Blackness as Disability

Another way to shake down whitey.

Kimani Paul-Emile is a light-skinned black woman who teaches law at Fordham Law School. Since graduating from Brown University in 1993 and getting a law degree from Georgetown, she has been showered with countless honors and fellowships, and in 2016, she co-founded the Center for Race, Law, and Justice at Fordham. “Just suing isn’t going to get you there,” she explained at the time, noting that “it requires a broader approach” to correct “the racial disparities and inequality that threaten our democracy and system of justice.”

Prof. Paul-Emile has been as good as her word. She has come up with a novel approach to correcting “racial disparities” that exemplifies the inexhaustible inventiveness of the leftist imagination. In a paper called “Blackness as Disability?” she proposes a radical expansion of the grounds on which minorities—but especially blacks—should get special treatment.

When the paper was first announced, only its abstract was available, and Breitbart and The College Fix mocked it as yet another example of fanciful academic lunacy. The full, 73-page paper is now available, and it is stuffed with legal citations and footnotes. This woman is serious: She is proposing a new way of treating race that would give blacks—and perhaps other non-whites—massive benefits. In a country that has managed to turn anti-discrimination laws such as the Civil Rights Act of 1964 into justifications for discriminating against whites, it is entirely possible that a “progressive” administration would try to implement her proposal.

The very first lines of the article set out Prof. Paul-Emile’s perspective:

"Is being black in the United States today a disability?.."