Manifesto

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Seal of Harvard University (est. 1636)

Dear Law School or University Dean X:

This unsolicited letter expresses my enduring and strong desire to apply for any open faculty positions at your law school, college, or university within my areas of expertise, scholarly pursuits, and teaching experience which include—Natural Law, Constitutional Law, Jurisprudence, Legal History, First Amendment, International Law, Legal Ethics, Law & Education Policy, Critical Legal Studies, Family Law, Juvenile Law, Critical Race Theory, Criminal Law, Criminal Procedure, Contracts, Business Law, Administrative Law, Law & Politics, Law & Humanities, and Law & Literature.

Due to my numerous and unsuccessful efforts for almost 20 years in obtaining neither a real, fair, or good faith interview for a law faculty or college position, this year I have elected to pursue a new, novel, and proactive strategy which I am convinced will cause a paradigm shift inside the Academy… and beyond. I will write an original Manifesto which outlines some of my scholarly accomplishments while addressing what I consider to be the endemic, racist, discriminatory, and frankly irrelevant criteria most American law schools and universities use to pick essentially the same vanilla, ideological-minded Leftists for all of their faculty appointments while others like myself of an “other” ideology; a different but equally relevant experience and scholarly achievement has for 20 years been ignored and shamefully treated as, to coin a phrase from that 1970s literary/movie classic, The Spook Who Sat by the Door.

~ E. Washington

MANIFESTO

Ideological Racism inside the Academy

By

Ellis Washington, J.D.

27 January 2012

Prologue

And I said to him, Michael [Parks], how many–he was Chairman–they made him Chairman of the Journalism Department at USC. I said, how many conservatives do you have on your faculty? He said, I can’t think of one. And I said, well, do you think that’s a good thing from the point of view of educating journalists? And he said, no. I said, well, what can you do about it? And he said, nothing, because the faculty chooses–they hire themselves. And so, once the left gets in, it’s over.

David Horowitz and Bernie Goldberg in Conversation (9 Dec. 2011)

Well… it ain’t over! My name is Ellis Washington. I was born 50 years ago on 22 September 1961. I was educated in the ghettos of Detroit, Michigan and raised predominately by a single mother who worked three jobs while going to school for 20 years to earn her college degree and raising three children. I grew up several blocks from the home of Dr. Ossian Sweet: that iconic battle ground domicile which achieved national attention in a famous legal case that desegregated my “Paradise Valley” neighborhood in 1925. This historic event was achieved despite the outrageous verdict of murder against Dr. Sweet by Judge Frank Murphy (a future Justice of the Supreme Court) and against all of the adults inside his home because a member of a violent and racist lynch mob who hated the fact that Black people had moved into their neighborhood and repeatedly shot into his home, was himself killed by a stray bullet. It took the combined forces of the NAACP with Clarence Darrow, then America’s preeminent trial attorney, that later secured the acquittal of Dr. Sweet and all the other family members inside that besieged bungalow at 2905 Garland St. in Detroit, Michigan.

I came of age during one of America’s bloodiest race riots in July 1967. I saw my beloved Detroit (once called “The Paris of America”) began her collective descent into madness which she would never recover from to this day. I saw the soldiers fighting against looters, vandals, and chaos as they valiantly struggled to preserve order and peace. I saw their AK-47 assault rifles. My mother even took pictures of me with some of those soldiers guarding our neighborhood high school (Southeastern). During my formative years I was taught by good, decent primarily White liberal teachers in the Detroit Public Schools that if you work hard, study diligently, avoid laziness, evil associations, criminal activity, shun youthful sexual activity, delay marriage, and get a good education, that one day you could achieve the American dream.

“They hire themselves”

In my opinion, that was a Big Lie worthy of Joseph Goebbels… at least from a vocational point of view. Why? Because of the ideological racism prevalent throughout society since the advent of what I’ve termed the “Progressive Revolution” (circa 1870 – present) where I theorize that liberals and progressives have maintained an ideological stranglehold inside the Academy that has metastasized exponentially since the 1960s. Therefore, faculty applications for law schools, college, and university jobs by conservatives are aborted and faculty applications by Black conservatives such as myself are a Sisyphus-like exercise in futility which I find not only morally reprehensible, but illegal, unconstitutional, and a betrayal of true academic freedom and intellectual diversity our students were promised; that liberals and progressives love to claim they possess. The results, over the past 140 years is a Fabian Progressive hegemony inside the Academy dominated by Leftists—from the President, Provost and Professors to Affirmative Action and Diversity Administrators, Secretaries, Students and the Janitors.

