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Jury trials are a challenge in diverse societies. In fact, one notable part of the legal history of the former British Empire is that almost every diverse, non-settler commonwealth country (including Singapore, Malaysia, India and Pakistan) has abolished jury trials in part because members of various groups consistently voted to exonerate their own.
To be fair, Vivek decided to organize a meeting on Chicago's South Side attended by local black activists involved in the black chamber of commerce, black city organizations, black rights groups and so on. These are people who are often employed in and around the entire Democratic activist framework. Using this as a bellwether is like failing to convince the New York Times newsroom to switch sides and concluding that you'll lose because no Democratic voters will swing right.
Bannon's plan was never to court the majority of black voters. It was to peel off the edge cases, which people involved in the Democratic machine certainly aren't. Maybe instead of 90-10 or 95-5 it's 85-15, which might still make a difference in the right places. And if messaging on immigration convinces some black voters to stay home because they see both parties as equally bad, that's a win too.
You'd think after their experience governing Scots they'd have already been aware of the issue with local juries.
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One of the seminal works of critical race theory in the law is a Yale Law Journal article from the 90's by Paul Butler, a black former federal prosecutor and current Georgetown law professor, in which he argued that there are no legitimate reasons for the overrepresentation of black people in American prisons besides racism, and encouraged black jurors to vote in favor of acquittal of black defendants as an act of racial solidarity. Butler prosecuted DC drug crimes and often saw black jurors vote to acquit black defendants even when the evidence was overwhelming, and even in cases where defendants practically admitted their guilt. These jurors told him they simply felt sympathy for the defendants regardless of the evidence, and Butler has spent the decades since framing this attitude as in line with an American tradition of refusing to cooperate with unjust laws, citing the example of John Peter Zenger, who published a newspaper insulting the British colonial authorities, but was acquitted at his libel trial by a patriotic American jury.
Personallly, I think Butler is just typical-minding his lower-class, lower-IQ co-ethnics, dressing up their acts of nullification as a noble struggle against oppression, when they're generally just acting out of base and atavistic tribal impulses or are just easy to manipulate by able and charismatic defendants. I recall the Chicago jury that acquitted R. Kelly of sexually abusing a child even when there was a VHS tape of him urinating on said child, and somehow I don't think this is what Butler had in mind. Or maybe he doesn't care.
Placing your fate in the hands of members of another tribe is always a grim proposition, particularly when these are people who were too stupid to get out of jury duty. But abolishing jury trials isn't always a solution - Scotland is currently doing a test run on abolishing jury trials for rape cases, because the Scottish government is unhappy with the number of jury acquittals for these charges. It's been almost unanimously condemned by Scottish bar associations as a political directive to circumvent pesky matters of civil rights in favor of a predetermined outcome, but the government is going ahead with it anyway, and I have no doubt that they'd make it permanent if they felt they had the political capital to do so. Would anyone accused of rape feel better about their rights under the law if their fate was being adjudicated by a judge who's been told by Lady Dorrian that these conviction rates are rookie numbers, we've git tae pump they numbers up?
This doesn't sound right; Critical race theory was an outgrowth of Critical Legal Theory (see page 6 here [". .. CRT began as a movement in the law"], and this truly seminal article was published in 1978. So critical race theory originated "in the law."
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What is this godforsaken mix of slang? e'Bonniè'ics?
See Thomas Sowell, Black Rednecks and White Liberals, for an at-least-plausible explanation. E'Bonniè'ics is less implausible than you would think...
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Well, part of the longstanding debate around jury trials (including in the OP’s comment) is that they’re almost always better for defendants. Abolishing them makes convictions more likely, for better or worse.
Plenty of grooming gang cases, for example, saw acquittals on many charges for precisely the reasons the Scottish government notes in its arguments for this legal pilot.
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