Mandating Racism

Eric Holder

Eric Holder’s DoJ has been fighting charges of gross incompetence since about the time Holder took that office; from colluding to attempt to bury a legitimate voting rights case brought by whites in Mississippi (http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/11/us/politics/11voting.html?_r=0), to dropping the charges in the New Black Panther voter intimidation case in Philly (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Black_Panther_Party_voter_intimidation_case), to helping activists in New York find a judge willing to scuttle that city’s highly effective “Stop & Frisk” program, to fighting AGAINST merit and standards for Police and Fire Departments across the country.

The Holder DoJ has virtually been a singular bastion that has steadfastly held to the “disparate impact” doctrine that’s increasingly lost favor in most legal circles.

Most recently, education experts across the country have decried a new memo from the Departments of Justice and Education that instructs public schools throughout the country to cease punishing disruptive students if they fall into certain racial categories, such as black or Hispanic.

The letter, released on Wednesday (1-8-2014), states that it’s a violation of federal law for schools to punish certain races more than others, even if those punishments stem from completely neutral rules. For example, equal numbers of black students and white students should be punished for tardiness, even if black students are more often tardy than white students.

The most relevant section of the letter reads:

“Schools also violate Federal law when they evenhandedly implement facially neutral policies and practices that, although not adopted with the intent to discriminate, nonetheless have an unjustified effect of discriminating against students on the basis of race.

Examples of policies that can raise disparate impact concerns include policies that impose mandatory suspension, expulsion, or citation (e.g., ticketing or other fines or summonses) upon any student who commits a specified offense — such as being tardy to class, being in possession of a cellular phone, being found insubordinate, acting out, or not wearing the proper school uniform.”

Andrew Coulson, director of the Center for Educational Freedom at the Cato Institute, said the letter’s policies, if implemented, would actually harm black children, by making the classrooms they inhabit “more chaotic.”

“The kinds [of kids] who just want to be free to learn in peace, who are not disruptive, have their education injured by the disruptive kids who remain in the classroom,” Coulson said. “And since African American kids are more often assigned to schools like that, they’ll be the ones most hurt.”

Frederick Hess, director of education policy at the American Enterprise Institute, described the letter as “troubling,” and an attempt to intimidate schools into initiating bad policy.

“As best I can tell, they are telling schools that even if you have policies that are clearly neutral, that are clearly evenhanded, that are clearly designed to create safe environments for students and educators, DOJ still might come down on you like a ton of bricks.”

There is absolutely nothing in that directive that looks to help black or Hispanic students, quite the reverse. That’s NOT my issue...I DON’T much care about why a black, like Holder, would institute policies that would harm younger blacks...I have no interest in that. I DO have an interest in the abuse of law, the abuse and violation of “equal protection under the law” and “equality of opportunity” that the flawed policies derived from the poisoned tree of “disparate impact” generate.