For example, a recent study by Stanley Rothman, S. Robert Lichter and Neil Nevitte found that 80 percent of professors teaching at American universities are liberal (by their own admission) and 15 percent are conservative. At elite universities, the ratio was 87 percent to 13 percent.

The Spook who Sat by the Door

I always knew it was my destiny to be a law professor and to thrive as a university professor. For almost 100 years it has been in my family’s DNA. I currently teach law, history, politics, education policy, resource management, and humanities as an adjunct at three universities. Nevertheless, for the nearly 20 years since graduating from law school out of literally hundreds of applications for full-time faculty positions, all I’ve gotten was rejection letter after rejection letter telling me how impressive my education background and scholarly record were, how competitive the process was, that my CV would be given full consideration by the faculty appointments committee, and most galling to me was this hypocritical statement printed at the bottom of every law school and university faculty application: “MINORITIES AND WOMEN ARE URGED TO APPLY.” I was then asked to complete the non-discrimination survey form and check the box: “African American” {sarcastic tone} so that us good, non-racist White folks can pat each other on the back and celebrate ourselves about how egalitarian and fair liberals and progressives are by giving all qualified people a chance to become a law professor or a university professor.

For several years I even naively attended the Law Faculty Recruitment Conferences sponsored by The Association of American Law Schools (AALS) where I had about two dozen interviews at law schools all over America. However, as soon as they deduced that this Black man sitting before them was a conservative (they actually had many of my books and law review articles in their possession at the interview), they nervously smiled at each other and after a phony, perfunctory interview, they threw my resume straight into the garbage can under the unjust, irrelevant pretext that, “Ellis Washington is without doubt a deep thinker and an original legal scholar, but he didn’t pass the bar exam.” The hypocrisy did not end with law schools: Colleges and universities likewise would use a variant of the same irrelevant pretext: “Ellis has solid scholarly credentials, but he doesn’t possess the Ph.D. degree.” Well, neither did over 95 percent of the most notable, extraordinary, and iconic figures throughout the annals of history in any given field of academic study possess a Ph.D. degree including: Socrates, Jesus Christ, Bach, Galileo, Goethe, Marx, Edison, Hitler, Churchill, Justice Robert Jackson, Reagan, Bill Gates, or Steve Jobs.

Therefore, in place of sending the standard letter of inquiry, I am writing this rather passionate Manifesto which chronicles my unique and iconoclastic background in hopes that some Dean, some University President, Provost, or Diversity Administrator, or some open-minded Law Faculty Recruitment Committee member would tear down this damn Berlin Wall of liberal bias inside the Academy and to seriously examine my personal story and in good faith scrutinize my entire scholarly oeuvre. Please, my dear colleagues, judge me not based on some contrived and irrelevant criteria like graduating from an Ivy League university, passing the bar exam, law practice experience, possessing a Ph.D. degree, or aping the 96 percent of my people who in Nov. 2008 voted for Barack Hussein Obama and the Democrat Party, but judge me based on Harvard University’s transcendent motto and the singular principle which in my view made Socrates the greatest of all philosophers—VERITAS (truth).

Tell me I’m ideologically unfit

Tell me I’m ideologically unfit to join your law school faculty, to join your university faculty when in January 1989 my law school initiation was at Harvard Law School (during the same time, a future U.S. President, Barack Obama was a law student there). Since I was a graduate student I was required to secure special permission from Dean Dr. Robert C. Clark to take two second year law classes literally off the street without any law school experience. One class was with the venerable and prolific civil rights scholar, Randall KennedyTell me I’m ideologically unfit to join your law school faculty, to join your university faculty when in May 1989, less than 5 months later I helped edit the Michigan Law Review at that time the 3rd highest rated law review behind Harvard and Yale and given a letter of commendation by the Managing Editor, Gregory B. Heller, two years before acceptance into law school. Tell me I’m ideologically unfit to join your law school faculty, to join your university faculty when in Sept. 1991 during my first year of law school I beat out dozens of 2nd and 3rd year law students to become a law clerk at my law school’s Sixty-Plus Elder Law Clinic and in Dec. 1991, I once again beat out dozens of 2nd and 3rd year law students to become the law clerk for The Rutherford Institute, the premier conservative civil liberties organization in America who under its founder and president, John Whitehead in Aug. 1997 successfully defended Paula Jones in her sexual harassment lawsuit which eventually lead to the impeachment and disbarment of President William Jefferson Clinton for charges of perjury and obstruction of justice.

