"Radical"

So the latest garbage to spew from the twitching undead corpse of the Breatbart defamation empire is an effort to "vet President Obama." On the theory that after spending two years as a US Senator and presumptive presidential candidate, six months as the primary target of the Clinton political machine, six months as a major party nominee for President, three months as President-Elect, and two years as actual President of the United States, no one before has ever thought to look into his background.

Their latest revelation is that once, twenty years ago, when he was a student at Harvard, he introduced Harvard professor Derrick Bell at a rally on campus. I don't really have any substantive response to any of that, Breitbart didn't even deserve substantive responses back when he was still alive, but I was struck by a passage in this article from the Heritage Institute. The author has discovered that that self-same Professor Derrick Bell, or at least someone with the self-same name as Professor Derrick Bell, visited the White House in January 2010. In his post he describes Prof. Bell and his views several times as "controversial," but doesn't explain any of those views until the final paragraph, which includes this statement:

Bell is widely credited with pioneering the field of Critical Race Theory, a radical school of legal thought that holds that the American legal and political systems are inherently racist.

"Radical."

Hmm.

Is the US legal system inherently racist? Well, consider this:

• What percentage of prison inmates in the US are African-American?
• What percentage of death-row inmates in the US are African-American?
• What percentage of white cops caught on video murdering African-American men are convicted? Okay, cheap shot, but come on.
• How do the sentences given to white and black defendants accused of similar crimes compare?
• How do the conviction rates of white and black defendants accused of similar crimes compare?

Is the US political system inherently racist? Well, consider this:

• What percentage of Senators are African-American? Oh, I know this one: Zero.
• What percentage of all Congressional representatives are African-American? 7.7%
• How many African-American senators have there ever been in the history of the United States? Six.
• What percentage of US Presidents have been African-American? 2.2%
• What percentage of US Supreme Court justices have been African-American? 1.8%

And yet it's considered radical to suggest that the US legal and political systems are inherently racist? Really? I thought it was common knowledge that the US legal and political systems were inherently racist.

But I guess not in ConservaWorld.