A very promising development in scholarship

Tonight, I'm finishing up a ton of paperwork that I'm behind on and I hear this really terrific show from Studio360, the late night NPR show about culture and society.

I love Studio360. They were the first to alert me to the monkey slam poetry video that lampoons the human race and how much it thinks it has evolved. Really creative stuff on this show.

Tonight, I was listening to this really terrific story on African Americans defying the politically correct push of the 1990's by the likes of August Wilson to only do African American roles and to embrace Shakespeare as their own and this really beautiful Shakespeare reading from Maya Angelo.

And then they bring on this really awesome and encouraging story about the most recent book by Yale law professor, Kenji Yoshino, called Covering: The Hidden Assault on our Civil Rights.

Now, honestly, this is not the type of book that would usually get me excited. Law books, generally, have to be really rigorous and ready to go beyond the more narrow world of law and politics to seriously interest me since I think of too much of the law springs from a narrow world view that too often ignores the human consequences from its often lengthy and involved and far too often cold logic. Ronald Dworkin writes law work that I very much appreciate. As does Richard Posner. And what both of these writers and other law writers (Alan Dershowitz is someone I've grown up reading) have in common is that they go beyond the law to look at the human consequences of their thinking.

And listening to this Studio360 interview with Kenji Yoshino convinced me that this guy's book is well worth checking out, that he writes very much like me - with scholarship and personal sharing intertwined - and in a way that is really touching, that his thinking on matters of race, gender, and identity are really wise and not at all in line with the politically-correct identity politics that characterizes far too much of the thinking and writing in this area of political discussion, and that his ideas are some of the most remarkably consistent with my own that I have ever read.

And this dude is a law professor at Yale Law School.

I would say that's a very healthy development for the life in my own ideas and thinking.

I'm very excited to check this guy's book out at the book store the next time I happen by. It's been a long time since I read a book that said something genuinely new that I could shake my head in agreement with since this whole political period has been one long head nod amongst a lot of people saying the same thing without having to say much at all, really, in my view.

Who would have thought I would have found such a fellow traveler in a law school faculty?

I didn't. That's for sure.

And that is why this is such a promising development.

A welcome suprise.

Love,
Ben