George Will has an excellent column on the Michigan Civil Rights Initiative in tomorrow’s (Sunday’s) Washington Post.
It begins with this …
DETROIT — A feisty 29-year-old white woman and a pugnacious 67-year-old black man are performing two services this autumn for Michigan and the nation. Their Michigan Civil Rights Initiative (MCRI) is promoting colorblind government. And they are provoking remnants of the civil rights movement, which now is just a defender of a racial spoils system, to demonstrate its decadence, even thuggishness.
… and ends with this:
Anti-MCRI demonstrators chant, “They say Jim Crow, we say hell, no.” So, the rancid residue of what once was the civil rights movement equates Jim Crow — the system of enforced legal inferiority for blacks — with opposition to treating blacks as wards of government, in need of infantilizing preferences, forever. To such Orwellian thinking, Gratz and Connerly — and soon, perhaps, Michigan — say: Hell, no.
Read the parts in between.
Two who recanted their signatures, saying they had signed without reading the measure, are federal judges.
It is hard to believe that two Federal Judges would sign a petition that they didn’t read and admit it in public. They are either fools or knaves. Take your choice.
George Will’s venom offered nothing of value to this issue here in Michigan as usual his myopic racial vision continues to stain any commentary he has on race in this country.
Of course given the Detroit News legacy of race baiting and contempt for Blacks in this region I was not at all surprised when Will surfaced and offered his pulp fiction on the issue
I saw that column. The word “feisty” seems slightly condescending to me, but that might just have been me. In general, I approved of the column.
I don’t think, Mr. Thrasher, that it was really intended to “offer” anything to the race in Michigan — it certainly didn’t break any new ground — so much as inform the rest of the country of it. As a 700-word introduction to the ballot question, I thought it worked quite well.