Outspoken conservative writer Candice Jackson — who Betsy DeVos announced Wednesday as the deputy assistant secretary and acting head of the U.S. Department of Education’s Office For Civil Rights — once said that she was discriminated against for being White, reports ProPublica.
From ProPublica:
As an undergraduate studying calculus at Stanford University in the mid-1990s, Candice Jackson “gravitated” toward a section of the class that provided students with extra help on challenging problems, she wrote in a student publication. Then she learned that the section was reserved for minority students. “I am especially disappointed that the University encourages these and other discriminatory programs,” she wrote in the Stanford Review. “We need to allow each person to define his or her own achievements instead of assuming competence or incompetence based on race.”
Although her limited background in civil rights law makes it difficult to infer her positions on specific issues, Jackson’s writings during and after college suggest she’s likely to steer one of the Education Department’s most important — and controversial — branches in a different direction than her predecessors. A longtime anti-Clinton activist and an outspoken conservative-turned-libertarian, she has denounced feminism and race-based preferences. She’s also written favorably about, and helped edit a book by, an economist who decried both compulsory education and the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964.
Jackson’s inexperience, along with speculation that Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos will roll back civil rights enforcement, lead some observers to wonder whether Jackson, like several other Trump administration appointees, lacks sympathy for the traditional mission of the office she’s been chosen to lead.
Civil rights advocates are worried about Jackson’s past actions, which they feel may “may be at odds with the office’s mission of ensuring “vigorous enforcement of civil rights” and serves “student populations facing discrimination and the advocates and institutions promoting systemic solutions to civil rights problems,” reports NBC News.
SOURCE: ProPublica, NBC News
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