, 2006. The other panel discussions are available in Civic Bulletins 45 and 46. JOHN McWHORTER: Today we are going to here to discuss today is what policies we should discuss the issue of reconnecting a certain segment pursue to remedy this trend. of disadvantaged men into the workforce. The Manhattan Institute has been instrumental in The first panel will present an overview of the issues. forging the reform of welfare legislation, beginning Ronald Mincy, Professor of Social Policy and Social with the actual legislation in 1996, and by all Work at Columbia University, is the first panelist. measures, this policy has been a success. It certainly Next, we will hear from Hillard Pouncy, Visiting has not been a magic bullet, but we are seeing that Professor at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public most of the women who have participated in these Policy at Princeton and a specialist on anti-poverty programs are working and childhood poverty, legislation, whose work also focuses on bringing ex- especially among African-Americans, is on the offenders back into the workforce. Next, Lawrence decline, and has reduced most quickly since 1996, Mead is a professor in the Political Science when these programs were instituted. -
Welcome to the Very First Episode of Conversations with Coleman
Will The Push For Reparations Get Trump Reelected? | Sam Harris (Ep.1) EPISODE TO CROSS REFERENCE: https://fanlink.to/CWCEP1 Welcome to the very first episode of conversations with Coleman. I'm your host Coleman Hughes. The idea for this podcast is pretty simple. I talk to people who I find interesting. I have five or six really great guests already lined up who I won't spoil now, but in the long run this podcast is an experiment and as a result I need your feedback. If you like the guests I'm getting let me know. If there's someone you think I should talk to who I might not otherwise think to talk to, let me know. If you like the podcast you can subscribe to it on YouTube, you can follow my Facebook page so you're alerted when a new episode comes out. And you can follow me on Twitter where I will post the link to each new episode. Each episode is going to have both audio and video so you can watch it on YouTube or you can listen to the audio version on whichever podcast listening app is your favorite. So a few notes before I introduce my very first guest who probably doesn't need much introduction. The audio on Sam's end is not ideal. We try to have him record it, but we ended up losing that file. It's neither horrible nor amazing and I hope the listening experience won't be too bad. All of my subsequent episodes will have great audio on both ends of the conversation. -
ANTIDOTES to the Virtue-Signaling, Violence-Encouraging Ignorance, Arrogance and Intellectual Thuggery of Elitists in U.S
ANTIDOTES to the virtue-signaling, violence-encouraging ignorance, arrogance and intellectual thuggery of elitists in U.S. scientific and academic establishments Compiled by Stuart H. Hurlbert San Diego State University, San Diego, California, June 20, 2020 First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a socialist. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out— because I was not a trade unionist. Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew. Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me. -- Martin Niemöller, WW I German U-boat commander, Lutheran pastor, and, until 1934, supporter of the Third Reich An error does not become truth by reason of multiplied propagation, nor does truth become error because nobody will see it. -- Mahatma Gandhi Men fight for liberty and win it with hard knocks. Their children, brought up easy, let it slip away again, poor fools. And their grandchildren are once more slaves. -- D.H. Lawrence We sleep safely in our beds because rough men stand ready in the night to visit violence on those who would harm us. -- George Orwell (apocryphally) The mainstream media, many university administrations, large numbers of politicians on the left and, now, many scientific societies have declared that there is widespread systemic anti-black racism in law enforcement organizations, in academia, and in society in general. This is the most damaging, divisive, fact-deficient narrative being pushed by the illiberal left at this moment in the U.S. -
Intro Paragraph: Is Humanity Making Progress
