"Everybody started telling her it was wrong and racist to do that. And then she said it was just a joke, and then she took down the doll."

Said one 14-year-old student, quoted in "Fla. teacher allegedly hanged doll of black child by neck to get her students' 'attention': 'It was wrong and racist'" (NY Post).

The teacher — with the fateful name Karen Savage — was fired.

We're told Savage "snatched the [black] doll from a student and, when 'nobody was paying attention,' hanged it from the television."

My question: Why was there a doll in a middle school class? And: Was she hanging it up to put it out of reach or hanging it as symbolic lynching?

"They’re too dumb to know they’re in a bad school."

Said Hunter College professor Allyson Friedman, at Community Education Council meeting, interrupting a black public school student who was speaking out against the proposed closing of her West Side school.

Quoted in "Hunter College to Review Professor’s ‘Abhorrent’ Remarks at Meeting
A student objected to the potential closure of her New York City middle school. The professor, speaking on a hot mic, said, 'They’re too dumb to know they’re in a bad school.' The comment was assailed as racist" (NYT).

It was an unwitting interruption. Friedman "was attending virtually and was unaware that her microphone was turned on." She now says she was "'trying to explain the concept of systemic racism' to her child, who was in the room with her, 'by referencing an example of an obviously racist trope....

"To commemorate the abolition of slavery, the [Citizens Coinage Advisory Committee] had recommended an image of Frederick Douglass on the obverse and shackled and unshackled hands on the reverse."

"To honor women’s suffrage, a World War I-era protester carrying a 'Votes for Women' flag. And to evoke the civil rights movement, a 6-year-old Ruby Bridges, books in hand, helping to desegregate the New Orleans school system in 1960. [Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent, authorized by law to make final decisions about coin designs] opted instead for the more general, and much whiter. For the Mayflower Compact, a Pilgrim couple staring into the distance. For the Revolutionary War, a profile of Washington. For the Declaration of Independence, a profile of Thomas Jefferson. For the Constitution, a profile of James Madison. And for the Gettysburg Address, a profile of Lincoln on the obverse, and on the reverse, a pair of interlocking hands. No shackles."

From "The War on ‘Wokeness’ Comes to the U.S. Mint/The Treasury Department unveiled new coins celebrating America’s 250th anniversary. They failed to include planned designs featuring abolition, women’s suffrage and the civil rights movement" (NYT).

It does seem that the celebration of the 250th anniversary should concentrate on things that happened around 250 years ago, not on later events, but even Bessent's 5 choices include 2 that are not from the era of the founding. The Mayflower Compact is over a century earlier, and the Gettysburg Address is almost a century later. 

This sentence bothered me:

"As a Black woman in economics... I know that part of what’s going on with [Lisa] Cook has to do with the ongoing mistreatment Black women in economics face."

"Back in 2017, Governor Cook and I authored an an op-ed in the New York Times titled 'It Was a Mistake for Me to Choose this Field.' In the piece, we discussed how the disproportionate harassment and discrimination Black women face in the economics discipline as well as the severe underrepresentation we experience. Since writing the piece, the Committee on the Status of Minority Groups in the Economics Profession reported in 2024 that only four Black women graduated with doctoral degrees in economics among 1,385 graduates, or nearly 0.3 percent of doctoral recipients.... I keenly remember when Cook was nominated to the Federal Reserve Board of Governors in 2022. Critics and naysayers loudly questioned her expertise and the bigotry and harassment that she and I wrote about in 2017 became her harsh reality...."

Writes Anna Gifty, in "Trump's attack on Lisa Cook is an attack on Black women/We all stand to lose if he gets away with it" (Public Notice).

"I view Stanford and MIT as mainly political lobbying operations fighting American innovation at this point...."

