hair

And “The Great Stupid” Crawls On: White Female Executive Fired Because Her Hairstyle Was Too Black

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

I can’t believe I even wrote that.

That’s Kelly Carnes above, the recently-hired executive director of the apparently insane Baltimore Rock Opera Society. After the blonde, white female returned from Burning Man with newly braided cornrows (above), her organization began receiving complaints from the staff regarding her choice of hair style. Cultural appropriation, you know. Can’t have that.

Carnes, who apparently has a habit of exploring daring hair displays…

…was fired, being told only that she and her new job were “not a good fit.” She had adopted the cornrows, she says, to deal with the desert where Burning Man is held annually. I wouldn’t regard a white woman’s cornrows as especially daring almost 50 years after “10” —Hello, Bo!

but The Great Stupid is full of nasty surprises.

The society’s board was especially stupid, publicly acknowledging “concerns” over their organization’s new executive director’s cornrows and that it was “taking the matter seriously.” It also said it planned to revise its anti-discrimination policy and require anti-racism leadership training, which apparently means that whites are racist when they adopt styles, behavior or dress that emulate our African American brothers and sisters. The board advised her not to attend a town hall that was called to discuss the controversy. That’s always a bad sign: they said that to Gene Hackman in “Hoosiers” when the town was meeting to fire him as the high school basketball coach for trying to teach the kids team play. Then the town’s star player got up and said he would only play if they let Gene keep coaching…wait, where was I?

Oh, right: the cornrows.

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From the Res Ipsa Loquitur Files: Flat Learning Curve at Harvard

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

Two depressing items to diges in the apparently unstoppable decline of Harvard University: the headline was composed based on the first, but the second may be even more disturbing. (Incidentally, I feel I should apologize for presenting so many EA posts involving my alma mater —and that of my sister and father, and where my mother was briefly a dean. However, its decay and current crisis mode would be ethics fodder of the same import if I had matriculated from Podunk U.)

First, here is the main substance of the proud announcement I was gifted with over the weekend from Harvard’s interim president. Recall that Harvard’s recent fiasco was seeded by a leadership group and campus culture that prioritized “diversity, equity and inclusion” to such an extent that it elevated an under-qualified, academically devious dean who had been involved in woke debacles during her tenure to be the new university president, primarily on the basis of her career-long obsession with “diversity” (and her color and gender, naturally). Coming under just and vituperative criticism for both engineering Claudine Gay’s ascent and later, after she had proven herself unfit for the job, acting to cover-up the scandal until the pressure by donors and students became too intense, was the Harvard Corporation, an all-Democrat and progressive woke cabal that ironically lacked diversity itself in the areas of world view and thought. Behold the two new members of that body selected in the wake of the criticism:

“…We write to let you know that two accomplished alumni will join the Harvard Corporation in the coming months…

Ken Frazier, a 1978 graduate of Harvard Law School, is former chairman and CEO of Merck & Co… he has had a distinguished career as a practicing lawyer, first in private practice and later as Merck’s general counsel. Known for his dedication to expanding opportunity for others, he recently co-founded OneTen, a nonprofit coalition focused on expanding family-sustaining employment opportunities for people lacking a four-year degree with an emphasis on Black Americans....

…His many honors include the Anti-Defamation League’s Courage Against Hate Award (2020) “for using his platform to speak out on behalf of marginalized communities and serving as an exemplary role model for corporate leadership.”

…Joe Bae, a 1994 graduate of Harvard College, is co-CEO of KKR, a global investment firm…he has served on numerous boards, including institutions such as the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts (current vice chair), Phillips Academy Andover (former trustee and chair of nominating and governance committee), the Asia Society, the Hong Kong Ballet, and the Nature Conservancy’s Asia Pacific Council. He is also a co-founder and board member of The Asian American Foundation (TAAF), which was established in 2021 to serve the Asian American and Pacific Islander community….Along with his wife, the novelist Janice Y. K. Lee ’94, he led a recent philanthropic drive to support an FAS initiative to expand education and scholarship in Asian American studies.

Frazier is black, and has concentrated on programs and initiatives assisting African Americans. Bae is Asian, and his focus has been substantially in the area of advancing the interests of Asian-Americans. Bae’s appointment is a pretty transparent reaction to Harvard’s losing the lawsuit by Asian-Americans who claimed they had been discriminated against by the school’s affirmative action policies, recent ruled illegal by the Supreme Court.

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Morning Ethics Warm-Up, 7/16/2020: Dreadlocks, Kareem, Scrabble And “Political Slogan? What Political Slogan?”

