Anti-Racists Are The Racists! (not)
Odds are you have never heard of Edward Blum. You should pay attention. Blum has arguably done more to inhibit racial justice than any other person. He just recruits surrogates to stand in the spotlight as he pulls the puppet strings.
His latest puppet show is an appeal to the Supreme Court of his lawsuit claiming that Harvard University discriminates against Asian-American applicants because of the University’s race conscious admission practices. “That Harvard engages in racial balancing and ignores race-neutral alternatives … proves that Harvard does not use race as a last resort.” The appeal was filed by his organization, Students for Fair Admissions.
This is not new work for Blum. He and his sham organization were behind two Supreme Court cases known as Fisher I and Fisher II. These cases claimed that Abigail Fisher lost a coveted spot at the University of Texas because affirmative action gave her rightful place to a less qualified Black applicant.
After losing these cases he created the populist-appearing, authoritative-sounding Students for Fair Admissions. At that time it had three members; Edward Blum, Abigail Fisher, and Abigail’s father. He recruited them to represent his ugly and tenacious campaign to undo any and every initiative aimed at racial justice. Although the evidence is circumstantial, it appears that he was motivated by losing a congressional election in the early 1990s. He claimed that his loss was due to redistricting that, he claimed, favored African-American and Latinx voters.
Just another beleaguered white man trying to make his way in a world stacked against him.
The current case, Students for Fair Admissions v. the President and Fellows of Harvard College, is likely to be accepted by the current Court, whose conservative Justices seem eager to find a case that will punish any entity or policy that seeks to remediate racial injustice. It seems that the blindfolds they wear in graphic representations of impartial justice actually blind them only to color. It is not that deeply wounded Asian-American students sought him out to get redress for the harm they suffered. As in the Fisher cases, he found them.
In a speech after losing in Fisher, he said, “. . . I need Asian plaintiffs.” If you can’t win with a sympathetic white “victim,” try a few Asian-Americans. I don’t mean to suggest that no Asian-Americans feel that an injustice was done when they were not admitted to Harvard. 95% of Harvard’s applicants feel that way, but Blum doesn’t care about any of them. It appears that he just wants to get even because he thinks racial considerations derailed his political ambitions.
You may also be unaware that Blum was behind another Supreme Court case, Shelby v. Holder, that eviscerated crucial protections in the Voting Rights Act. This nasty business immediately catalyzed a viral spread of voter suppression legislation. The impact was deeply felt in the 2020 election when many Southern States did their best to imitate the Jim Crow era.
In a logical extension of this work, the Trump administration eliminated any anti-racist training in the federal government. A well-orchestrated conservative campaign seeks to virtually banish Critical Race Theory, which explicates systemic racism and implicit bias, from the land.
According to an alarming Michelle Goldberg column in the New York Times, “Critical race theory is a grave threat to the American way of life,” Christopher Rufo, director of the Center on Wealth and Poverty at the Discovery Institute, a conservative think tank once known for pushing an updated form of creationism in public schools, wrote in January.
Goldberg also wrote, “Republicans in West Virginia and Oklahoma have introduced bills banning schools and, in West Virginia’s case, state contractors from promoting ‘divisive concepts,’ including claims that ‘the United States is fundamentally racist or sexist.’ A New Hampshire Republican also proposed a ‘divisive concepts’ ban, saying in a hearing, ‘This bill addresses something called critical race theory.’”
She continued, “An Arkansas legislator introduced a pair of bills, one banning the teaching of The Times’s 1619 Project curriculum, and the other nixing classes, events and activities that encourage ‘division between, resentment of, or social justice for’ specific groups of people. ‘What is not appropriate is being able to theorize, use, specifically, critical race theory.’”
It is an international effort. Goldberg also wrote, “A month later, the conservative government in Britain declared some uses of critical race theory in education illegal. ‘We do not want teachers to teach their white pupils about white privilege and inherited racial guilt,’ said the Tory equalities minister, Kemi Badenoch.'"
Equalities Minister???
As with so much other conservative nonsense, we are to believe that the anti-racists are really the racists. Talk to any Trump supporter or Fox News viewer and you will find that they believe this with every bone in their body (pronoun use intentional).
The most obscene irony is that the campaign to abolish Critical Race Theory comes from the same fine folks who are nearly apoplectic about “cancel culture.” Go figure.