This fall Harvard College has been defending its admissions program against charges of racial discrimination brought in federal court. Ironically, this is not the first time that Harvard’s admissions practices have lain at the heart of an important case that could affect college enrollments across…
The Christmas season has begun, and ballet companies across North America are blessing their towns and cities with performances of The Nutcracker. For The Scrapbook, it’s the season’s highlight.
A university named for George Washington and Robert E. Lee wrestles with its traditions and heritage.
Albert Louis Zambone reviews ‘Blue-Collar Conservatism: Frank Rizzo’s Philadelphia and Populist Politics.’
Were admission to Harvard based solely on academic merit, Asian-Americans would comprise 43% of the freshman class, while African-Americans would make up less than 1%, according to an internal Harvard report discussed at a trial here Wednesday.” That’s the sobering lede of a Wall Street Journal…
Readers will know the background already: Elizabeth Warren claimed to be Native American while she was a law professor at Harvard despite (a) appearing about as Anglo-white as one can appear and (b) having scant evidence that her claim of Native American heritage was true. She cited family lore…
In 2003, the Supreme Court hoped the use of racial preferences would last no more than 25 years. They are becoming permanent.
Ralph Taylor, owner of the Orion Insurance Group in Lynnwood, Washington, is decidedly white. Several years ago, though, he took a DNA ancestry test that determined he was only 90 percent Caucasian. He was also, according to the ancestry test, 6 percent “indigenous American” and 4 percent…
The left-wing organization MoveOn subjected itself to ridicule this week by posting a message to its social media accounts: “Low wages are violence. Knowingly letting people suffer is violence. It must end.” The attached graphic had to do with the minimum wage, which the staff at MoveOn in their…
Next month the Supreme Court will hear arguments in Abigail Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin, one of the most important cases this term. In 2008 Fisher, a white high school senior in Texas, applied for admission to the university and was turned down. She sued the school, claiming that its…
"As the 50th anniversary of the Voting Rights Act’s signing approaches Thursday, Marione Ingram says we’re backtracking as a country. ‘They’re disenfranchising the poor, the elderly, blacks, Latinos, students,’ she says of voter identification laws and the Supreme Court’s continued refusal to hear…
For the last year or so, the issue of whether or not cops have been too eager to punish -- and even kill -- African Americans has dominated the news. Yet, one very big story relating to cops and racial tension has been completely swept under the rug. Guardian reporter Spencer Ackerman has been…
Marcus Weisgerber at Defense One writes that:
What will Iran do with the big “signing bonus” – perhaps as much as $150 billion – coming its way thanks to the nuclear pact negotiated by the Obama administration?
Hillary Clinton is scheduled to speak at the Virginia Democratic party's Jefferson-Jackson Dinner on Friday in northern Virgnia. The event is from 2-6 p.m. in Fairfax.
Bill Clinton attended the funeral of the son of Vice President Joe Biden earlier today in Wilmington, Delaware and then headed up north to see American Pharoah win the Triple Crown at the Belmont Stakes in New York.
On May 14, I joined a tiny, highly exclusive group of Republicans, namely those who have decided not to seek our party’s presidential nomination. By contrast, the coach section of the party contains perhaps two dozen people who have announced (or soon will) their availability. Good luck to them all…
A bipartisan group of members of Congress is pushing a law that would stop the requirment for gun buys to disclose race and ethnicity. The effort is being led by Senators Roy Blunt, Mike Enzi, and Joe Manchin, a Democrat.
Last week, I noted that Harvard's Robert Putnam had made a rather baffling and slanderous statement about American Christians. As an empirical matter, it was utterly indefensible and not the kind of untrue generalization you would expect a prominent social scientist to indulge in. So, that was…
NPR’s “Race Card Project,” a series of stories on the topic of race and society, found another way to make us confront our own latent racism as well as the lingering racism in society this week by telling us the story of a white guy named Jamaal.
At an Ivy League university, Hillary Clinton will propose having "body cameras for every officer nationally," the New York Times's Maggie Haberman reports on Twitter.
CNN political commentator Marc Lamont Hill advised that "we should be strategic in how we riot."
