DeVos Pick for Civil Rights Office Once Claimed Reverse Racism

Candice Jackson, the new acting head of the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights, once claimed reverse racism, ProPublica reported. In the 1990s, while she was an undergraduate student at Stanford University, she at some point “gravitated” toward a part of her calculus class that gave students extra help—and then learned the assistance was reserved for minority students. “I am especially disappointed that the university encourages these and other discriminatory programs,” Jackson wrote in the student-run Stanford Review at the time. “We need to allow each person to define his or her own achievements instead of assuming competence or incompetence based on race.” Jackson’s piece and inexperience suggest, according to ProPublica, that she will likely take one of the department’s most important branches in an entirely new—and controversial—direction. Jackson’s writings “[don’t] leave me with a feeling of confidence with where the administration might be going,” said Theodore Shaw, who led former President Barack Obama’s transition team for civil rights at the Justice Department. “I hope that she’s not going to be an adversary to the civil-rights community and I hope that the administration is going to enforce civil-rights laws and represent the best interests of those who are affected by civil-rights issues.”