Tell me I’m ideologically unfit to join your law school faculty, to join your university faculty when since graduating from law school in 1994, I’ve written seven books and over two dozen law review articles and other scholarly works published on three continents and translated into several languages including—Spanish, French, German, and Portuguese. Tell me I’m ideologically unfit to join your law school faculty, to join your university faculty when many of my books and law review articles are in the Chambers Library of SCOTUS and included in the personal collections of members of the U.S. Supreme Court including Justices: Thomas, Scalia, Rehnquist, Ginsburg, Breyer, Souter, Kennedy, O’Connor, and with my intellectual mentor and legendary scholar, Judge Richard A. Posner, fmr. Chief Judge of the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals, the latter of whom was the subject of my comprehensive, historical, natural law critique of Judge Posner’s 1997 Harvard Law School Oliver Wendell Holmes Lecture titled, Reply to Judge Richard A. Posner on the Inseparability of Law and Morality (1999).

Tell me I’m ideologically unfit to join your law school faculty, to join your university faculty when in Sept. 2010, I was accorded the special honor by the editors of the Rutgers Journal of Law & Religion to do a critical analysis of declassified Nazi documents selected from the world renowned Donovan Nuremberg Trials Collection which is kept at the Cornell University School of Law Library. This is part of Rutgers University’s ongoing Nuremberg Project. The law review article (released 23 February) was titled, Social Darwinism in Nazi Family and Inheritance Law. Tell me I’m ideologically unfit to join your law school faculty, to join your university faculty when my latest books are published in March/April 2012, The Progressive Revolution: Writings on Liberal Fascism through the Ages (University Press of America). This opus is a 2-volume collection of 230 original essays and Socratic dialogues on 12 different academic disciplines including: Law, Politics, Foreign Policy, Philosophy, Aesthetics, the Academy, Religion, Science, Economics, Culture, Society and History. This opus will revolutionize how America, Europe, and the world will understand and view the Progressive movement and the destructive effects of the Progressive Weltanschauung (worldview) which I describe as omnipresent, Machiavellian manipulation of every aspect of society controlled by a Nazis tactic called Gleichschaltung (coordination, synchronization). These books will expose the historical fact that for over 140 years the Progressive Revolution has surreptitiously, deliberately, and systematically exacerbated the collapse of America’s Republic, American exceptionalism, our Judeo-Christian traditions, free market enterprise, Natural Law, stare decisis, and Western Civilization before our very eyes.

Tell me I’m ideologically unfit to join your law school faculty, to join your university faculty when on the book jacket cover of these volumes one of my reviewers called me, “…the Thomas Sowell of his generation.” Tell me I’m ideologically unfit to join your law faculty, to join your university faculty when no other writer in the world that I am aware of has written about the expansive sweep, exposed the critical leitmotivs, nor chronicled the diabolical consequences of progressive laws, Fabian socialist philosophy, Keynesian economic policy, Marxist education atheism, and Machiavellian political hegemony over such a vast array of academic disciplines in the historical context that I detail in my books, The Progressive Revolution. These essential volumes meticulously chronicles an existential, contiguous, radical revolution which began circa 1870—tracing the advent of the welfare state from Germany’s Chancellor Otto von Bismarck (1871-90), the leader whose Leviathan socialist policies were eventually established all over Europe, America, Soviet Union, China, South America, and throughout the world reaching its apotheosis in the neo-Progressivism of America’s President Barack Hussein Obama (2009 – present). President Obama is truly a revolutionary political figure who is purposely following the Progressive traditions of the Imperial Presidency of Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, FDR, and LBJ; who in his own words repeatedly proclaimed that his administration would reestablish Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s “New Deal” Part 2 in modern times.

