The NAACP recently passed a resolution backing a proposed federal law that would prohibit enforcement of federal laws banning marijuana in states that have imposed lesser penalties or have legalized marijuana entirely. The resolution cites the “misguided and misplaced policies” of the War on Drugs, which have resulted in “the disproportionate over-confinement of racial and […]
Archive | Racism
My Take on Heather Gerken’s Progressive Defense of Federalism
I recently participated in a Tulsa Law Review symposium in honor of Yale Law School Professor Heather Gerken, one of the nation’s leading federalism scholars. Much of Gerken’s work urges her fellow political liberals to rethink their traditional distaste for federalism. My contribution to the symposium is now available on SSRN. Here is the abstract: […]
Racial Progress and Obama’s Reelection
As I see it, Obama’s reelection is overall likely to cause more harm than good. But there is one important positive aspect that deserves special mention. Obama’s reelection victory cements the idea that having an African-American president is normal. For a nation with a long history of racial oppression – one where most blacks didn’t […]
Racial “Obligations” of Mixed-Race People
Co-blogger David Bernstein links to a New York Times column by Thomas Chatterton Williams which argues that “[m]ixed-race blacks have an ethical obligation to identify as black — and interracial couples share a similar moral imperative to inculcate certain ideas of black heritage and racial identity in their mixed-race children, regardless of how they look.” […]
Heather Gerken’s Progressive Defense of Federalism
By Ilya Somin on March 13, 2012 9:11 pm in Federalism, Gay Rights, Racial Discrimination, Racism, Voting With Your Feet
Yale Law Professor Heather Gerken, a prominent federalism scholar, has an interesting article in Democracy urging her fellow liberals to take a more favorable view of federalism: Progressives are deeply skeptical of federalism, and with good reason. States’ rights have been invoked to defend some of the most despicable institutions in American history, most notably […]
Libertarianism and the Civil War
By Ilya Somin on March 6, 2012 12:55 am in Civil War, Federalism, History, Libertarianism, Racism, Secession
Over at Libertarianism.Org, Jonathan Blanks has an interesting series of posts criticizing libertarians who defend the secession of the Southern states that precipitated the civil war (see here and here). Like Blanks, I believe that any possible justification that the Confederates may have had was negated by the fact that they seceded for the purpose […]
Mercedes-Benz: The car for people who admire mass-murdering racist totalitarian thugs
Mercedes-Benz’s latest marketing ploy is to associate itself with Che Guevera. Over at the Huffington Post, Michael Gonzalez (Heritage Foundation) supplies the details. It’s not surprising that a corporation which is currently pro-Che was pro-Hitler, far more so than many other German businesses during the Third Reich. As recounted in Cecil Adams’ “The Straight Dope”: […]
The original meaning of the 14th Amendment regarding interracial marriage
By David Kopel on December 5, 2011 5:38 pm in Anti-Semitism, Congress, Constitutional History, Constitutional Law, Federalism, First Amendment, Fourteenth Amendment, History, Racism, Supreme Court
Over at Balkinization, Andrew Koppelman (Northwestern) has an interesting and thoughtful post on the state of originalism. Synthesizing analysis by Jamal Greene and Jack Balkin, Koppelman writes, “Originalism is fundamentally about a narrative of rhetorical self-identification with the achievements of a founding historical moment. That is the real basis of its power. An originalist argument […]
The Tragedy of Urban Renewal
Reason TV has a short but interesting video about the urban renewal era of the 1950s and 60s, when hundreds of thousands of people – mostly poor minorities – were forcibly displaced from their homes by eminent domain. As the video notes, often the land was transferred to politically connected developers and other influential interest […]
My US Commission on Civil Rights Testimony on the Impact of Eminent Domain Abuse on Minority Groups
By Ilya Somin on September 22, 2011 11:14 pm in Blight, Eminent Domain, Kelo, Post-Kelo Reform, Property Rights, Racism
On August 12, I testified at a US Commission on Civil Rights hearing on the “Civil Rights Implications of Eminent Domain Abuse.” The video of the oral testimony is available here. I have now made my more detailed written testimony available online here. Here is the Introduction, which includes a summary of the rest [footnotes […]
Reagan’s infamous speech in Philadelphia, Mississippi
By David Kopel on August 16, 2011 6:18 am in Elections, History, Housing, Political Ignorance, Racism, Tenth Amendment
In 1980, one of the major party presidential nominees opened his general election by delivering a speech in a small town in the Deep South that just by coincidence happened to be the national headquarters of the Ku Klux Klan. That same candidate had previously complained about federal housing policies which attempted “to inject black […]
Cornel West: The Dinesh D’Souza of the Left?
Last year, Dinesh D’Souza made waves by claiming that Barack Obama’s left-wing ideology and policies can be explained by his “anti-colonial” attitudes, traceable to his father’s Kenyan background. I criticized D’Souza’s argument here. This year, Cornel West claims that Obama’s racial background is the key to explaining why the president isn’t left-wing enough. West believes […]
John McWhorter on Efforts to Remove the “N Word” from Huckleberry Finn
Last week, co-blogger Jonathan Adler noted the publication of a new edition of Huckleberry Finn that replaces all of the book’s many uses of the word “nigger” with “slave” in order to make it more palatable to modern teachers who want to assign the book to students. In this recent column, prominent black linguist John […]
Of “Racist Progressives” And “Hard-Hearted Libertarians”
At Balkinization, prominent legal historian Brian Tamanaha has an interesting post on progressivism, racism, and libertarianism. He acknowledges that libertarians, including me, are right to point out that early 20th century progressivism was tarred by racism. But he also argues that libertarians have their own historical skeletons in the closet, ones he claims are more […]
Jack London, Racist Progressive
Jack London is remembered today mostly for writing inspiring novels about dogs and the Alaskan wilderness. In his own time, however, he was also known as a prominent advocate of socialism and a virulent racist. At Slate, Johann Hari has an interesting review of a new biography of London: The United States has a startling […]