Actually, the whole conference is online now, so a quick thread. Here's the always excellent and nuanced Randall Kennedy on race and freedom of expression
The next session was "What are the empirical facts about lack of intellectual diversity in academia and what are the causes of existing imbalances?"
"To what degree is this a problem?" panel
Here is Nancy Costello and Jonathan Friedman on "What is to be done about it?"
Here's Ulrich Baer and Keith Whittington debating whether free speech is the right ideal to champion on campus
And finally, here's @Musa_alGharbi and I discussing "what is to be done" about suboptimal viewpoint diversity on campus My proscription isn't one that's widely known.
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At The Wedge, it's rare to see someone turn right. After all, if you turn right your hurtling toward a rock jetty. The day I was there, I saw just one person turn right all afternoon. A look at his ride in twelve tweets, starting here:
At first the ride seemed uneventful. But at The Wedge, there's the wave coming in from the ocean and the mini-wave bouncing back off the jetty. Here he is looking at that mini-wave:
It bears mentioning that he's moving pretty fast here.
Here's my article urging that we investigate police killings in the same way that we investigate plane crashes. theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/… In this thread I'll engage a critique from the left:
First, there is a bit of common ground here, in that the writer suggests some reforms I've repeatedly advocated. For example: theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/… Nothing about these reforms is incompatible with adding an NTSB-like approach.
Second, the idea that there is an expert consensus for the writer's views is simply incorrect. Police killings are a hugely complicated phenomenon, criminologists argue a lot about them, treating them all as "murders" is simply false, and the writer doesn't even mention
Some thoughts on a reader email that I just received (apropos this interview with a Black school board candidate theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/…), which begins:
First, if there's a viewpoint that black as well as white people hold, isn't "white fragility" a very strange name to give it?
Second, if you're a black kid with rich, highly educated parents, attending school in a wealthy suburban district, there is, in fact, no system that forecloses your ability to be a lawyer, let alone *the same system* as enslaved people faced.
I interviewed Ndona Muboyayi. She worries that the public school system is teaching her Black children in ways that disempower them while prejudicially stereotyping whites.
Reflecting on an ascendant term, she told me, "It’s white supremacy to teach Black and brown children that they’re weak, they’re victims, it isn’t up to them if they get ahead. And it teaches the white children that the Black and brown children are weak!"
A thread on sardonic videos of OSHA violations, a TikTok trend that began with an ingenious twist on a Willy Wonka song:
At least 4 elements are necessary for this thread: 1) people doing things of dubious safety and legality 2) that they videotape because of those qualities 3) and upload to the Internet 4) and set to public.
Many require multiple willing participants and look kinda fun.
We in the anti-racism coalition should reject the faction that emphasizes policing discourse, identifying villains, and punishing individuals for violating elite politeness norms, and instead champion structural changes that help people.
Examples:
A software bug is keeping people in prison for longer than they ought to be there. But it has gotten very little attention because there's no one in particular to pillory as a Bad Person. kjzz.org/content/166098…
This paper persuasively shows a kind of structural racism in jury selection and proposes a remedy that would be very easy to implement nber.org/papers/w28572 But it too has gotten very little attention