Epilogue:

Searching for Lebron James & Dr. Thomas Sowell

If sports organizations like university sports departments all over America, the NFL and NBA can literally spend hundreds of millions of dollars to go into the most dangerous and uninviting of America’s Black ghettos and even into the deep jungles of Africa, Hawaii, the Caribbean and other far flung places in search of gifted Black athletes as early as middle school, and give multi-million dollar contracts to fundamentally illiterate young Black men, many who can’t think independently, rationally, logically, speak proper English, or even compose a coherent sentence without a paid tutor, then why can’t America’s self-enlightened, progressive, egalitarian, liberal Academy over the past 20 years not find “the Thomas Sowell of his generation” and give this man a job as a professor?… Haven’t I earned it yet!? Would you have me to believe that your entire faculty at your law school, college, university is better educated, your scholarly output more impressive than mine? If yes, then prove it to me. Have them challenge me in the arena of ideas or what Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes called, “the marketplace of ideas” if not, then why have you for 20 years ignored me, mocked me, perverted my scholarly record, and treated me with such utter contempt as The Spook Who Sat by the Door?

In 2004, on the 50th anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education I explored that very question in a way no other academic or legal scholar in the world has done. (See A Voice Crying Out in the Wilderness: A Word About Brown v. Board of Education, 39 Valparaiso University Law Review 1, 87-94 (2004), also posted on my blog). In the Addendum at the end of that law review article is a critique of NBA star Lebron James using Socratic dialectical techniques and poetical verse to expose the deficiency of stare decisis, pseudo-constitutionalism, legal emotivism and progressive philosophy, contained in that iconic and pivotal desegregation case of 1954.

At this juncture you have perhaps deduced that this letter, this essay is not so much for my benefit, but a Socratic dialectical Apology, a Manifesto, an indictment if you will against the entrenched ideological, academic, and intellectual racism of the Left endemic in all of America’s so-called “Liberal Arts Academy” and law schools. How many conservatives are on the faculty at your law school, at your university? How many Black conservatives are on the faculty at your law school, at your university? I would imagine none, or perhaps the number is so statistically insignificant as to embarrass you. In 2008-09, when I taught constitutional law, political science, and jurisprudence at Savannah State University (a Historic Black College University) virtually none of the approximately 4,100 students there had ever seen nor heard of this curious creature called a “Black conservative.” In the beginning, the students looked upon me as one would an alien from out of space or an albino gorilla at the zoo. Nevertheless, the 12 Symposiums that I and my colleague, Professor Leonard McCoy, organized and participated in that academic year literally revolutionized the Weltanschauung (worldview) of the entire student body and many faculty members while ideologically affecting the entire campus to this day.

In conclusion, if you are content to continue “to hire yourselves” while shamelessly feigning ideological and academic diversity at your law schools, colleges, and universities, then please don’t waste your paper sending me another rejection letter… I have 20 years worth of rejection letters already, but know this I will bring this matter before your eyes (and before the eyes of your superiors, your alumni, your Board of Regents including the politicians and the taxpayers that regulate and fund your educational institutions) next year and the year after… because my intellectual mentor and namesake Booker T. Washington taught me that, Property, brains and character will settle the question of civil rights.

I am not stupid. I am not a Pollyanna. Yes, I was born in the ghetto, but the ghetto wasn’t born in me. I was born to be a Professor at Harvard University; to interact with emergent student scholars, to debate intellectual ideas with my colleagues inside the walls of the Ivy League, even so, I bear no irrational illusions that the Leftist Academy will ever feel enough legal, moral, or political pressure to grant me the economic justice I need to take care of my wife and my two little children (Stone and Eden) with the vocation I’ve trained for since age 5 where I first learned to read at the Detroit Public Library named after the first Black woman millionaire in America—Mme. C.J. Walker. I don’t honestly expect anyone to invite me to join your university or law faculty. Why? Because on the one hand I’ve spent nearly 20 good years of my life literally begging for the crumbs that fall from the master’s table; 20 good years of begging liberal White folks at all the colleges, universities, and law schools all over America for a faculty position even at my own alma maters to no avail. Nevertheless, what continues to give me the strength to fight against the ideological racism of the liberal Academy is contained in these transcendent words of Dr. Martin Luther King (another conservative Republican who like me wrote eloquently on Natural Law). Dr. King said: “All I want from America is to be true to what you said on paper!” Discrimination based on creed violates the 1st,5th, and 14th Amendments of the U.S. Constitution and also violates the 1964 Civil Rights Act, 42 U.S.C. § 21 which has the repeated refrain: “…prevents discrimination because of race, color, religion, creed, sex, disability, familial status or national origin.”

I AM A MAN ~ I AM A SCHOLAR ~ I AM A MAN!

