Chron.com

Widely known in the local federal courthouse for his tendency to say what he thinks about some of the cases brought before him, U.S. District Judge Lynn Hughes has found himself under fire again for remarks that a Texas civil rights group claims are racist.

The Texas Civil Rights Project has gone so far to ask for Hughes' resignation over comments he made during a hearing last November in a lawsuit brought by a state employee who claimed he was discriminated against when he was laid off. The comments came to light when the plaintiff, J.T. Shah, filed a recusal motion against Hughes, asking that the case be reassigned to another judge.

During the November hearing, Hughes at one point veered off on a tangent about diversity, making fun of educational institutions that have hired personnel to broaden the racial diversity of employees.

"And what does a diversity director do," Hughes said, "go around and (paint) students different colors so they think they were mixed?"

Later, Hughes appeared to discount the possibility that the plaintiff in the case could have been discriminated against because of his South Asian ethnic background. Shah's Indian origin did not impress Hughes as special.

"All right," Hughes said. "So he's Caucasian."

"No, he's Indian," replied the attorney for the state.

"They're Caucasian," Hughes said. "That's where we came from. That's why Adolph Hitler used the swastika."

Hughes appeared to confuse Caucasian - a racial classification that was popularized in the 19th century and which used certain Eastern European characteristics as representative of a larger group - with Aryan, which refers to the original speakers of early Indo-European languages and which later was hijacked by 19th-century racial theorists to describe a purportedly "master" root race that represented the human ideal.