/ Jack Marshall / 22 Comments

1. This Morning’s Grovel: A white Seattle hairdresser apologized profusely for daring to wear dreadlocks. The key quote: “I have come to understand—far too belatedly—that my hairstyle is harmful.”

To lightly paraphrase Orwell: ‘She loved Big Brother.’

It’s hard to work up any sympathy for people like Irene—weak, ignorant, unwilling to stand up for basic  human rights, like being able to wear your hair any damn way you want to. This is yet another of the one-way “rules” that are being delivered by edict as an alleged remedy for “systemic racism”: Blacks can do anything they want to, whites are severely limited. The hair rules: black women can straighten their hair, dye it blonde, adopt any style the choose as a method of self expression, but a white woman who chooses dreadlocks has “harmful hair.”

Those who won’t stand up for their own liberties deserve to lose them. Irene is a fool, and betraying the values of her country. Continue reading →

Morning Ethics Warm-Up, April 13, 2018: Past, Present, And Future

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

Happy Morning, everybody!

1. On the Future News front…The Michael Cohen raid has prompted a new outbreak of this particularly odious journalism and punditry trend: writing hysterically about what might happen. I spend so much time telling my wife that it is absurd and self-destructive to spend energy and emotion on dire “what if?” speculation, when sanity only reigns when we deal with what happens, when it happens, and not freak out because it might happen. Reinhold Niebuhr’s Serenity Prayer isn’t just for alcoholics, you know:

“God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change;courage to change the things I can;and wisdom to know the difference. Living one day at a time;enjoy ing one moment at a time; accepting hardships as the pathway to peace…”

The news media, however, pummels us with dire future news to undermine serenity, create fear, encourage anxiety, distrust, panic and hysteria. All the better to undermine President Trump, after all.

MSNBC’s Joy Reid, for example, admittedly one of the worst of the worst, speculated about what might happen should the president refuse to allow himself to be arrested by federal marshals. Note that there is no evidence that there is anything to arrest him for, but never mind. This is Future News. “What if he refuses to open the White House door? What if he fires any Secret Service agent who would allow the federal marshals in? What if Donald Trump simply decides, ‘I don’t have to follow the law? I refuse to be held under the law. No marshal can get into this White House and any Secret Service agent who defies me is fired,'” she asked.

Today I am reading that Michael Cohen might have incriminating tapes of Donald Trump saying incriminating things. Yes, and he might have 12 toes and three nipples, too. Cohen apparently surreptitiously taped some of his conversations. Now, it is true that Cohen is a uniquely sleazy lawyer, but surreptitiously taping a client is a serious legal ethics breach that would pretty much end his career, not to mention his bar license, it it were proven. Never mind though: what if he taped Trump having sex with a marmot? What if he taped the President speaking Russian?

What might happen isn’t news. There are exceptions, but extensive concentration of speculation and projections, as with the Russian investigation coverage, is misleading and unethical journalism.

2. Incompetent prosecution to the rescue! For some reason, Bill Cosby’s prosecutors, allowed to choose from the more than 70 alleged victims of the serial sexual predator a representative five to show his  modus operandi that victimized Andrea Constand, chose Janice Dickinson, an aging ex-model, huckster, reality show star and publicity hound with the approximate trustworthiness and credibility of Stormy Daniels. Continue reading →

The Little Bald Girl, The Ethics Incompleteness Principle And The Ethical Way To Handle Obvious Anomolies

/ Jack Marshall / 31 Comments

Kamryn Renfro with her friend: obviously a troublemaker.

Kamryn Renfro with her friend: obviously a troublemaker.

In Grand Junction, Colorado, Caprock Academy student Kamryn Renfro was banned from attending her school after shaving her head in support of a friend undergoing chemotherapy to treat neuroblastoma, a rare type of cancer. Academy administrators told Renfro’s family that they would not permit the little girl to return to class after spring break because her shaved head violated a school dress code requiring that female students’ hair to be “neatly combed or styled. No shaved heads.”

This is obviously the kind of anomalous situation that calls for, indeed screams out for, a compassionate exception. Any school administrator who couldn’t see that is not just unqualified for his or her post, but not sufficiently intelligent or rational to be trusted with the welfare of children, or, I would say, to take tolls in the Lincoln Tunnel. If there really were a competition to see which enforcement of a “no-tolerance policy” would stand as the most outrageous of all time, I would suspect that this would be an entree. (It still wouldn’t win, though.)

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