"The combination of DEI and immigration is politically lethal. When these two forms of discrimination combine, as they have for the last 60 years and on hyperdrive for the last decade, they systematically cut most of the children of the Trump voter base out of any realistic prospect of access to higher education and corporate America.... So of course you have to go overseas to get qualified PhD candidates, most of the native born kids who could have been in that pipeline were cut out of it.... I was born in 1971 in Iowa and grew up in Wisconsin. My cohort of citizens was told that we just had to put up with this as a cost of prior American bigotry even though the discrimination was now aimed at us. And for the most part we did. But the insanity of the last 8 years and in particular the summer of 2020 totally shredded that complacency. And so now my people are furious and not going to take it anymore. The universities are at ground zero of the counterattack since they are BOTH actively discriminating against us AND primary origin points and propagation vectors.... They declared war on 70% of the country and now they’re going to pay the price...."

Wrote Marc Andreessen in a group chat with White House officials and technology leaders.

Quoted in "Tech billionaire Trump adviser Marc Andreesen says universities will ‘pay the price’ for DEI/The investor in a private group chat also criticized Stanford and said colleges are biased against Trump voters: 'My people are furious'" (WaPo).

My prompts to Grok were "What does Marc Andreessen mean by 'my people'?" And then: "That's going to be seen as racist by a lot of people. Why wasn't he smart enough to use different words? One answer would be that he meant to signal to white people that they need to come together and fight for their own interests." Answers: here.

"Race in America is often presented in two buckets: White and non-White. This is an update to the buckets..."

"... that existed for much of American history — White and Black — reflecting how the end of immigration restrictions in the 1960s allowed more Asian and Hispanic and Middle Eastern and you-name-it people to come to the U.S. But there are still two buckets, buckets into which people with mixed racial backgrounds jump (or are dropped) depending on circumstance."

Explains Philip Bump, in "The useful political lesson from Zohran Mamdani’s college application/America’s understanding of race and ethnicity is still woefully simplistic" (WaPo).

ADDED: By the way, I loathe the increasingly common use of the word "bucket" to mean "category." I'm one of those people — perhaps you are too — who see the concrete image in a metaphor. But maybe Bump wants to evoke disgust at the idea of human beings in buckets. His use of "jump" and "dropped" suggests that he does want us to visualize people disrespected and abused. 

"Let the parents decide. My daughter was born August 31st. Had she been born September 1 , she could have started 1st grade a year later."

"Why should this bureaucrat date dictate my child’s education?"

So says the top-rated comment at "D.C. banned ‘redshirting’ years ago. Here’s why people are talking about it. The controversial practice of delaying kindergarten enrollment by a year has been allowed to happen at a small number of schools" (WaPo).

I think the answer to her question why is: It's part of the struggle against (what is perceived as) white privilege: "It is difficult to determine exactly how common it is to delay a child’s enrollment in school. Some national data suggest it’s rare — somewhere between 3.5 percent and 5.5 percent of eligible children do it. Most of those students are boys born in the summer months. Academic redshirting is also more common among White children at schools that serve large numbers of wealthy families, who can afford an extra year of preschool or day care, according to an article published by the American Educational Research Association."

ADDED: The Supreme Court's opinion in Mahmoud v. Taylor, which upheld the parents' right to exempt their own children from the school's gender-ideology indoctrination, relied heavily on Wisconsin v. Yoder, which upheld the parents' right to exempt their child a school requirement that had to do with the age of the child. In Yoder, Wisconsin wanted to compel school attendance up to the age of 16, and the parents, Amish parents, sincerely believed that schooling beyond 8th grade impairs religious salvation. They wanted their children to avoid the "worldly educational environment" and sought a different kind of wisdom and way of life, and the Supreme Court viewed their preference as a constitutional right. I'd thought of Yoder as a marginal case until I saw Mahmoud v. Taylor.

The WaPo commenter's slogan "Let the parents decide" resonates.

Mamdani didn't lie. He is an African American.

I see that among the many attacks on Zohran Mamdani is the charge that he filled out a college application form deceptively. But the fault was in Columbia's form — and, some will say, in its policy of race consciousness:

[A]s a high school senior in 2009 ... [a]sked to identify his race, he checked a box that he was “Asian” but also “Black or African American,” according to internal data derived from a hack of Columbia University that was shared with The New York Times.

I'm reading "Mamdani Identified as Asian and African American on College Application/Zohran Mamdani, the Democrat running for mayor of New York City, was born in Uganda. He doesn’t consider himself Black but said the application didn’t allow for the complexity of his background" (NYT). 

