The Question Amy Barrett Wasn't Asked: "Do You Believe In Disparate Impact?"
10/18/2020
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Earlier by John Derbyshire: “Disparate Impact”—Key Lie In Our Ruling Class Ideology

If I were on the committee questioning Judge Barrett I would ask her about the Disparate Impact doctrine.

Question One:  Judge, in current American society, black and nonblack citizens present vastly different statistical profiles on many key indices of socialization, most notably school misbehavior, educational outcomes, and crime. Decades of legislation, numerous Supreme Court rulings, and great social-engineering projects have done nothing to shrink these differences.

Our conventional wisdom, jurisprudentially enshrined in the doctrine of Disparate Impact, says that these differences are caused by malice—conscious or unconscious, past or present—on the part of nonblacks. Do you think this doctrine is sound?

That would be my first question. I might follow it up with another, even more impertinent.

Question Two:  Judge, the opinion of the Supreme Court, delivered by Justice Sandra Day O'Connor in Grutter v. Bollinger seventeen years ago, was that, quote: "We expect that 25 years from now, the use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary to further the interest approved today."

The interest referenced there was the University of Michigan Law School's interest in striving to, quote, "achieve that diversity which has the potential to enrich everyone's education and thus make a law school class stronger than the sum of its parts."

Do you agree with the Court's opinion that by year 2028—eight years from now—the use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary for the furtherance of those interests?

Probably Judge Barrett would deflect those questions as skilfully as she did the many others posed to her this week. It would be thrilling to hear them asked in a televised hearing, though.

As thrilling as it would be, the event is inconceivable. Anyone who hinted, even interrogatively, at race realism in a forum as public as that would be chased from the hearing chamber by a baying pack of senators and reporters, bipartisan of course, and would never be allowed on any public platform again. So deep are we sunk in fantasies about human nature.

Excerpted from the latest Radio Derb, now available exclusively through VDARE.com

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