President Bush has named Gerald A. Reynolds, a Black lawyer and fellow conservative, as the new Chair of the United States Commission on Civil Rights. Reynolds takes over for Mary Frances Berry, whose term is ending and who had a history of combative and confrontational interactions with Bush and past Presidents.

By most accounts, Mr. Reynolds is an accomplished professional. But going back to my earlier post about actual policies on civil rights rather than the race/ethnicity of the person in charge, he unfortunately represents Bush’s latest attempts to water down enforcement of racial discrimination laws and to deemphasize the problem of racial inequality in America. As a New York Times article points out,

It is not that [Mr. Reynolds] doubts racial discrimination still exists, as his detractors have charged, it is that he is not quick to see it. He is not sure he has personally experienced it. . . He is a big fan of the No Child Left Behind law and ardently backs Mr. Bush’s belief that a “soft bigotry of low expectations” - far more than discrimination - is what is keeping Black and Hispanic students behind Whites and Asians. . . Though he took pains to say racial discrimination exists, he also said it is surmountable with fortitude and made no bones about his belief that traditional civil rights groups - which he has sharply criticized in the past - overstate the problem. He plans a more skeptical approach.

Unfortunately, this sort of development was exactly what I thought would happen if Bush were reelected.