Now I understand what the Psalmist meant when he wrote: “It was good for me that I have been afflicted so that I might learn.” Indeed, overtime and despite my endless David/Goliath battles with the Academy, I am now at peace. The crumbs of respect, the crumbs of acknowledgement… the crumbs of collegiality I begged from you these 20 years has made me realize that I now have enough crumbs to make my own bread… yea, even to open up my own bread factory based on what you and your colleagues carelessly threw away over these past 20 years (e.g., my emergent academic career) and to offer my two little children and to their generations effective tactics and proven self-help strategies following the conservative philosophical traditions of Booker T. Washington; to aggressively and continuously fight against this Leftist, existential, institutional, and ideological racism in all of its diabolical and hypocritical guises.

I AM,

Ellis Washington, J.D.

John Marshall Law School (J.D., 1994)

University of Michigan (M.M., 1986)

DePauw University (B.M., 1983)

Michigan State University (Post-Grad. Studies, History, 2004)

Harvard University, GSAS (Post-Grad. History/Law Studies, 1988-89)

Blog: Nigger Manifesto

WND.com Archive: http://www.wnd.com/author/ewashington/

*CV will be sent upon request.

References

1. Does the Academy discriminate against conservatives? Error! Hyperlink reference not valid.

2. University of California, Santa Barbara: Viewpoint Discrimination in Student Activity Funding.

3. Dr. Ossian H. Sweet House at 2905 Garland St., Detroit, Michigan.

4. In Jan. 1989, despite just beginning my first two law classes at Harvard Law School, yet five months later I would be appointed an Editor on the prestigious Michigan Law Review [MLR] having bested the top 10 percent of all 2nd and 3rd year University of Michigan Law School students who concurrently applied for this coveted seat in a test administered by MLR Executive Editor, Erik Light. Our output was legendary—in just 3 months our team edited 3 complete volumes which my colleague, Editor-in-Chief David Meyer, informed us sold more subscriptions than any other law review volumes in the history of the MLR up to that time (See 87 MICH. L. REV., nos. 6, 7, 8 (1989). By Nov. 1989, I completed the manuscript of my first law review article (“black” or “Black”?: A Plea for Legitimacy in Legal Scholarship), and in June 1991 I completed the manuscript to my second law review article (The Sophistry of Positive Law in Constitutional Jurisprudence) both of which I subsequently published as chapters 1-3 and chapters 5-6 respectively in my first book, The Devil is in the Details: Essay on Law, Race, Politics & Religion (1999). By late Dec. 1991, with only one semester of law school under my belt, I achieved two more coveted law clerkships by once again beating out dozens of top-tier 2nd and 3rd year law students (09/91-Sixty-Plus Elder Law Clinic and 01/92-The Rutherford Institute).

5. Professor Arthur R. LaBrew (b. Detroit, Mi 1930 – )— historian, musicologist, concert pianist, teacher, intellectual, mentor, friend, and the author of over 40 books, dozens of monographs, miscellaneous scholarly works, and his own multi-volume musicological journal—The Afro-American Music Review. In 1987, Professor LaBrew first prepared me for the rigors of graduate school at Harvard. Since then, for over 25 years he has taught me scholarly techniques in reading, research, writing, critical thinking, rhetoric, history, languages, classical music, and musicology. The first scholarly books and articles I ever edited all belonged to Professor LaBrew. In my opinion he is one of the greatest unheralded historians in the world. Yet, because like me he lacks the Ph.D. degree, his prolific oeuvre has been blacklisted by the Academy as irrelevant. Nevertheless, his final masterpiece, his magnum opus will be published by June 2012 (at age 82) which will solidify his scholarly legacy for the Ages — International Dictionary of Black Music and Musicians from Antiquity through the Nineteenth Century (4 volumes & Addendum). A singular expression of genius which dates to circa 1969. An eccentric and reclusive, Professor LaBrew has only granted me the honor to write this one modest essay in memoriam.

6. Rodney Whittaker was a young protégé of mine who in 1985 at about age 15 I led to accept Christ in his mother’s driveway after coming home from Sunday School and Church at Antioch C.O.G.I.C. After touring as a bassist with Wynton Marsalis and many other jazz greats, Professor Whittaker was charged with the task of creating the budget, curriculum, and the hiring of all the faculty members for the newly created Jazz Department at Michigan State University College of Music. Since 2000, Professor Whittaker continues to serve as its first Chair possessing only 1 year of college and no Ph.D. degree.

Sanitation workers protest in Memphis during their 1968 strike for better working conditions just days before the martyrdom of civil rights icon, Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King (1929-68).

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