I’ve been talking on this blog as though systemic racism is nothing but an excuse to avoid facing the hard reality that today’s progressives don’t want to face, which is that the “acting white” syndrome (together with other acts of self-sabotage) means that there are few blacks coming through the pipelines into high-status jobs. The people doing the hiring for those jobs would be happy to have blacks, but they seldom see any black candidates, so they either give up or occasionally hire a foreign black, who come from less self-destructive environments. I have based this view on my observations of academia, on what I have seen and heard.
But now I learn from an article in the Washington Post that Ruth Bader Ginsburg had 120 law clerks throughout her time, and only one of them was black. See here. Is this because there were no blacks coming through the pipeline? No, because Kavanaugh has already hired a black as a clerk. And of two other black clerks working in the Supreme Court at the time that article was published (almost two years ago), both clerked for him when he was a judge in the Court of Appeals. The author of the Post article says that Ginsburg was a familiar type to blacks, someone who espouses racial justice but doesn’t carry through, and that she might as well say, “I support racial diversity everywhere except in my chambers.”
What could she possibly have been thinking? Maybe one or more of the following:
1. “I know I’m not racist, but that isn’t true of most other people, so it’s ok for me to impose rules on them that I won’t impose on myself.” This may have been true when she was young, but it is hardly true today.
2. “I happen to like opera, and I choose my clerks on whether they like opera. It’s not my fault that few blacks like opera.” This is what’s called disparate impact.
3. “Gosh, I just never noticed. Sorry.” Then we would expect her to change her ways. Did she? I don’t know.
4. “What’s important is that I am helping blacks with the judicial decisions I make. My hiring practice is unimportant.” I’ve noticed this tendency among liberals and leftists. They make declarations about what they think is important and unimportant, and then they think that their opinion is supposed to be the final word on the matter, even though others fervently disagree with them. She should have been canceled.
I’d also like to know why she received almost no flak for her hiring record, aside from the article at the Post. Surely others knew about her record, yet they said and did nothing to force her to change her ways. Why?
Is academia, to take the segment of society I am most familiar with, rife with people like Ginsburg? Let’s try a parallel issue: worker exploitation. Academia is filled with people who rail against the exploitation of workers, yet there is exploitation of workers in academia. So, maybe academia is filled with people like Ginsburg, who say they aren’t racist, but then never choose to hire blacks. That isn’t what I am hearing from the people I know in academia. It seems to me that academics with habits like Ginsburg’s retired ages ago, to be replaced by people who have less hypocritical practices.
Anyway, to hear academics talk these days, academia is permeated with racism. And so the president of Princeton, Christopher Eisgruber, has declared that Princeton is racist, and in response, as I’m sure many have already heard, the Department of Education is now going to investigate them because a racist institution cannot receive federal funds. See here. And I hope they put Princeton through the wringer. What colleges and universities should be saying is that unlike other segments of society, they are relatively free of racism and that blacks can easily get a job in academia, if only they will do the hard work that is necessary to get them.