So it depends on what the meaning of "or" is. It could mean "African American" is another way to say "Black," but it could mean check this box if you are either black or African Amercan or both. Mamdani didn't write the form. He filled it out. Now, of course, he knew there was a special advantage to be gained and that "Asian" wasn't much help if any, but he didn't lie. He perceived the potential for selfish advantage and he took it, and now he is offering to bring his advantage-taking skill to the people of New York. Where there is an edge to be gained, Mamdani will grab it for you, the citizens of New York City.

By the way, it is almost surely the case that Columbia wanted applicants to err on the side of claiming to belong to one of the minority groups Columbia gave an advantage to. It may have cared how the class looked when assembled in the auditoriums, and it may have even cared about the much touted educational benefits of a diverse student body. But it's safe to assume that Columbia wanted the racial percentages to look good on paper. If self-advantagers like Mamdani allowed Columbia, back in 2010, to say it had 14.5% "Black or African American" students instead of, say, 10%, Columbia would benefit. What's the problem? Fairness to applicants without the guts to interpret the form in their favor

ADDED: The Times of India explains to its readers:

[I]n America, Blackness is recognised as a political identity born of struggle and oppression. Indian-American identity, by contrast, is often invisible—treated as an immigrant economic niche rather than a racial group needing justice. This is why even Kamala Harris, with a Tamil mother, emphasised her Black identity throughout her rise.

"The Justice Department... signaled that it was reviewing claims of discrimination against white men at The Harvard Law Review..."

"... and accused the renowned publication of destroying evidence in an open investigation. The administration demanded that Harvard 'cease and desist' from interfering. In a series of letters that have not been previously reported, the government also disclosed that it had a 'cooperating witness' inside the student-run journal. That witness now works in the White House under Stephen Miller, the architect of the administration’s domestic policy agenda, Trump officials confirmed.... Harrison Fields, a White House spokesman, praised Mr. Wasserman as a whistle-blower and encouraged more students to speak out. 'Harvard is violating federal law with its discrimination, and a student was brave enough to call them out on this,' Mr. Fields said....."

From "A Stephen Miller Staffer and Tough Talk: Inside Trump’s Latest Attack on Harvard/The Justice Department opened an investigation into the student-run Harvard Law Review. The startling accusations show how the Trump administration is wielding power in pursuit of its political agenda" (NYT)(free-access link).

The Times article links to this Free Beacon article, "Exclusive: Internal Documents Reveal Pervasive Pattern of Racial Discrimination at Harvard Law Review." Excerpt:

We need everyone to do their part, first, by being "truthful."

Santa Ono, the sole finalist for University of Florida president, claims that "systemic racism is embedded in every corner of any institution," and says that "the only way to solve it" is for everyone to admit their complicity in racism and engage in BLM-style self-criticism. pic.twitter.com/T3KtRrvdyw

— Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️ (@realchrisrufo) May 19, 2025

The best part is the background music. It really helped me experience the angst of the perfect blend of sincerity and insincerity. It felt like an excellent satire.

"Everybody has implicit, um, bias."

That "um" is important. He was doing his part by being truthful. Maybe it's not a big part, but it's a part. These parts may add up. If everyone would just exhibit a tiny twinge of discomfort....

"I think of the [antiracist] programming as a kind of secular religion, a progressive penitence."

"The real work of advancing equality is never mentioned. One exercise that consultants recommend is for students to visit a grocery store to observe who is 'enforcing white supremacy culture.'"

Said Steve Wilson, quoted in "He’s a Foe of D.E.I. in Schools but Not a Fan of Trump’s Crusade/Steven Wilson was forced out of the charter school network he started for an essay that conflicted with antiracism initiatives. Five years later, he feels both vindicated and dismayed" (NYT).

Wilson got "canceled" in 2019: 

"Larry David had one of the stupidest op-eds in today's New York Times in which he compares Bill Maher having dinner with Donald Trump with having dinner with Adolf Hitler."

