Pun Salad

The National Basketball Association hates racism. They are very clear about this. In the playoffs being played in the bubble in Orlando, “Black Lives Matter” is emblazoned not just on the shirts players wear but on the court itself.

So when the Los Angeles Clippers’ Montrezl Harrell clearly called Dallas Maverick Luka Doncic a “bitch ass white boy” during a recent game, it should be obvious what the NBA reaction would be: Nothing. Absolutely nothing.

The President’s Cabinet of the University of Southern Maine, including President Glenn Cummings and several other administrators, sent a message to its students pledging its support of the Black Lives Matter movement and encouraging students to do the same. 

The pledge cites late Georgia Congressman and civil rights icon John Lewis’ support of the movement and proclaims that “we must add our voices to the Black Lives Matter Movement.” The cabinet went on to condemn the phrase “all lives matter” as “hurtful” and claims that it “misses the point.”

Northeastern University sent an email to over more than 100 undergraduate students, threatening to rescind their admission offers should they choose to participate in parties.

An Instagram account called Northeastern Class of 2024 posted a poll, asking whether the page’s followers would be willing to participate in parties during the fall semester. The Boston Globe reported that of the respondents, 115 said that they intended to party. After Northeastern became aware of the poll, the school reached out to the pollster, who turned over the names of the students who answered “yes.” 

In other words, the new antiracism requires that we take our eyes off what antidiscrimination work is all about—combating invidious discrimination—and focus instead on social outcomes that arise in the absence of racial preferences. The results can be seen in the report I sent Congress last month on behalf of the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights. Over the past three fiscal years, OCR resolved 4,656 complaints against institutions, requiring them to redress discriminatory practices. This is 1,507 more than OCR achieved during the preceding three years under an administration generally aligned with antiracist thinking. In other words, OCR is now requiring far more schools to change discriminatory policies and practices. We closed twice as many school-discipline cases and six times as many sexual-violence cases than the prior administration.

Why is that? It turns out there is a price to be paid when we take our eyes off racial (or sex) discrimination. The price, which victims of discrimination paid during earlier years, is that enforcement agencies were unable to resolve discrimination cases because they were too focused on statistical disparities and social change. Civil-rights enforcers should address systemic problems where appropriate, as in major sexual-violence investigations that I oversaw at Michigan State University and in the Chicago Public Schools. When we resolve such systemic failures, however, we are addressing a large number of individual claims, rather than looking at statistical disparities and presuming structural problems. The primary focus of antidiscrimination, however, must be on mistreatment of individuals.

Election years bring their own unique array of annoyances. When the most powerful office on the planet is on the line, partisans become more unbearable than usual, our televisions and laptops become inundated with ads, and our social-media squabbles increase in both volume and intensity. With Donald Trump up for reelection, 2020 has been and will continue to be exceptional in this respect.

Like the last election, and the one before that, this is the “most important of our lives.” Because of its importance, many in the pundit class have decided that you, the voter — sweet, innocent, stupid you — are incapable of making this consequential decision for yourself. But there are two problems for these pundits. The first is that they cannot make your choice for you. The second is that they are competing with other pundits, pundits who would have you vote for evil. To win, they need to make you feel bad enough to agree with them prior to November 3, and they need to be more forceful in their condemnations of any who disagree with them than their counterparts on the other side of the aisle.