Free Republic

Thank you, Madam Moderator. Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. I am here this evening in the capacity of a wet blanket. I am here not to take one side or the other on the topic under debate, but to say that the topic, as written, is based on a false premise, and therefore has no satisfactory answer. I don't believe the disparities under discussion can be eliminated. Debate about whether government should play a greater or lesser role in eliminating them is therefore, in my opinion, otiose. When the organizers first emailed me to suggest I appear on the panel,...

Anyone who has read Derb in our pages knows he’s a deeply literate, funny, and incisive writer. I direct anyone who doubts his talents to his delightful first novel, “Seeing Calvin Coolidge in a Dream, or any one of his “Straggler” columns in the books section of NR. Derb is also maddening, outrageous, cranky, and provocative. His latest provocation, in a webzine, lurches from the politically incorrect to the nasty and indefensible. We never would have published it, but the main reason that people noticed it is that it is by a National Review writer. Derb is effectively using our...

... There is a talk that nonblack Americans have with their kids, too. My own kids, now 19 and 16, have had it in bits and pieces as subtopics have arisen. If I were to assemble it into a single talk, it would look something like the following. (1) Among your fellow citizens are forty million who identify as black, and whom I shall refer to as black. The cumbersome (and MLK-noncompliant) term “African-American” seems to be in decline, thank goodness. “Colored” and “Negro” are archaisms. What you must call “the ‘N’ word” is used freely among blacks but is...