Bill de Blasio is trying to insert himself into the foreign policy arena. The New York City mayor, more specifically, has commented on the deaths of refugees crossing the Mediterranean Sea.
Republican Carly Fiorina, a possible presidential candidate, reacts to Hillary Clinton's entry into the 2016 race.
Al Gore is "gaining steam" in the presidential race, stated a report last night from Fox News. Watch Peter Doocy's report on Bret Baier's Special Report:
The question that haunted the American motion-picture industry in the two months leading up to the Academy Awards broadcast was this: Is Hollywood racist? In December, leaked emails revealed how one of Hollywood’s longest-serving studio chiefs, Amy Pascal, and its most prestigious producer, Scott…
Not long ago, Harvard Law School's Charles Ogletree told Politico that Eric Holder "is a race man":
Former White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel is up for reelection, and President Obama stopped by his campaign headquarters to praise his mayor.
The green-lipstick wearing interviewer of President Barack Obama expressed her concern that the "po-po" (meaning: police officer) might shoot and kill her husband. The interviewer, GloZell Green, made the remarks to the president in an "interview" held today at the White House:
When to mention race and when not? My fellow journalists who covered the funeral of the woman who died in the D.C. Metro last week chose not to mention it. Perhaps they deemed it a distraction, too fraught a subject to bring up at a solemn, family time. My own opinion, for what it’s worth, is that…
The news on race relations in the U.S. is disturbing. From Rasmussen's latest poll:
Julian Borger at the Guardian writes that:
America is "less racially divided" now than it was six years ago, President Obama told NPR in an interview. The president was responding to this question, from NPR host Steve Inskeep, "Is the United States more racially divided than it was when you took office six years ago, Mr. President?"
The Obamas talked with People magazine about dealing with their "own racist experiences," as the magazine described.
President Obama was asked by journalist Jorge Ramos why he doesn't more to combat "white privilege" since becoming president of the United States:
In an article turgidly tallying up the racial backgrounds of the actors appearing in Ridley Scott’s forthcoming movie Exodus, contributor to The Week Jonathan Merritt says that viewers will “notice one ingredient painfully missing: melanin.”
President Obama alluded to the recent unrest in Ferguson and New York City in remarks today at the Ronald Reagan Building in Washington, D.C. The president talked of "restoring a sense of common purpose."
The Connecticut gubernatorial race is too close to call officially, but Democrat Governor Dan Malloy has declared victory.
In the eleventh hour, unaffiliated conservative candidate Joe Visconti gifted the Tom Foley campaign with a much appreciated present. Visconti announced his decision to drop out of the race on Sunday, urging his supporters to pull the lever for Foley on Tuesday.
Every election year, it seems, there’s a race that catches the political set in Washington by surprise. It’s possible that we’ve already seen the 2014 version of this with the defeat of House majority leader Eric Cantor, a result few anticipated and fewer still predicted.
Professor Cornel West was "taken into custody" in Ferguson, Missouri earlier today, according to the New York Times:
Possible 2016 presidential candidate Chris Christie refused speak out against the police in Ferguson, Missouri, following the ongoing unrest there.
In the midst of rioting in St. Louis over the police shooting of an unarmed black teenager, the New York Times decided to stoke the embers of racial animus even further with an incendiary op-ed titled, "Can the G.O.P. Ever Attract Black Voters?"
Martin Luther King dreamed that one day his children would "be judged on the basis of the content of their character, not the color of their skin." This week, the current head of the Justice Department said that "given the disparities that still afflict and divide us," that dream will have to wait.
It has been a while since there has been a winner of thoroughbred racing's Triple Crown. Thirty-six years, in fact. Twelve horses have had a chance before today, when California Chrome gets a shot in the Belmont. Eleven of those horses came up short and one did not run. When Affirmed won the…
Democratic gubernatorial candidate Alan Webber of New Mexico says of his likely political opponent, Republican governor Susana Martinez, that "We need to send her back to wherever she really came from."