Intro Paragraph: Is humanity making progress? Or does each new generation suffer the same level of violence, inequality, and disease as the last? Dr. Steven Pinker, Harvard psychologist and public intellectual, believes we have made progress––and has the research to back it up. Nevertheless, the timing of this conversation was inconvenient for Pinker’s argument. Just days after the death of George Floyd in police custody in Minneapolis, cities all across American were burning. Not to mention the global pandemic infecting millions worldwide. Despite such sign chaos, Pinker made a strong case for progress. In this conversation we talk about how to reduce police shootings in the future. We talk about the coverage bias of police shootings in the media––that is, the phenomenon of the national media only reporting instances of cops shooting civilians when the victim is black. We talk about the apparent tension between Pinker’s famous book on human nature, The Blank Slate, and his later books on progress, The Better Angels of Our Nature and Enlightenment Now. We talk about the enormous and largely unknown progress that’s been made in reducing poverty, racism and other social ills. We talk about whether or not violence is necessary in order to foster progress. We discuss the causes of criminal behavior. We talk about the idea of prison abolitionism. We talk about the lead-crime hypothesis and the progress we’ve made in incarceration as well as the progress we still have to make. We even talk about the bizarre possibility of substituting corporal punishments for prison, which sounds strong, but makes sense in context. -
Who Speaks for Us? Lessons from the Pinker Letter* Abstract 1 Introduction
Who speaks for us? Lessons from the Pinker letter* Itamar Kastner, Hadas Kotek, Anonymous, Rikker Dockum, Michael Dow, Maria Esipova, Caitlin M. Green, Todd Snider Journal preprint submitted for peer review August 2020 Abstract In the short time since the Open Letter to the LSA regarding Steven Pinker was published in early July 2020, it has evoked many different reactions across the field of linguistics. This commentary examines how the letter has been received in the field and outside of it, in news outlets as well as on social media. The findings are troubling. Our comprehensive review of reactions to the letter shows that not only are Pinker and his supporters spreading demonstrably false claims about the letter, its signatories, and the LSA itself, but that these claims are being repeated uncritically by a great many media outlets. We discuss possible reasons for this state of affairs and provide suggestions for how the field should deal with media attention in the future. 1 Introduction The field of linguistics has recently been shaken by an open letter submitted to the Linguistic Society of America on behalf of over 600 signatories (Open Letter to the LSA 2020). This letter—commonly referred to as The Open Letter or The Original Letter, henceforth TOL—argues that public statements made by LSA Fellow and Media Expert Steven Pinker have been inconsistent with values that the LSA publicly espouses, and as such, asks LSA leadership to revoke his status as LSA Fellow and remove him from the list of media experts. TOL has launched vigorous debates in the few weeks since it was published, the content of which has ranged from the status of TOL’s claims to issues of hierarchy and power in the field. -
Racial Conflict Are U.S
Published by CQ Press, an Imprint of SAGE Publications, Inc. www.cqresearcher.com Racial Conflict Are U.S. policies discriminatory? ac e-centered conflicts in several U.S. cities have led to the strongest calls for policy reforms since the turbulent civil rights era of the 1960s. Propelled R largely by videos of violent police confrontations with African-Americans, protesters have taken to the streets in Chicago, New York and other cities demanding changes in police tactics. meanwhile, students — black and white — at several major universities have pressured school presidents to deal aggressively Demonstrators on Christmas Eve protest an alleged with racist incidents on campus. And activists in the emerging cover-up of a video showing a white Chicago police officer shooting 17-year-old African-American Laquan Black Lives matter movement are charging that “institutional racism” McDonald 16 times. The shooting — and others in which white police officers killed black suspects, often unarmed — has added fuel to a persists in public institutions and laws a half century after legally nationwide debate about systemic racism. sanctioned discrimination was banned. Critics of that view argue that moral failings in the black community — and not institutional racism — e xplain why many African-Americans lack parity with whites in such areas as wealth, employment, housing and educa - I tional attainment. B ut those who cite institutional racism say enor - THIS REPORT N THE ISSUES ......................27 mous socioeconomic gaps and entrenched housing and school S BACKGROUND ..................33 segregation patterns stem from societal decisions that far outweigh I CHRONOLOGY ..................35 individuals’ life choices. D CURRENT SITUATION ..........40 E CQ Researcher • Jan.