https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2022/01/31/georgetown-law-ilya-shapiro-administrative-leave
In this vicious op-ed penned by Paul Butler, a Georgetown law professor, Ilya Shapiro is deemed beyond the pale and must be fired because of one tweet which Butler misinterprets to mean that Shapiro harbors anti-black racist beliefs.
President Biden had publicly pronounced that he would select a black woman and only a black woman to replace Justice Breyer on the Supreme Court. “Shapiro suggested that Sri Srinivasan, chief judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit and the first person of South Asian descent to lead a federal circuit court, would be Biden’s ‘best pick.’”
But because Biden had already announced that his candidate must be an African-American woman, Shapiro correctly concluded that Srinivasan would not even be considered for the job. And he tweeted, ““But alas [Srinivasan] doesn’t fit into the latest intersectionality hierarchy so we’ll get lesser black woman…”
What exactly did Shapiro mean by “lesser black woman”? Does it mean, as Butler would have us believe, that “Shapiro is unfit for our community…because he called Black women ‘lesser’….” or did Shapiro simply mean that Biden would select someone likely not as good a Supreme Court candidate as Srinivasan? [Shapiro later called Srinivasan “the most qualified nominee a Democratic president could choose.”]
Let’s assume for a moment that Shapiro actually meant that he did not think that any black women jurists being considered by Biden were as well qualified for the High Court as Srinivasan, or, going even further, that Srinivasan would be a better pick than any black woman judge in America today. Neither of those positions constitutes believing that black women are “lesser.”
Shapiro also later wrote: “I regret my poor choice of words, which undermined my message that nobody should be discriminated against for his or her skin color.”
Somehow we need to find a way that allows people, who have said or written something controversial or ill-advised, to clarify and correct or even retract and apologize for their remarks without it necessarily costing them their job, their livelihood, or their career.