"Um, you know, Larry David, that's a form of Holocaust denial. Comparing Trump to Hitler is a form of Holocaust denial because Trump didn't have gas chambers, he didn't have shooting squads, he didn't take babies, and throw them into ovens, and if you're making a comparison what you're saying is Hitler didn't have any of those things either. So shame — shame — on you Larry David. You know, we used to be friends, boy. No more. And the one thing: about Larry David he stopped being funny, I don't laugh at his jokes anymore because I know they're not jokes. That's who he really is, so they're not jokes...."

Said Alan Dershowitz, trashing Larry David's trashing of Bill Maher's dining with Trump.

Here's David's NYT op-ed "My Dinner With Adolf" — free-access link — which begins:

Imagine my surprise when in the spring of 1939 a letter arrived at my house inviting me to dinner at the Old Chancellery with the world’s most reviled man, Adolf Hitler. I had been a vocal critic of his on the radio from the beginning, pretty much predicting everything he was going to do on the road to dictatorship. No one I knew encouraged me to go. “He’s Hitler. He’s a monster.” But eventually I concluded that hate gets us nowhere. I knew I couldn’t change his views, but we need to talk to the other side....

Read the whole thing. I gave you the free link. Now, I do think what Larry wrote there is funny. It just violates a rule of taste: You shouldn't compare anything to the Holocaust. 

We can talk about why that rule fell out of fashion. But whether Larry David is violating a strict and important rule or just going with the flow of the current taste within his hyper-elite stratum of society is a separate question from whether it's funny.

"Would [Harvard] recognize the Ku Klux Klan? For me, the National Lawyers Guild and the Ku Klux Klan are indistinguishable in terms of ideology...."

"If [Harvard] wouldn't recognize Klansmen or if it wouldn't recognize a group of sexists who called for the end of equality for women, then it shouldn't recognize the pro-Hamas National Lawyers Guild.... If this were the 1950s and there was a university say the University of Mississippi — Old Miss — that was forcibly integrated and it was allowing... some of the Klansmen who were students to harass black students, and the federal government came in and said 'Unless you stop Klansmen from harassing black students we're going to cut off federal funding,' people would be applauding that.'..."

Said Alan Dershowitz, in his latest "Dershow":

"Progressives within the federal bureaucracy, regardless of Democrat or Republican being in the White House, have been advancing left-wing racialist ideologies and DEI programs for decades."

 "And so I don't have any doubt in my mind that what we're doing is, is, is the right course of action. It's defensible intellectually. And certainly I think it is actually a minimal and very restrained response to a long standing problem.... You know, I would certainly like to see much more dramatic action. I would like to see, you know, if, if, if they, if they are anticipating this as a, as a shock, I could easily imagine, you know, 10 times, 20 times, you know, 50 times more dramatic action that is, you know, within the realm of possibility.... We'll see... One thing I've learned is that you, you want to keep the, the, the larger ideas close to the chest and you wanna work incrementally up to them. And so we're doing some A/B testing, we're doing some prototyping. And as those things gain traction, I think it'll open up new lines of action. But what we're doing is really a counter-revolution. It's a revolution against revolution. And so I think we are the responsible party in this. But responsible doesn't mean weak. It doesn't mean self-effacing, it doesn't mean playing nice. I think that actually we are a counter radical force in American life that paradoxically has to use what many see as radical techniques."

Says Christopher Rufo at the end of today's episode of the NYT "Daily" podcast — "The Conservative Activist Pushing Trump to Attack U.S. Colleges."

What "50 times more dramatic action" do you think he has in mind? Criminal prosecution?

That quote is from the end of the interview. At the beginning, Rufo establishes his left-wing credibility:

"A new report is shedding more light on why UW-Madison’s director of Division of Diversity, Equity & Educational Achievement lost his job."

"The report, which was released Friday, details how former DDEEA chief LaVar Charleston spent millions of dollars, handed out bonuses and raises, and never fully communicated any of it to anyone else at the school.... But perhaps the most damning part of the report came from what Charleston spent on training, travel, and events. Which totals over $2.5 million last year alone.... The report does not detail where those trips or training took place, or who was allowed to go. UW-Madison removed Charleston from his job at the DDEEA in January, but did not fire him. He’s currently on leave from his $133,000 job as a professor. He made over $300,000 as DEI boss. The report also details how the university’s governance system allowed Charleston to spend so much money without anyone knowing until afterwards...."

