Integration – John Malcolm

By Bob Parks | June 16, 2012 | Black and Right

This whopper deserves all the attention it can get. Again, it shows the ignorance and contempt of the electorate liberals depend on.

In 2010, Democrats gave their website a facelift and whitewash. Click on the screenshot above to see what they used to say about their civil rights history compared to now. [Read more…]

Obama’s Sinister “Religion”—Racist Marxism Under a Faux Biblical Veneer

By Kelly OConnell | June 10, 2012 | Canada Free Press

As we ready ourselves for the inevitable onslaught against Romney’s religion, we need to educate ourselves on Obama’s own beliefs, which are the most unusual of any candidate. Even taking Barack at his word, that he is a “Christian”, his beliefs are highly atypical of biblical Christianity. Barack, as an acolyte of Reverend Jeremiah Wright’s ideology, is really a follower of James Cone’s own racist and Marxist Black Liberation Theology. This is the subject of today’s essay.

I. Jeremiah Wright’s Church & Rev James Cone’s “Christianity”

Barack Obama attended Jeremiah Wright’s Chicago Trinity United church for more than two decades. Given the length of time, we must assume that Barack shared the core beliefs of that congregation. But what were Wright’s core beliefs? These are just a subset of Reverend James Cone’s Black Liberation Theology. This connection is explained by Charles C. Johnson of the American Spectator: [Read more…]

Law School Humbug

Heather Mac Donald | Autumn 1995 | City Journal

Law schools across the country have taken on a new function: cleansing students’ souls. The taint to be extirpated, of course, is racism and sexism, and in many classes the sometimes dramatic measures needed to root out such blights have driven away the more mundane task of teaching legal analysis. “I was going home crying every day,” says Linda P., a law student at New York University. The source of her unhappiness was her “Race and Legal Scholarship” course. “No matter what I said, the response was: you don’t know because you’re white. Some students wouldn’t speak to me after class. It scared me, because I thought I was this big liberal, and I was treated like the devil.”

Linda’s professor, Paulette Caldwell, practices the hottest form of legal scholarship today: critical race theory. While therapeutic courses such as Caldwell’s remain a small portion of the curriculum at most law schools, the theory behind them has nevertheless shaken up the legal academy. Only ” feminist jurisprudence” rivals critical race theory in influence and sheer sex appeal; both fashions are cut from the same cloth.

The impact of critical race theory and feminist jurisprudence doesn’t stop at the ivy-clad walls of the legal academy. Feminist jurisprudence has revolutionized the law of sex discrimination and rape. Courts across the country, persuaded that legal practice is deeply racist and sexist, are conducting costly studies of their own alleged biases. Both movements are trying to limit First Amendment guarantees in order to protect female and minority sensibilities; their first success, beyond campus speech codes, has been in the workplace. These repercussions are all the more remarkable when you consider that critical race theory and feminist jurisprudence are fundamentally antithetical to the very notion of law.

Back in the law school classroom, Linda P. is not the only student crying these days. Law professors in many schools boast that their courses have reduced students to tears, sent them fleeing to the dean, and created crosscurrents of hostility in the classroom—proof that the professors are ” touching a nerve.” Frances Lee Ashley, a University of Tennessee law professor, faced numerous charges from students that her “Discrimination and the Law” class was simply a forum for white-bashing, that she favored black students, and that the class exacerbated racial tensions. Ashley was unrepentant. “If teachers intend to open this scary space,” she writes in the California Law Review, “they need to be ready to make it reasonably safe and bearable for all members of the enterprise. . . . As a teacher in a predominantly white but desegregating institution . . . you [cannot] consistently do the right thing if by that you mean behavior that allows the average white student to avoid any feeling of being personally accused or defensive when matters of race are discussed.”

Charles Jones, a professor at Rutgers-Newark Law School, asks students in his critical race theory seminar to write an essay about race relations, challenging, among other things, “the assumption that blacks, Jews, and Latinos are allies.” When a black student wrote about her indelible dislike of white people, Jones knew he had struck gold. He asked the student to read her essay aloud in class; an Italian-American woman burst into tears and fled the room. Fortunately, critical race teachers are prepared for such disruptions. “Getting in touch with your feelings is difficult,” explains Jones. “We let [the Italian-American woman] experience out her grief. She sat out a class or two, and when she came back, she wouldn’t talk.” It was a useful lesson, Jones concludes: “She was naive to think there’s not a lot of cross-racial hatred.” (However open-minded critical race teachers may be about “cross-racial hatred,” it is difficult to imagine this story coming out as it did had a white student written of his dislike for blacks.)