In an age of hypersensitivity to sexism and homophobia, why does the North Korean regime escape censure? North Korean media specialize in a gutter rhetoric that, from any other source, would be met with immediate condemnation. The world, however, seems so accustomed to hearing astonishingly…
Fred Barnes, writing for the Wall Street Journal:
During a celebration of African-American History Month, Vice President Joe Biden said, "I may be a white boy, but I can jump." The comments were made at Biden's home, the Naval Observatory.
We're way past overload on Trayvon Martin-George Zimmerman commentary, but there is a tiny tributary of the story that has been largely overlooked. And it's worth a moment because it points to a larger problem regarding both the state and the public.
Post time for today’s running of the Belmont Stakes, the 145th running of the 1½ mile-long Grade 1 stakes race and final leg of the triple crown, is 6:36 p.m. With the Kentucky Derby won by Orb, the morning-line favorite in today’s race at 3-1, and Oxbow, going off this morning at 5-1, winning the…
Earlier this week, Louisiana legislator Karen Carter Peterson called Obamacare critics racist:
Louisiana state senator Karen Carter Peterson said today that Obamacare critics are inspired by the race of the president of the United States, Barack Obama:
In a commencement address at Morehouse College in Atlanta, Georgia, President Barack Obama recalls Jim Crow laws and racism of the 40s and 50s. Morehouse College is a historically black college.
Mark Sanford, former governor of South Carolina, has cleared the first hurdle in his comeback campaign. He will be in a runoff to determine the Republican candidate for a vacant House seat. He got some 37 percent of the primary vote. Which would have seemed an utterly improbable back in 2009, when…
In 1997, Chuck Hagel had effusive praise for Strom Thurmond. Here's the video and transcript, via the Washington Free Beacon:
The New York Times has greeted the appointment of South Carolina congressman Tim Scott to succeed fellow Republican Jim DeMint in the Senate with an op-ed decrying the selection--and Scott himself--as "token."
THE WEEKLY STANDARD podcast with Bill Kristol, hosted by Michael Graham:
On a hot mic, reporter David Chalian of Yahoo News said that Ann and Mitt Romney are "happy to have a party with black people drowning." Here's audio:
On TV this morning, Chris Matthews accused RNC chairman Reince Priebus and Republicans of playing the race card, causing clear discomfort on the set of MSNBC's Morning Joe:
What to make of Joe Biden’s apparent racial demagoguery this week in Danville, Virginia? Team Obama dismissed it as having nothing to do with race, but this is likely wrong: Biden certainly seemed to be referencing slavery, was doing so in a Southern dialect, and speaking in a city that is roughly…
Barack Obama's reelection campaign has seized on this blind quotation in today's edition of the British newspaper the Telegraph:
Give the media enough time, and they will spin straw into gold – for Democrats, naturally. And so it has been over the last two weeks since the Obamacare ruling was handed down. We have seen media pundits debate whether the ruling hurts Mitt Romney. We have seen them criticize Team Romney for not…
“Senator Santorum is at the desperate end of his campaign,” Mitt Romney told CNN's Wolf Blitzer on Tuesday. Oops. For weeks, Team Romney and many of its allies have been eager—one might even say desperate—to end this campaign. The Republican primary electorate has been resisting this, and the…
Associated Press: "Obama Tells Blacks to 'Stop Complainin' and Fight"
Philo Klein: "Is Obama's 'specific' plan now just an outline?"
TWS: Wisconsin Republicans beat back Big Labor in recall elections.
Last night the House of Representatives voted overwhelmingly to censure Representative Charlie Rangel (D-NY), 333-79. Only two Republicans (Peter King of New York and Don Young of Alaska) voted against the censure resolution, but Democrats were more evenly divided, with 170 supporting the…
On July 19, Andrew Breitbart posted a video of USDA official Shirley Sherrod speaking at an NAACP event. In that clip, Sherrod told the audience that she had once withheld the "full force of what I could do" for a white farmer because of his race. Shortly after the video was posted Agriculture…
JTA's Ron Kampeas reports on the brouhaha developing in Pennsylvania between Democratic Senate candidate Joe Sestak and the Emergency Committee for Israel: