"[T]he sudden, rapid, stunning shift in the belief system of the American elites... has sent the whole society into a profound cultural dislocation."

"It is, in essence, an ongoing moral panic against the specter of 'white supremacy,' which is now bizarrely regarded as an accurate description of the largest, freest, most successful multiracial democracy in human history.... The elites, increasingly sequestered within one political party and one media monoculture, educated by colleges and private schools that have become hermetically sealed against any non-left dissent, have had a 'social justice reckoning' these past few years. And they have been ideologically transformed, with countless cascading consequences. Take it from a NYT woke star, Kara Swisher, who celebrated this week that 'the country’s social justice movement is reshaping how we talk about, well, everything.' She’s right — and certainly about the NYT and all mainstream journalism.... The reason 'critical race theory' is a decent approximation for this new orthodoxy is that it was precisely this exasperation with liberalism’s seeming inability to end racial inequality in a generation that prompted Derrick Bell et al. to come up with the term in the first place, and Kimberlé Crenshaw to subsequently universalize it beyond race to every other possible dimension of human identity ('intersectionality'). A specter of invisible and unfalsifiable 'systems' and 'structures' and 'internal biases' arrived to hover over the world...."

Writes Andrew Sullivan in "What Happened To You?/The radicalization of the American elite against liberalism" (Substack).

"Mr. Greenberg was neither the first white nor the first Jew to work for the civil rights of blacks. But he was one of the most powerful white figures..."

"... in the movement in the 1960s and ’70s, a distinction that led to friction with both blacks and Jews. Still, Mr. Greenberg helped achieve through the courts what the political system had denied Southern blacks: voting rights, equal pay for equal work, impartial juries, equal access to medical care, equal access to schools and other benefits of citizenship broadly enjoyed by whites."

From the NYT obituary for the great civil rights lawyer Jack Greenberg.

How the NYT called Jill Abramson — its axed executive editor — a bitch.

This "all the news that's fit to print" business is tricky... especially when you're firing your first-ever! female executive editor and replacing her with your first-ever! black executive editor. The fit-to-print article — "Times Ousts Its Executive Editor, Elevating Second in Command" — is some of the best raw material for interpreters of crafty text that I have ever seen.

How did the NYT call Jill Abramson a bitch? Well, it all started with the unfit-to-print image of the new executive editor, Dean Baquet, as the angry black man. I'm going to do a little editing and cut this text down to highlight the "angry black man" story buried within the plentiful neutral verbiage:

Ms. Abramson... had clashes with Mr. Baquet.... Mr. Baquet had become angered over a decision by Ms. Abramson to make a job offer to a senior editor from The Guardian, Janine Gibson, and install her alongside him in a co-managing editor position without consulting him. 

Note that the cause for anger is strong and blatant. That sentence is written to put Abramson clearly in the wrong and to give Baquet reason for his outrage. Someone is installed — great verb! — next to you, in a co-position with you and there has been no discussion with you about why this new work structure is needed? Anyone should read that as a message that you can't do your job right, and we don't even want to tell you; we're just going to work around you. When that is done to a black man, he can and should at least speculate that the disrespect has a racial component. (Remember when constitutional law professors at Stanford set up — on the sly — an extra constitutional law study program for students assigned to Derrick Bell's constitutional law class?)

The NYT article says about this incident — the installation of a white female right next to Baquet — "It escalated the conflict between them and rose to the attention of Mr. Sulzberger." Again, great verbs. No person is assigned the action, but things elevate — they escalate and rise. Human agency evanesces. Do not be so racist as to perceive an angry black man, or if you do, know that he is righteously angry at the indignity, embarrassment, and insult visited upon him. But no, no, no, please do not dare to perceive the NYT as discriminating against the black man. Or... if you must... that lady did it. That lady who is gone.

Maybe this is how the world works these days (or how America works anyway). If there's any racism, it's lodged in one person, and that person is lopped off. (You know, the Donald Sterling routine.)

Now, we never heard a public peep out of Baquet, but I suspect that the way "It... rose to the attention of Mr. Sulzberger" is that Baquet laid it out for Sulzberger. The Times is going to look awful for what it did to the black man, unless that woman is out before the story breaks, and the black man — who was humiliated when his white female superior diminished him with the installation of another white female — suddenly trumps both of those ladies. Put the lid on this embarrassing story. Out with the woman — and lock in her silence.

Ms. Abramson did not return messages seeking comment. As part of a settlement agreement between her and the paper, neither side would go into detail about her firing.

Problem solved! No sexism or racism at the NYT. It's so intra-Times: Everyone has agreed with each other that no one is going to talk about it. What about us, the reading public? The leaks with undisclosed sources are already springing. I'm merely speculating based on the clues that are apparent in this wonderful NYT article.

Let's continue:

Mr. Baquet thanked Ms. Abramson, who was not present at the announcement, for teaching him “the value of great ambition” and then added that John Carroll, whom he worked for at The Los Angeles Times, “told me that great editors can also be humane editors.”

Let me paraphrase that: Jill was too ambitious. It sparked my ambition, and I played my hand and I won. And you know you'll be better off, because unlike Jill, I'm humane.

Meaner paraphrase: Jill was outrageously pushy, and it pushed me — humane me — to push back, and now you've got an executive editor who is not a bitch.

With Mr. Sulzberger more closely monitoring her stewardship, tensions between Ms. Abramson and Mr. Baquet escalated. In one publicized incident, he angrily slammed his hand against a wall in the newsroom. He had been under consideration for the lead job when Ms. Abramson was selected and, according to people familiar with his thinking, he was growing frustrated working with her.

So there was a big blowup. What happened? It was "publicized," and we're given a link. Clicking, we see it takes us out of the pleasant environs of the New York Times, over to the rougher place that is Politico. Here is an article by Dylan Byers from a year ago, and it's by linking to Byers that the NYT has found its way to call Abramson a bitch. Here's where we find the NYT sources dropping the unfit-to-print bits:

More than a dozen current and former members of the editorial staff, all of whom spoke to POLITICO on the condition of anonymity, described her as stubborn and condescending, saying they found her difficult to work with. If Baquet had burst out of the office in a huff, many said, it was likely because Abramson had been unreasonable.

There was a scene between Abramson and Baquet, but everyone who knows them and is talking is saying it must be Abramson's deficiencies. What they saw was Baquet enraged enough to slam his hand on the wall, but everyone's saying he's not that kind of guy. If he acted out, the woman made him do it. (By the way, that's an excuse that demands the deployment of the cliché "as old as Adam.")

More from Politco's Byers:

“Every editor has a story about how she’s blown up in a meeting,” one reporter said. “Jill can be impossible,” said another staffer....

At times, ["staffers"] say, her attitude toward editors and reporters leaves everyone feeling demoralized; on other occasions, she can seem disengaged or uncaring....

“I think there’s a really easy caricature that some people have bought into, of the bitchy woman character and the guy who is sort of calmer,” [Baquet] said. “That, I think, is a little bit of an unfair caricature.”

A bit! But there it is. The "bitchy woman." It's what the "staffers" believe. It's out of the mouth of Baquet and yet HE didn't say it. It's what those other people think, those unnamed people, those people who also think that he is "sort of calmer." He's not the angry black man, says the man apparently nobody thinks is angry, even though he burst out of a meeting and slammed his hand on the wall. He's the one everyone sees as calm, he says so himself. And he's even nice enough — what a nice man! — to say that the beliefs of the unnamed staffers whose caricatures he's characterizing are a bit unfair.

And that's how the NYT called Jill Abramson a bitch — by linking out to Politico, where the new executive editor — the calm and humane Dean Baquet — is quoted paraphrasing the opinions of some people.

CORRECTION:  The Politico article was a year and 3 weeks ago, not, as originally stated, 3 weeks ago. Also, in the 7th paragraph, I say "we never heard a public peep out of Baquet," but the quote discussed at the end of the post could be considered a peep. I'm just acknowledging, not correcting, that, because the "peep" that I say was not heard was an accusation of race discrimination, which I speculated may have been leveled in Baquet's private meetings with Sulzberger, after which (apparently) Sulzberger took to "monitoring" Abramson "more closely." The quotes Baquet gave to Politico do not play the race card.

For at least 6 years, during Elizabeth Warren's tenure at Harvard Law School, Harvard University reported that there was a Native American woman at the law school.

