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The habit of university professors, especially once they have achieved the almost impregnable job security that accompanies ownership, can be embarrassing when they adopt perspectives that are not expressed in a civilized environment.
This disturbing event is evoked through a recently written editorial by John Eastman, a full professor at Chapman University’s Fowler School of Law in Orange.
A Chapman member since 1999 and former dean of law, Eastman questions Kamala Harris’s eligibility for vice president; in fact, his eligibility to take the Senate seat he held recently.
The publisher never intended to cause or take part in the racist lie of birthism, the conspiracy theory to delegitimizing Barack Obama, yet we have identified the potential, if not the probability, of this simply happening.
Newsweek apologizes for Birther editorial
Eastman’s editorial, published Wednesday on Newsweek, a day after alleged Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden elected Harris as a vice-presidential candidate, raged.
That’s because he evoked the discredited controversy and discredited the “birther” who called Barack Obama’s eligibility for president, a claim promoted to force through Donald Trump under the Obama administration. Few may have ignored the fact that doubts about politicians’ citizenship had now been sown in opposition to two national political leaders of color.
Newsweek apologized for publishing the article. Chapman issued on Monday an indicted to its rector, Daniele Struppa, that “the university is not guilty of the concepts of its faculty”.
Struppa extra states that “if in a position of authority he publicly criticized the paintings of the faculty, it would create a chilling harmful effect on the culture of educational freedom that defines a university” and expresses its “unwavering commitment to a varied and inclusive network painting at Chapman”.
Should Chapman spend an extra to disallow Eastman’s editorial? The answer is yes. And not just because a thorny argument raised through a college member echoed President Trump, who cites Eastman as a “very qualified” lawyer. Eastman did not respond to my request for comment.
At the heart of Eastman’s argument is that Oakland-born Harris was the daughter of two parents who lived in the United States on visas and would therefore possibly not be citizens.
According to the 14th Amendment, which dates back to 1868, “all persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to their jurisdiction are citizens.” Eastman asks, “Were Harris’ parents legal permanent at the time of his birth? Array … or were they, as it turns out, just transit visitors?”
If the latter were the case, he writes, “Then, as an advantage of his parents, Harris was not subject to the full jurisdiction of the United States at birth, but he owed allegiance to one or more foreign powers: Jamaica, in the case of his father, and India, in the case of his mother, and therefore was not entitled to citizenship by birth under the 14th amendment as originally understood.”
Newsweek responded first to the protest over Eastman’s article with a note from the editor titled “Eastman’s Newsweek Chronicle has nothing to do with racism.” This alludes to the challenge compared to putting the toothpaste back in the tube: when you have to explain why an article that advocates a racist point of view is not racist, you’re already looking to drive uphill.
In a timenote from the editor (professional recommendation: When you have to write a note from the editor to apologize for a note from the editor, you’re in trouble), Newsweek tried to provide the publisher as an attempt to explore a minority legal argument. about the definition of who is a “born citizen” in the United States. “
This holds that the publisher is about anything of purely educational interest, raising the question of why it belonged to Newsweek rather than a law magazine.
Newsweek suggests that the conclusion that Eastman’s article can be interpreted as racist struck its editors as lightning strikes. “For many readers,” he says, “the essay inevitably conveyed the ugly message that Senator Kamala Harris, a woman of color and daughter of immigrants, was not American.”
“The publisher never intended to cause or take part in the racist lie of birthism, the conspiracy theory to delegitimizing Barack Obama, yet we have identified the potential, if not the probability, that this could happen. Array… among us at Newsweek are horrified that this editorial has resulted in a wave of vile birtherism addressed to Senator Harris.”
Eastman’s editorial and Newsweek’s apology have the merit of an old trick known to George Orwell in 1945 as a defense opposed to accusations of anti-Semitism in Britain: the statement that one is engaged in “observation of the facts.”
As Orwell wrote at the time, “naturally, the anti-Semitic is considered a moderate being.” Therefore, his anti-Semitism is camouflaged as a search for facts completely independent of his anti-Semitic reach. This is exactly the same phenomenon in paintings, either in Eastman’s publishing house and in defending its publication through Newsweek.
It’s a good place to take a closer look at Eastman’s argument and background, to guess if Newsweek could have been as innocent as all of this.
First, Eastman’s educational dispute is by no means a genuine dispute; It is a marginal argument promoted through a small right-wing group, many of them at the Claremont Institute in Upland, where Eastman is indexed as a senior member and where Josh Hammer, the Newsweek opinion editor who oversaw the publishing house, is a former partner.
The tortured language investigation of the 14th Amendment into the “subject to jurisdiction” of the United States, which is at the center of Eastman’s argument, is even accepted by many conservative jurists. One of them, UcLA’s Eugene Volokh, even wrote an article for Newsweek demystifying Eastman’s case. The Cato Libertarian Institute calls Eastman’s argument, charitably, an “unorthodox vision.”
As for wondering the extent of “citizenship by birth,” Eastman has been whipping this racist horse for years.
In other words, Newsweek has entered the quagmire of “birthright” racism with wide-spoken eyes.
This leaves us with the question of how Chapman responds to the retail sale of a racist trope through a college member. No one is suggesting that Eastman lose his homework because of his views, but that doesn’t mean Chapman can’t take a firmer position. His own reputation, after all, is at stake, whether he likes it or not.
Cases where a full member of the university, or even a non-holder teacher, take completely destructive positions do not occur as often, but are not unprecedented.
Take the case of Kevin McDonald, a full member of the psychology branch of Cal State Long Beach, whose identity with anti-Semitic conspiracy theories began in the mid-1990s.
In published literature, McDonald’s arguments that Jewish elitism promoted anti-Semitism were described as anti-Semitic and neo-Nazi propaganda through the Southern Poverty Law Center. “Given the prospect that Jews will continue to be an elite hostile to American whites,” he wrote in 2013, “the long history of other white people in America is, in fact, bleak.”
Concern for his club at CSULB intensified after testifying in 2000 on behalf of Holocaust denier David Irving in Irving’s failed defamation lawsuit against American expert Deborah Lipstadt.
CSULB’s education directorate has issued a series of critical statements about McDonald’s.
These resulted in a 2008 Academic Senate of the University detailing its white supremacist associations, pointing to the threat to CSULB’s reputation, and stated that “although the Academic Senate defends the educational freedom and freedom of expression of Dr. Kevin MacDonald, he did for all his faculties, he strongly and unequivocally dissociates himself from the anti-Semitic and white ethnocentric perspectives he has expressed.”
McDonald, however, retired in early 2014.
CSULB can simply be a style for Chapman and his law school. Struppa’s takes the simplest way out. It supports the precept of educational freedom without being at all transparent on the issue of the Eastman case.
Struppa’s reference to its “unwavering commitment to a varied and inclusive network in Chapman” is too narrow. The challenge is not the diversity of the Chapman network, but the diversity of the American political framework and a university member’s long crusade to mitigate it.
Chapman and his law school will have to unreservedly commit to a U.S. Constitution that has been a bulwark that opposes racist discrimination. Your own call is at stake.