In re: "Diversity blather"

Silberman’s post, which went out widely to scores of Court staff and judges, sat unanswered over the next day, until the first volley was sent back not by a fellow judge but by a clerk: courtroom employees who work directly with judges to research and write their opinions.

“Hi Judge Silberman,” began the career-risking reply-all email, “I am one of only five black law clerks in this entire circuit. However, the views I express below are solely my own,” they went on. “Since no one in the court’s leadership has responded to your message, I thought I would give it a try.”

[M]y maternal ancestors were enslaved in Mississippi. While the laws of this nation viewed my ancestors as property, I view them as hostages. In a hostage situation, when someone does something that leads to the freeing of the hostages, I am not sure if the hostages would be concerned as to whether the person that saved them, actually intended to save them. In this instance, as people considered to be property, my ancestors would not have been involved in the philosophical and political debates about Lincoln’s true intentions, or his view on racial equality. For them, and myself, race is not an abstract topic to be debated, so in my view anything that was built to represent white racial superiority, or named after someone who fought to maintain white supremacy (or the Southern economy of slavery), see Photo of Liberty Monument attached, should be removed from high trafficked areas of prominence and placed in museums where they can be part of lessons that put them in context. ...

Experience is substantive. The need for diversity is not about fairness; it's about epistemology.
Adolph Reed, McWhorter, Leiter, Jilani, Henry Farrell –a long list.

Jilani: If our ancestors survived colonialism we can survive a racist editor. "Shhh..."

It's so easy to destroy Jilani, but no one does it.  People don't speak directly. His universalist anti-identity-politics schtick falls flat, from Bari Weiss to Batya Ungar-Sargon on "moral panic". Moral panic is all they're good for. The facts are there but no one shoves them in his face.

He deleted the tweet.