In the guise of fighting bigotry, the American Jewish Committee has issued a pandering press release deploring "the racially insensitive remarks made recently by Lino Graglia, a University of Texas law professor, whose statements suggested that whites are superior to others."
Actually, as THE SCRAPBOOK pointed out last week, Graglia's "gaffe," for which he has in any case made public amends, was to tell a painful truth namely, that all too often at elite universities, blacks and Hispanics "are not academically competitive with whites." This, of course, is the stated view of admissions officers at Graglia's university, as revealed in court documents from the Hopwood case, and the whispered view at practically every other American institution of higher education. This, after all, is why they all set up racially discriminatory admissions programs, except where judges and voters have forbidden the practice. But Graglia said nothing of racial "superiority," a word that came straight from the imagination of the publicists at the AJC, who are apparently eager to use this episode to flog a favorite house publication of theirs called "Bigotry on Campus."
The AJC's only other excuse for dragging Graglia's name through the mud seems to be that it once, rightly, denounced the notorious racist and anti-Semitic crank Leonard Jeffries, who taught students at CCNY that blacks ("sun people") were indeed superior to whites ("ice people"). Now the AJC says that Graglia's case " mirrors closely [sic] that of Jeffries." No, it doesn't, and the AJC owes Graglia an apology for the breathtakingly unfair comparison.