When You’ve Lost Randall Kennedy. . .

[Valin]

Power Line

Steven  Hayward

Apr. 2 2024

Randall Kennedy of Harvard Law School is one of the progenitors of Critical Legal Theory (CLT) back in the late 1980s and 1990s. It was an early postmodern expression of the view that language itself—and therefore law expressed in language (because try expressing law through interpretive dance sometime)—is merely a subjective tool of power. It was a precursor to Critical Race Theory (CRT), which is a key component of the entire Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) racket.

Kennedy may be left, but he is a serious man, and has been drawing away from CRT and the censorious practices of the campus left for quite a while now, without shedding his social democratic views. Today he attacked DEI in the pages of the Harvard Crimson, a paper edited, keep in mind, mostly by very left-leaning Harvard students.

His article is entitled, “Mandatory DEI Statements Are Ideological Pledges of Allegiance. Time to Abandon Them.” Here is the most salient part of the article:

It would be hard to overstate the degree to which many academics at Harvard and beyond feel intense and growing resentment against the DEI enterprise because of features that are perhaps most evident in the demand for DEI statements. I am a scholar on the left committed to struggles for social justice. The realities surrounding mandatory DEI statements, however, make me wince. The practice of demanding them ought to be abandoned, both at Harvard and beyond.

I’ll enjoy the spectacle of the DEI cultists attacking Kennedy as some kind of adjacent white supremacist. Because that’s all they’ve got.

(Snip)