The Association of American Law Schools won’t put on a panel with four white men — it would consider the panel to lack racial and gender diversity. But it will put on a panel consisting entirely of one race, gender, and ideology: left-wing black women only. Even though a panel consisting entirely of black women has no more diversity than a panel consisting entirely of white men.
On August 17, AALS is hosting a webinar on new constitutional law books for its Constitutional Law section. But none of the books are about constitutional law. Why is it hosting the panel, then? Because it provides an opportunity to showcase what the AALS views as racial diversity — the panel consists of four left-wing black women who are all hostile to the police: Dorothy Roberts, Kristin Henning, Sheryll Cashin, and Derecka Purnell. For example, Purnell’s book Becoming Abolitionists advocates abolishing the police, and calls for “the end of the policing itself.” Similarly, Dorothy Roberts wants to abolish the police and the child welfare system, as she makes clear in her book Torn Apart: How the Child Welfare System Destroys Black Families — and How Abolition Can Build a Safer World. She says we need “to abolish the child welfare system” to “liberate Black communities.”
This left-wing panel is as ideologically uniform and devoid of diversity as it could possibly be — even more so than today’s ideologically uniform universities, where faculty are overwhelmingly progressives or leftists.
Their books seem to assume that the higher black incarceration rate and higher rate of reported child abuse in the black community is proof of racism, in and of itself. But this is a mistaken assumption: statisticians know different racial groups have different crime rates. In homicide crimes, “the offending rates for blacks were more than 7 times higher than the rates for whites” between 1976 and 2005, according to the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics. (See BJS, Homicide Trends in the United States).
Similarly, a 2021 study by the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics found that although blacks are arrested for serious nonfatal violent crimes at more than twice the rate of people in general, this is not due to racism. Instead, arrests are correctly “proportional” to the actual crime rate (which is higher among blacks than among whites), and to the crimes actually reported to the police, which often are committed by black offenders. As it noted, “white and black people were arrested proportionate to their involvement in serious nonfatal violent crime overall and proportionate to their involvement in serious nonfatal violent crime reported to police.” (See Allen J. Beck, Race and Ethnicity of Violent Crime Offenders and Arrestees, 2018).
