Racist Email Rocks Harvard Law School

The legal world was shaken today by the discovery that a promising third-year student at Harvard Law School had unleashed a group email to a number of other law students in which she discussed at some length the purported genetic and intellectual inferiority of African Americans. These views were all the more remarkable coming from a young woman rumored to be a candidate for a clerkship with a Judge on the prestigious United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. (The only Court higher than a United States Court of Appeals is the Supreme Court, and the Ninth Circuit is generally considered to be one of the most liberal Circuits in the country.) The statements in the email were shocking in themselves, but more shocking was the fact that they were coming out of Harvard Law School, a supposed bastion of liberal enlightenment and the bellwether for legal education in America. The Law School has been put on the defensive to the point that Harvard Law School Dean Martha Minow, a possible candidate for the Supreme Court, felt compelled to make an official statement.

Despite being dressed up in a certain amount of scientific jargon, however, such sentiments are nothing new to America, and in fact served as a principal justification for Southern entry into the Civil War. Particularly noteworthy was Confederate Vice President Alexander H. Stephens' Corner-stone Speech in Savannah, Georgia, on March 21, 1861, proclaiming the Southern States to be founded on the principle of white supremacy. In relevant part, Stephens explained his theory of white supremacy as follows:

"Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth. This truth has been slow in the process of its development, like all other truths in the various departments of science. It has been so even amongst us. Many who hear me, perhaps, can recollect well, that this truth was not generally admitted, even within their day. The errors of the past generation still clung to many as late as twenty years ago. Those at the North, who still cling to these errors, with a zeal above knowledge, we justly denominate fanatics. All fanaticism springs from an aberration of the mind from a defect in reasoning. It is a species of insanity. One of the most striking characteristics of insanity, in many instances, is forming correct conclusions from fancied or erroneous premises; so with the anti-slavery fanatics. Their conclusions are right if their premises were. They assume that the negro is equal, and hence conclude that he is entitled to equal privileges and rights with the white man. If their premises were correct, their conclusions would be logical and just but their premise being wrong, their whole argument fails. I recollect once of having heard a gentleman from one of the northern States, of great power and ability, announce in the House of Representatives, with imposing effect, that we of the South would be compelled, ultimately, to yield upon this subject of slavery, that it was as impossible to war successfully against a principle in politics, as it was in physics or mechanics. That the principle would ultimately prevail. That we, in maintaining slavery as it exists with us, were warring against a principle, a principle founded in nature, the principle of the equality of men. The reply I made to him was, that upon his own grounds, we should, ultimately, succeed, and that he and his associates, in this crusade against our institutions, would ultimately fail. The truth announced, that it was as impossible to war successfully against a principle in politics as it was in physics and mechanics, I admitted; but told him that it was he, and those acting with him, who were warring against a principle. They were attempting to make things equal which the Creator had made unequal."

Since the Southern defeat in the Civil War, white racists have been more hesitant to avow such sentiments openly. Today's news, however, shows that a young, white woman in America's most privileged educational institution, the crucible of the profession dedicated to upholding the rule of law, could casually espouse justifications in support of white supremacy and assume they would not arouse objections among her fellow students. A candid observer of white America would not be surprised that such attitudes, while decried when they become public, are widely held, at least tacitly, among white Americans, and occasionally even receive a patina of intellectual respectability with the publication of such books as the controversial Bell Curve published in the mid-nineties.

It would be comforting to believe that notions of racial inferiority -- indeed, of race as a biological concept -- had been laid to rest as part of our benighted past, or that they had been effectively marginalized to the point where they were limited to such economically disenfranchised and intellectually impoverished groups as the Tea Party and the Klan. To castigate the young woman at Harvard without a deeper examination of our beliefs as a society is to miss half the point; as a privileged young white woman at America's most elite institution, who appeared destined to dwell in the inner sanctum of privilege and power, she reveals that the corrosive stain of racism in the white American soul is with us yet, and that racism is a problem we have yet to deal with as a people not merely as a person. Thanks in part to such courageous leaders as Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King, Jr., and John Lewis, we have been to the mountaintop, but we are still a long way from the Promised Land.

Thanks to my friend Thomas Nephew for first pointing me in the direction of the Corner-stone speech. (He is otherwise not responsible for any of the views in this post, which are mine.)