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“Woke up an optimist / Sun was shinin’, I’m positive / Then I heard you was talkin’ trash / Hold me back, I’m ’bout to spaz.” — Kanye West

On Tuesday, University of Oklahoma’s President David Boren expelled two SAE fraternity members from the school for their “leadership role in leading a racist and exclusionary chant which has created a hostile educational environment for others.”

By now you probably have seen and heard the infamous lyrics that some of Sigma Alpha Epsilon members gleefully sang on their bus. Some legal scholars believe it is unconstitutional for the University of Oklahoma to have expelled the fraternity brothers of SAE for their racist chant. In a recent post, Eugene Volokh writes:

First, racist speech is constitutionally protected, just as is expression of other contemptible ideas; and universities may not discipline students based on their speech… Likewise, speech doesn’t lose its constitutional protection just because it refers to violence — ‘You can hang him from a tree…’

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Related Column: Balancing the First Amendment vs. racist chants at the University of Oklahoma (by Noah Feldman)

“Wonder how they would feel if our lives got criss-crossed / What if you lost your homie and you felt like Kriss Kross? / Double cross, I swear that Christians don’t even get this cross.” — Big Sean

This week, I attended a presentation where the speaker implied Obama was a communist. After he was criticized for some of his remarks, he warned the audience, “political correctness is as pernicious as McCarthyism.”

In Jonathan Chait’s New York Magazine article “Not a Very P.C. Thing To Say – How the Language Police are Perverting Liberalism,” he compares political correctness to Marxism. Chait tells his readers:

I am white and male, a fact that is certainly worth bearing in mind…. If you consider this background and demographic information the very essence of my point of view, then there’s not much point in reading any further…. The internet has shrunk the distance between p.c. culture and mainstream liberal politics, and the two are now hopelessly entangled…. The p.c. style of politics has one serious, possibly fatal drawback: It is exhausting. Claims of victimhood that are useful within the left-wing subculture may alienate much of America….

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“The rejected stone is now the cornerstone / Sort of like the master builder when I make my way home.”  — Guru, Gang Starr

Recently, I had the opportunity to review The Triple Package: How Three Unlikely Traits Explain the Rise and Fall of Cultural Groups in America, the bestselling book by the wife-and-husband team of Amy Chua and Jed Rubenfeld, both professors at Yale Law School. You may be familiar with Chua, who first gained fame as a “Tiger Mom” because of her book Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother. The basic premise for The Triple Package is that certain groups have had disproportionate success in our country and the “Triple Package” is the reason for this success. Chua and Rubenfeld believe the three dominant predictive traits for achievement in America are:

1. A superiority complex.
2. Insecurity.
3. Impulse control.

The book’s premise is, no doubt, controversial. This is partly because the book attempts to answer “a complicated socioeconomic and cultural question.” Regardless of how you feel about the book, if read in context it can promote much needed discussions regarding racial issues in our society. In addition, minorities in the law can use particular parts of this thesis to better understand how they can become successful in their own careers. If nothing else, The Triple Package can be a guide for what character pathologies minorities should guard against while pursuing their own versions of success.

Anytime you talk about achievement in socioeconomic and cultural terms, it is sure to be provocative. But this doesn’t mean that particular influences, traits, and systematic factors aren’t critical to one’s success.

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