The MacIver Report reports.

Here's the Fox News report: "University of Wisconsin-Madison's ex-diversity officer scrutinized over spending, judgment amid DEI crackdown/Lavar Charleston was removed from his role as chief diversity officer in January, but continues to serve as a faculty member." 

"That’s why middle school math is this flashpoint. It’s the first moment where you potentially make it very obvious and explicit that there are knowledge gaps opening up."

Said Joshua Goodman, an associate professor of education and economics at Boston University, quoted in "The Algebra Problem: How Middle School Math Became a National Flashpoint/Top students can benefit greatly by being offered the subject early. But many districts offer few Black and Latino eighth graders a chance to study it" (NYT).

"What I do know is that even the most peaceful of protests would be treated as outrages if they were interpreted as, say, anti-Black..."

"... even if the message were coded, as in a bunch of people quietly holding up MAGA signs or wearing T-shirts saying 'All Lives Matter.' And besides, calling all this peaceful stretches the use of the word rather implausibly. It’s an odd kind of peace when a local rabbi urges Jewish students to go home as soon as possible, when an Arab-Israeli activist is roughed up on Broadway, when the angry chanting becomes so constant that you almost start not to hear it and it starts to feel normal to see posters and clothing portraying Hamas as heroes. The other night I watched a dad coming from the protest with his little girl, giving a good hard few final snaps on the drum he was carrying, nodding at her in crisp salute, percussing his perspective into her little mind. This is not peaceful..."

Writes John McWhorter, in "I’m a Columbia Professor. The Protests on My Campus Are Not Justice" (NYT).

How to try to achieve racial diversity without trying to achieve racial diversity.

The NYT tried to find out.

 

Here's a free link to the extensive article, elaborately festooned with interactive graphics.

"Children at a Brooklyn public elementary school are being taught revolutionary politics and communist terms from a Black Lives Matter coloring book..."

"Last week, teachers at PS 321—the kindergarten through fifth grade school in Park Slope—supplied students with the coloring book, What We Believe, as part of a lesson for Black History Month.Lessons in the coloring book tell children to reflect on Black Lives Matter’s 13 principles. Some of the exercises, parents said, appear innocuous; a page about 'Restorative Justice,' for example, asks students: 'Why is it important to offer to forgive someone?' But another, entitled 'Transgender Affirming,' instructs students to read the book When Aidan Became a Brother about a girl who transitions to a boy, and then answer questions on a worksheet like, 'How do you feel when someone tells you what you can or can’t do based on your gender?'"

"Kids Get Schooled on Radical Politics/Students at a public elementary school in Brooklyn are learning revolutionary theory from a Black Lives Matter coloring book."

I don't see "transgender affirming" ideology in the question "How do you feel when someone tells you what you can or can’t do based on your gender?" The question strongly implies that you can do what you want regardless of gender and that it is ignorant to associate preferences and interests with gender. That undercuts those who think that that they have an inward gender that is different from their physical bodily sex. It seems to me that it is encouraging kids to see themselves and others as individuals with whatever feelings and behavior they happen to have. It seems to be attacking the motivation to take the transgender route. 

"For more than 40 years, our nation’s military leaders have determined that a diverse Army officer corps is a national-security imperative..."

"... and that achieving that diversity requires limited consideration of race in selecting those who join the Army as cadets at the United States Military Academy at West Point.... A lack of diversity in leadership can jeopardize the Army’s ability to win wars.... [D]ecades of unaddressed internal racial tension erupted during the Vietnam War...."

Wrote Solicitor General Elizabeth B. Prelogar, quoted in "Supreme Court Won’t Block Use of Race in West Point Admissions for Now/The court rejected an emergency request to temporarily bar the military academy from using race in admissions while a lower-court lawsuit proceeds" (NYT).

The recent Harvard and UNC cases did not determine the outcome. When it comes to the military, there is different potential to articulate a compelling government interest in race-based admissions.

Remember this passage from Grutter v. Bollinger (2003)(overruled in the Harvard and UNC case):