Boston Globe reports on documents Harvard filed with the federal government:

The US Department of Labor requires large employers to collect diversity statistics annually and suggests they be based on employees’ classification of themselves. In cases in which employees do not self-identify, federal regulations allow some administrators to make judgment calls on the correct categories using “employment records or observer identification.’’

The administrator responsible for Harvard Law School’s faculty diversity statistics from 1996 to 2004, the period in question, was Alan Ray, a citizen of the Cherokee Nation who, like Warren, has fair skin, blue eyes, and Oklahoma roots.

But Ray, now president of Elmhurst College in Illinois, said in a statement that he “did not encourage the Law School to list any faculty member as one particular race or ethnicity, including Professor Warren.’’ He further said through a spokeswoman that he “never encouraged any faculty member to list himself or herself in a particular way.’’ Ray added that Harvard “always accepted whatever identification a faculty member wanted to provide,’’ a characterization another highly placed former Harvard administrator backed up.

The linked article also recounts the history of Harvard Law's perceived diversity problem circa 1990, just before Warren arrived. Lawprof Derrick Bell had gone on "strike" (unpaid leave) to protest, some students brought a lawsuit (unsuccessful), and the U.S. Department of Labor audited what the article calls "Harvard's diversity practices" and found 10 violations. Warren arrived in 1992 (as a visiting professor), at which point she "had been listing herself for seven years as a minority in a legal directory often used by law recruiters to make diversity-friendly hires." She was still on that list when Harvard Law gave her a permanent position in 1995.

In 1996, law school news director Mike Chmura, speaking to the Harvard Crimson, identified Warren as a Native American professor.

In 1997, the Fordham Law Review, citing Chmura, referred to Warren as Harvard Law’s “first woman of color.’’

I find it hard to believe that — after all the uproar over diversity in 1990 — that the law school could quietly pass off Warren as its "first woman of color." There were so many people who were genuinely angry over the lack of diversity. Why would they have tolerated the school making such a lame assertion? Wouldn't they have wanted to keep up the pressure? If you were at Harvard in the 1990s, what do you remember about this?

The Globe article has more detail about Harvard's "affirmative action plan," a 1999 document, which "lists one Native American senior professor at the entire university," and, in a section on the law school, specifies that there is "a single Native American senior professor." This must be Warren, right? But this document also defines Native American in a way that would not include Warren: "a person having origins in any of the original peoples of North America and who maintains cultural identification through tribal affiliation or community recognition."

The inference is that Harvard itself lied on diversity documents filed with the federal government (and posted on line for years).  Note that this information is used to recruit students, some of whom may care a great deal about whether there are faculty who seem as though they will be special mentors. I wonder whether there were students who chose Harvard and sought out Warren as a mentor because of her perceived status as a Native American.

There's something very odd here. A lot of things, actually. This isn't just about whether Elizabeth Warren is a worthy candidate for the U.S. Senate. This is about more general chicanery about diversity at Harvard and even more general deception and manipulation in the politics of diversity.

"[T]he quiet succor Obama gave to black homophobes with his 'evolving' line on gay marriage was always just as ugly as it was unnecessary..."

... writes John McWhorter article in TNR.

[P]lus, for someone of his demographic and biography, it was more than a little fake. (Did the Harvard Law Review Editor hugging Derrick Bell in that 1991 video really think two men shouldn’t be allowed to get married?)

I love the totally gratuitous homoeroticism McWhorter allowed into his question by having the men hugging.

"Someone of his demographic and biography" is an unusual phrase. Who else has Obama's biography? McWhorter speaks as if this is the sort of person we just know, from experience. But Obama is unique in the history of the world. Who knows who the authentic Obama is? I've read his autobiography, and I got the impression that he himself could never figure it out, and I'm deprived of the actual answer to the question whether he was conning us, and I barely have a guess whether he knew if he was.

If Obama believes in same-sex marriage... what does that even mean for someone of his demographic and biography? Of course, if you go to Harvard Law School and merge/mingle with the elite you get the message of what you're supposed to think, but then... do you really think it? Do you lose touch with what you really think? Of does even that question disguise the real question which is whether there's a real you at the core who thinks anything at all?

(And I'm saying that as a lawprof who has lived amidst the lawprof liberals for more than 3 decades now and who willingly admits that I lost track of what I really thought for myself or whether there was a true self that thought anything at all.)

