Today is the last day
some of us will have
two functioning eyes,
and a full set
of fingers and toes.
And kids -
don't mess with fireworks.
Best if you leave it the adults
who've been drinking heavily
since about noon.
Jul 3, 2023
Today's Tweet #2
It’s almost Independence Day and Rhonda Santis is letting his control freak flag fly!👇🏻pic.twitter.com/HHmCocEwZT
— Lynda hates GOP thugs (@IvanasStairCam) July 3, 2023
The France Thing
I've been wondering about Marie Le Pen's gang - where they might factor in, and how Le Pen would play this thing.
I think I have the beginnings of my answer now.
She probably didn't directly encourage assholes to deface a holocaust memorial, and it's not likely she wrote a memo to any of the French equivalents of Proud Boys and 3%-ers saying they should rush right down to their local protest and amp things up.
But she can point at the "Muslim Problem" and then sit back and carp about "rampant violence" and the need to restore order, and how that weak sister Macron isn't able to do enough because what we really need is a strong leader to clamp down on immigration and stand up to rioters and show 'em who's boss and blah blah blah.
Race riots in France could give far-right the edge Marine Le Pen needs to win in 2027
When Nahel Merzouk, a 17-year-old of North African origin, was shot dead by police at a traffic stop in the Paris suburb of Nanterre on Tuesday morning, it looked like an event that would unite the French in shock and revulsion at the long-known violence and racism in the law enforcement community.
The killing was condemned across the political community, with President Emmanuel Macron calling it “inexplicable” and “inexcusable”, and even police authorities distancing themselves from the incident, which involved a teenager being shot at point-blank range simply because he refused to comply with the officer’s demands.
France’s far-right leader, Marine Le Pen, was initially on the back foot: this case, filmed and posted on the internet, seemed to prove the argument that minorities were systematically targeted by a police force that considers itself above the law. Meanwhile, the left-wing opposition, led by radical firebrand Jean-Luc Mélenchon, said it was the consequence of decades of neglect in the banlieues, the poor, multi-ethnic, high-density suburbs around the big cities.
But that was before the riots. The five nights since the shooting saw Paris and other French cities plunge into chaos as rioters have run rampage. Schools, police stations and city halls have been set torched, while cars, trucks and buses have been set ablaze.
Mr Macron, whose second term has already been disrupted by opposition to his pension reforms, is now facing perhaps the biggest challenge to his presidency yet. Although tens of thousands of police have been deployed to contain the violence, the anger has spread across the country, to Marseille, Lyon and Lille, with fears growing that they could disrupt the Tour de France cycling race. Mr Macron himself was obliged to cut short an EU summit in Brussels on Friday to return to Paris, and to postpone this week’s planned three-day state visit to Germany.
The rioting has also transformed the political discourse. The initial horror over the shooting of a teenager has now turned into a debate about law and order.
This is fertile territory for Ms Le Pen, who has long railed against what she sees as France’s drift into permissiveness and lawlessness. She lambasted the government on Twitter on Sunday as “a power that abandons all constitutional principles for fear of riots, which contributes to aggravating them”, adding, “Our country is getting worse and worse and the French are paying the terrible price for this cowardice and these compromises.”
She did not directly address the shooting but condemned the National Assembly for holding a minute’s silence for Nahel last week, saying, “Unfortunately, there are young people in our country every week…It’s terrible, but I think that the National Assembly should perhaps measure a little the minutes of silence that are carried out.”
And in a video address yesterday she lambasted the “anarchy”, called on authorities to declare a state of emergence or curfew, and attacked Mr Mélenchon for “conniving” and “morally exempting these criminal acts”, promising that they would face a reckoning with “the nation and history”.
This appeal to law and order is in direct contrast with her energetic encouragement of the violent yellow vest or “gilets jaunes” anti-government fuel protests in 2019 and 2020.
Ms Le Pen has detoxified her image in recent years. She changed the name of her party from the National Front to the National Rally, and in last year’s presidential campaign, her posters simply call her “Marine”, handily distancing her from her xenophobic father, Jean-Marie Le Pen.
The 54-year-old put pocketbook issues at the heart of her campaign, pointing to sharply rising fuel and food prices as proof of Mr Macron’s economic mismanagement. Her pivot was aimed at working-class voters struggling with rising costs, as she campaigned in rural France and former industrial towns.
She recast her party as a movement for the forgotten masses, bypassed by globalisation and the Paris elites, and even talked up her struggles as a single mother and her cat breeding. The rebrand has worked: she has neutralised many fears of her and normalised her image, with polls today rating her the nation’s second favourite political personality, behind the former prime minister Édouard Philippe.
The riots put Mr Macron in a bind. He was quick to capture the emotion after the shooting but has so far failed to contain the momentum of the subsequent anger. If he echoes Ms Le Pen’s language, he risks being called a hypocrite over the killing.
However, the longer the violence continues, the more Ms Le Pen will benefit. She can continue to blame the authorities for the chaos, saying this is the inevitable result of the moral laxity she has always warned against. And with Mr Macron term-limited, Ms Le Pen can look to the next presidential election, in 2027, as her moment.
Today's Tweet
I was going to suggest that if conservative Christian web designers can refuse to help gay men, then gay male hairdressers can refuse to help conservative Christians.
