UPenn law professor Amy Wax is coming to UNC on Monday to talk about her latest book, Race, Wrongs, and Remedies: Group Justice in the 21st Century.
At first glance, it sounds like something progressive and cool. But.
Wax argues that discrimination against blacks in the U.S. has dramatically abated and that the most important factors impeding black progress are behavioral: low educational attainment, poor socialization and work habits, drug use, criminality, paternal abandonment, and non-marital childbearing. [Event page]
It doesn't sound like she has changed her tune much from the 2007 paper she wrote, Engines of Inequality: Class, Race, and Family Structure (which, once again, that title is totally progressive/pc/feminist bait, and you think it is going to be all awesome and about intersectionality and systemic oppression and lingering institutional racism, but NO):
The article concludes that society-wide changes in economic conditions or social expectations cannot account for these patterns. Rather, for reasons that are poorly understood, cultural disparities have emerged by class and race in attitudes and behaviors surrounding family, sexuality, and reproduction. These disparities will likely fuel social and economic inequality and contribute to disparities in children's life prospects for decades to come. [Abstract]
Maybe Wax influenced that David Brooks column on Haiti that got Matt Taibbi (and everyone else) outraged. According to Taibbi's translation, Brooks was basically saying:
Haitians are a bunch of lazy niggers who can’t keep their dongs in their pants and probably wouldn’t be pancaked under fifty tons of rubble if they had spent a little more time over the years listening to the clarion call of white progress, and learning to use a freaking T-square, instead of singing and dancing and dabbling in not-entirely-Christian religions and making babies all the fucking time. I know I’m supposed to respect other cultures and keep my mouth shut about this stuff, but my penis is only four and a third inches long when fully engorged and so I’m kind of at the end of my patience just generally, especially when it comes to “progress-resistant” cultures.
See? This is what Wax will probably be getting at. I wonder why students aren't all outraged about this like they were when Tancredo came to campus. Maybe because Wax's bigotry is better veiled/buried in boring ass law review articles?
Anyway. What is the Federalist Society thinking? I don't see how she is relevant to their so-called organizational aims. Not really sure how this has anything to do with a more fundamentalist/originalist (is that a word?) interpretation of the Constitution. And did they think other faculty members/students here wouldn't get wind of this and judge them? Or am I naive, is this acceptable and cool with most law students?
So I will be there on Monday to hear this. I am looking forward to an uncomfortable q+a session wherein some of our faculty, or any of our other students, ask this lady where the hell she gets off spewing this stuff.
Posts