PJ Media's stupid effort to attack Obama through Derrick Bell's book "Afrolantica Legacies."

Did anyone over there realize how dumb this is?

As a 28-year-old student at Harvard Law Barack Obama supported the activism of Professor Derrick Bell and urged his peers to open their hearts and minds to the words of Critical Race Theory's founder.

I've already blogged about the stupidity of attributing significance to the student who gave a nice introduction to a venerable professor. I won't repeat that. This is about PJ Media's failure to see that Bell is attacking liberals. It's stupid to tear down Bell as a way to attack Democrats. Bell is attacking Democrats!

PJ Media is reading one of the lesser Bell works, "Afrolantica Legacies." It's not available in Kindle, or I'd buy a copy right now, but I see that it's like about the 7 millionth best-selling book over at Amazon right now. The book is a collection of essays, and PJM displays photos of some pages in the book, including a collection of "rules of racial preservation," which is the first thing the PJM article decides to trash. But let's look at Bell's first rule:

No matter how justified by racial injustices they are intended to remedy, civil rights policies, including affirmative action, are implemented only when they further the interests of whites.

Hello? Who implements these race-based policies like affirmative action? Liberals! Derrick Bell is saying that white people do this when and only when it works for their advantage! The critical race thinking you're invited to do here is to understand how, when white people purport to advance black people, they are really exploiting black people for their own advantage. This is an attack on the work of the Democratic Party and other liberals. Conservatives are on the sidelines of this battle.

I am reminded of the dissenting opinion that Clarence Thomas wrote in Grutter v. Bollinger, the case that upheld the affirmative action admissions at the University of Michigan Law School:

"Breitbart’s Obama Video Is a Total Dud."

Says Brett Smiley at New York Magazine.

I agree. In the video — which appears in long form at the link — Obama is a Harvard Law student introducing a highly respected Harvard Law professor, and he does an outstanding job, displaying the  now-familiar charm, and even breaking the tension and getting a laugh from a crowd of protesters that had been displaying a grim, aggrieved demeanor. I am impressed by Obama's mildness and moderation in this video, and I remember very well the controversy that led to Professor Derrick Bell's protest in 1990. I was a visiting professor at Boston University Law School in the fall of 1990, and I used to attend a reading group called "FemCrits" that included BU, Harvard, and other female law professors in the area. I saw and heard plenty of the radical lawprofs of that era, and Barack Obama does not come across as their acolyte. He seems independently well-grounded and perhaps even aloof from the controversy. Obama had just been elected president of the Harvard Law Review, its first black president. That put him in a position where he may have been called upon to do the introduction, and he handles the task with diplomacy and aplomb. What I see in that video is a great and natural politician, not some hardcore radical.

Goodbye to Derrick Bell.

The eminent law professor has died.

He was a pioneer of critical race theory — a body of legal scholarship that explored how racism is embedded in laws and legal institutions, even those intended to lessen the effects of past injustice. Mr. Bell “set the agenda in many ways for scholarship on race in the academy, not just the legal academy,” said Lani Guinier, the first black woman hired to join the Harvard Law School’s tenured faculty, in an interview on Wednesday....

Mr. Bell’s core beliefs included what he called “the interest convergence dilemma” — the idea that whites would not support efforts to improve the position of blacks unless it was in their interest....

Much of Mr. Bell’s scholarship rejected dry legal analysis in favor of allegorical stories....

One his best-known parables is “The Space Traders,” which appeared in his 1992 book, “Faces at the Bottom of the Well: The Permanence of Racism.” In the story, as Mr. Bell later described it, creatures from another planet offer the United States “enough gold to retire the national debt, a magic chemical that will cleanse America’s polluted skies and waters, and a limitless source of safe energy to replace our dwindling reserves” in exchange for one thing: its black population, which would be sent to outer space. The white population accepts the offer by an overwhelming margin....

Not everyone welcomed the move to narrative and allegory in legal scholarship. In 1997, Richard Posner, the conservative law professor and appeals court judge, wrote in The New Republic that “by repudiating reasoned argumentation,” storytellers like Mr. Bell “reinforce stereotypes about the intellectual capacities of nonwhites."

Prof. Bell was 80.