The core claim of both critical race theory and feminist jurisprudence is that law is merely a mask for white male power relations. Law, in other words, is indistinguishable from politics; the purported objectivity and neutrality of legal reasoning is a sham.

However crude the multicultural trappings of these theories, their fundamental argument has a respectable pedigree. For over a century, American legal scholars have challenged the traditional distinction between legislative and judicial action. According to the traditional view, legislators make the law; judges merely apply it. Judicial decisions, this tradition holds, are determined by preexisting legal rules, not by the judge’s own whims.

The stakes riding on the accuracy of this conception are enormous. For if rules do not in fact determine the outcome of cases, if judges inevitably enjoy such enormous interpretive discretion that they are virtually creating law as they go along, then the legitimacy not just of the judiciary but of governmental power itself is thrown into doubt.

The first American thinker to question the conventional understanding of law was also America’s greatest legal scholar: Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, whose ideas foreshadowed virtually all of twentieth-century American jurisprudence. Holmes was reacting against the late-nineteenth-century view of law as a fixed system of unchanging, quasi-Platonic principles.

Bunk! replied Holmes; “law is no brooding omnipresence in the sky.” To equate it with a set of timeless legal principles ignores the fact that judges have always transformed the law in accord with changing opinions and social conditions. In fact, argued Holmes, there are no legal principles in any meaningful sense. Law is simply a prediction of “where the axe of the state will fall.”

By the twenties and thirties, Holmes’s skepticism about legal rules had expanded into one of the most powerful movements in American legal scholarship. The “Legal Realists” developed detailed exposés of the malleability of legal reasoning in every kind of judicial decision making. Since precedent can always be found on either side of a case, they claimed, judicial decision making and even fact-finding are often determined by unconscious, irrational factors or by the judge’s political and economic beliefs. Legal rules, in other words, don’t determine outcomes; judges do.

Men of letters as well as the law, the Legal Realists produced a witty and urbane corpus of work—unlike that of the current crop of legal critics. The Realists argued that law should rest on a rational basis, such as the emerging discipline of social science, not on abstractions. Accordingly, they urged judges to sweep away archaic common-law rules that no longer made sense. Their criticisms were unimpeachable—many of the traditional distinctions determining when someone was liable for an injury, for example, were wholly artificial. But the skeptical judicial housecleaner often turns into the sorcerer’s apprentice. “Gradually, every limitation [on legal liability] begins to seem arbitrary,” warns Philip E. Johnson, a law professor at the University of California at Berkeley. Once a precedent has been established for ignoring existing case law, decisions that follow the law require justification just as much as decisions that depart from it, says Johnson.

Legal Realism lost much of its glamour after World War II. But in the 1970s, leftist law professors dusted off the Realists’ critique and dressed it up in German and French literary and critical theories. Their favorite phrase to describe their work—”trashing”—reflects their nostalgia for the anti- establishment 1960s. The result of their efforts was Critical Legal Studies (CLS), a diverse, sometimes impenetrable mix of Marxist analysis, postmodern literary criticism, and American legal skepticism. CLS dominated the academic left for well over a decade, gaining widespread media attention in the 1980s for tearing up Harvard Law School. (Concurrently, “Law and Economics”—equally iconoclastic—moved in from the right, creating, together with CLS, a pincer offensive on traditional jurisprudence.)

Like many of the Realists, the Crits (as CLS practitioners called themselves) argued that law is just politics wearing robes. But the Crits’ real gripe was not with law but with liberal society. They berated liberalism’s emphasis on individual freedom and limited state power. Many called for a world without distinct public and private spheres, in which the individual would not be “alienated” from the collectivity. The Crits were particularly scornful of “illegitimate hierarchies,” a phrase that included every possible type of ranking or distinction among individuals. Harvard’s Duncan Kennedy, the original bad boy of CLS, infamously called for breaking down law school hierarchies by rotating all law school jobs from dean to janitor on a regular basis and paying all employees the same salary.

According to the Crits, the real purpose of law is to make an oppressive capitalist system appear inevitable. Law does this by duping people into believing that the rules that govern the distribution of property, the performance of obligations, and the relation between the state and civil society are “natural” and necessary. We forget, say the Crits, that law is man-made and could as easily be constructed quite differently—property need not be private, for example; or an employer could have no right to control his employees’ behavior; or responsibility for deviant behavior could be assigned not to the individual but to social forces.

Unlike the Realists, the Crits seldom ventured into the practical world of law reform, preferring instead to generate anti-bourgeois theory in academic comfort. To the extent they did make practical proposals, these consisted of familiar Old Left prescriptions: public ownership of banks and insurance companies, rent control, union control of business, and vigorous housing-code enforcement.

Read the full article here.