Law Schools

Law School Prof Rants About Women And Minorities And Their Pesky Insistence On 'Rights' And 'Equality'

It's a logical fallacy issue-spotter!

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University of San Diego law professor Larry Alexander is definitely the junior partner in the Amy Wax-Larry Alexander racist fan fiction writing team. He shows up in the byline whenever Wax tosses around easily debunked claims about how America was better off before women and minorities started getting rights, but he’s rarely the star of the show. But, like so many overlooked artists before him, Alexander is putting out a solo track.

Newsweek, the former news magazine that’s now pivoted completely to op-eds about Kamala Harris’s long form birth certificate, published Alexander’s two–part diatribe over the last couple weeks and while there’s a good argument that it should just languish in ignominy on that publication’s desiccated website, we feel an obligation to shame the law schools that still employ jackholes like this guy.

To Alexander’s credit, he does properly recognize the state of the literature before shifting his essay to issuing unfounded claims to poison the well:

The identitarians respond that although the civil rights movement may have been effective against overt, conscious racism and sexism, it was ineffective against the more pernicious and insidious forms, which they label as structural (or systemic) racism, white privilege and patriarchy.

Yes, efforts to end de jure discrimination failed to address vectors of de facto discrimination. So far so good!

Now is he going to use the NBA as an example for why affirmative action is bad? Friends, you’d better believe he is:

The NBA is 80 percent black and has almost no Asians. Is this an example of “structural racism?” No.

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Q.E.D. motherf**kers. There may be massive income gaps and unarmed Black people may be getting gunned down over speeding tickets but Jeremy Lin couldn’t make a roster this season!

Sadly, that was one of his more coherent passages.

So what are the offending “structures?” Policing and punishing? But what race would benefit if murderers, rapists and robbers are not apprehended and punished? To seek such a Hobbesian state of affairs is lunacy.

A modestly good faith effort to understand the policing debate would recognize that no one is suggesting that America adopt the plot of The Purge, but that law enforcement resources are overwhelmingly geared toward minor infractions that are either discriminatorily enforced or used as a pretext for harassing targeted populations.

The nuclear family? Black Lives Matter, the current darling of the identitarians, has called for “disrupt[ing]” (i.e., eliminating) it. But the dissolution of the nuclear family has led to poor educational outcomes, poverty and crime. Tearing it down further will not level the playing field; it will just sow societal destruction.

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I see your logic, and raise you reality. No one is doing any of these things. He literally takes a single out-of-context word and then redefines it to fit his screed. Is there anyone editing this thing? How was that not a giant red flag for an editor?

The argument against the nuclear family is to unsettle it from its perch as “normal” where it’s been used to discriminate upon anyone who doesn’t live in a 1950s sitcom. No one is against nuclear families, they’re against people like Alexander telling kids that they’re going to be criminals because their folks got a divorce and mommy hasn’t managed to land herself a new man yet.

Alexander continues the straw argument parade by positing that anything but a full embrace robber barons represents Stalinism and affirmative action creates doctors who don’t understand basic anatomy. You may be beginning to see a trend.

Turning to “patriarchy,” which is supposed to indicate the systemic subordination of women: Where’s the evidence?… If you want an example of patriarchy, go to Saudi Arabia. The U.S. is its opposite, in this respect.

Alexander lacks the necessary self-awareness, but this aggressive reliance on the “either/or” fallacy is how you know he’s speaking from a position of extraordinary privilege and unintentionally proving everything he’s trying to criticize. Discrimination can’t exist in his mind because he recognizes women to have more rights than the Saudis. The whole piece is replete with this sort of thing! Literally the next paragraph says that people who think racism and sexism persist are liars because they don’t live in “Kim’s North Korea, Mao’s China, Stalin’s Soviet Union or Hitler’s Germany.” He kicks off his second installment claiming that promoting diversity requires modeling “Nazi Germany, apartheid South Africa and the Jim Crow South.” He’s got a Rolodex of maligned regimes and staying one step ahead of them is “conclusive” proof that everything is fine.

But what Alexander’s really saying here is that he, as the speaker for normalized America, has framed himself as having graciously allowed women and minorities to work… pray he doesn’t alter the deal any further.

It is the current identity politics, with its destructive focus on race and sex, that spawns the lies about racial oppression and patriarchy and the destructive, zero-sum game of identity politics. The identitarians are not “progressives”; they are dangerous reactionaries.

Hi. It’s not a zero-sum game unless you’re the kind of incredibly mediocre white man who never earned his job in the first place and just coasted on the privilege of history stacking the deck in your favor.

Oh, wait. This actually might be zero-sum for Alexander.

Earlier: Newsweek Says Kamala Harris Essay Not ‘Racist Birtherism’ (Psst, It’s Totally Racist Birtherism)
Law Professors Say White ’50s Culture Is Superior, Other Racist Stuff
Dog Whistling ‘Bourgeois Values’ Op-Ed Gets Thorough Takedown From Other Law Professors

HeadshotJoe Patrice is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news. Joe also serves as a Managing Director at RPN Executive Search.

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