by Charles C. Johnson
(Daily Caller) - A course description for “Current Issues in Racism and the Law,” a class Barack Obama taught at the University of Chicago Law School 12 times between 1992 and 2004, categorized race relations in the United States as “institutional racism in American society.”
Obama taught the two-hour seminar course more often than his other two classes, “Constitutional Law III: Equal Protection and Substantive Due Process” and “Voting Rights and the Democratic Process.” He taught those eight times beginning in 1996 and six times beginning in 1997, respectively.
The summary of Obama’s course on racism, likely authored by the future president himself, appeared in the law school’s 1995-1996 course catalog.
It promised students they would “examine current problems in American race relations and the role the law has played in structuring the race debate.”
It also promised an examination of “the continued emphasis on statutory solutions to racism” that have been emphasized at the expense of “potentially richer political, economic, and cultural approaches.”
“[C]an minorities afford to shift their emphasis,” it asked, “given the continued prevalence of racism in society?”
“Can, and should, the existing concepts of American jurisprudence provide racial minorities more than formal equality through the courts?”
The course’s requirements included writing “papers that evaluate how the legal system has dealt with particular incidents of racism and that discuss the comparative merits of litigation, legislation, and market solutions to the problems of institutional racism in American society.”
The course’s presumption that the legal profession has a duty to equalize minorities with the general population is a hallmark of Critical Race Theory, the academic idea that the law itself is an instrument of the powerful against the powerless, rather than an effort to seek justice.
The phrase “institutional racism” recalls the work of Derrick Bell, a controversial Harvard Law school professor whom Obama once introduced as a speaker during 1991 “diversity” protests at Harvard Law School, and whose Saturday seminars Obama attended as a law student.
New York Times reporter Jody Kantor released other materials from the course in 2008 showing that Obama taught Bell’s work, in particular Bell’s interpretations of seminal civil rights case law.
An August 2012 analysis of the materials Kantor published, co-authored by a University of North Carolina law professor and a law student, suggests that the readings Obama assigned and the group presentation topics he suggested reveal his strong interest in Critical Race Theory, also called CRT.
“[T]he prevalence of presentation questions on the syllabus that were at the center of CRT suggests that Obama had been brought into orbit around key issues in CRT.” Obama, they wrote, also seems to have taught according to “a model set by many CRT scholars,” who prefer alternatives to the traditional Socratic method.
NEXT: 'He agreed entirely with the theory of reparations' >>
No comments:
Post a Comment