— Mrs. Betty Bowers (@BettyBowers) June 30, 2023
But, apparently, they already have. pic.twitter.com/TGnLjmRNwG
Jul 2, 2023
Today's Odd Thing
Surprise, surprise, surprise.
Half the Police Force Quit. Crime Dropped.
In a staggering report last month, the Department of Justice documented pervasive abuse, illegal use of force, racial bias and systemic dysfunction in the Minneapolis Police Department. City police officers engaged in brutality or made racist comments, even as a department investigator rode along in a patrol car. Complaints about police abuse were often slow-walked or dismissed without investigation. And after George Floyd’s death, instead of ending the policy of racial profiling, the police just buried the evidence.
The Minneapolis report was shocking, but it wasn’t surprising. It doesn’t read much differently from recent Justice Department reports about the police departments in Chicago, Baltimore, Cleveland, Albuquerque, New Orleans, Ferguson, Mo., or any of three recent reports from various sources about Minneapolis, from 2003, 2015 and 2016.
Amid spiking nationwide homicide rates in 2020 and 2021 and a continuing shortage of police officers, many in law enforcement have pointed to investigations like these — along with “defund the police”-style activism — as the problem. With all the criticism they are weathering, the argument goes, officers are so hemmed in, they can no longer do their job right; eventually they quit, defeated and demoralized. Fewer police officers, more crime.
Lying just below the surface of that characterization is a starkly cynical message to marginalized communities: You can have accountable and constitutional policing, or you can have safety. But you can’t have both.
In accord with that view, some academic studies have found that more police officers can correlate with less crime. But the studies don’t account for factors that the Minneapolis report highlights — the social costs of police brutality and misconduct, how they can erode public trust, how that erosion of trust affects public safety — and they don’t account for the potential benefits of less coercive, less confrontational alternatives to the police. We don’t have as many studies that take those factors into account, but to see the effects in real time, you need only step over the Minneapolis city line.
Golden Valley is a suburb of about 22,000 that in many ways is as idyllic as its name suggests. The median annual household income tops $100,000, there’s very little crime, and 15 percent of the town is devoted to parks and green spaces, including Theodore Wirth Park on its eastern border, a lush space that hosts a bike path and a parkway.
But the town’s Elysian charm comes with a dark past. Just on the other side of the park lies the neighborhood of Willard-Hay. There, the median household income drops to about $55,000 per year, and there’s quite a bit more crime. Willard-Hay is 26 percent white and 40 percent Black. Golden Valley is 85 percent white and 5 percent Black — the result of pervasive racial covenants.
“We enjoy prosperity and security in this community,” said Shep Harris, the mayor since 2012. “But that has come at a cost. I think it took incidents like the murder of George Floyd to help us see that more clearly.” The residents of the strongly left-leaning town decided change was necessary. One step was eliminating those racial covenants. Another was changing the Police Department, which had a reputation for mistreating people of color.
The first hire was Officer Alice White, the force’s first high-ranking Black woman. The second was Virgil Green, the town’s first Black police chief.
“When I started, Black folks I’d speak to in Minneapolis seemed surprised that I’d been hired,” Chief Green said when I spoke with him recently. “They told me they and most people they knew avoided driving through Golden Valley.”
Members of the overwhelmingly white police force responded to both hires by quitting — in droves.
An outside investigation later revealed that some officers had run an opposition campaign against Chief Green. One of those officers recorded herself making a series of racist comments during a call with city officials, then sent the recording to other police officers. She was fired — prompting yet another wave of resignations.
The typical Golden Valley police officer makes a six-figure salary with good benefits. The city has almost no violent crime. It’s a good gig. Yet in just two years, more than half the department quit.
“I haven’t been on the job long enough to make any significant changes,” Chief Green said. “Yet we’re losing officers left and right. It’s hard not to think that they just don’t want to work under a Black supervisor.”
The interesting thing is that according to Chief Green, despite the reduction in staff, crime — already low — has gone down in Golden Valley. The town plans to staff the department back up, just not right away. “I’ve heard that the police union is cautioning officers from coming to work here,” Mr. Harris said. “But that’s OK. We want to take the time to hire officers who share our vision and are excited to work toward our goals.”
Mr. Harris is quick to point out that Golden Valley may not be the perfect model for the rest of the country. “This is a wealthy community with very little crime,” he said. “We can afford to go through this change. I realize that may not be the case in other places.”
There is reason to think it may. When New York’s officers engaged in an announced slowdown in policing in late 2014 and early 2015, civilian complaints of major crime in the city dropped. And despite significant staffing shortages at law enforcement agencies around the country, if trends continue, 2023 will have the largest percentage drop in homicides in U.S. history. It’s true that such a drop would come after a two-year surge, but the fact that it would also occur after a significant reduction in law enforcement personnel suggests the surge may have been due more to the pandemic and its effects than depolicing.
At the very least, the steady stream of Justice Department reports depicting rampant police abuse ought to temper the claim that policing shortages are fueling crime. It’s no coincidence that the cities we most associate with violence also have long and documented histories of police abuse. When people don’t trust law enforcement, they stop cooperating and resolve disputes in other ways. Instead of fighting to retain police officers who feel threatened by accountability and perpetuate that distrust, cities might consider just letting them leave.
When police departments are made less people-hostile, and more citizen-friendly, things can get better.
We have to be careful not to fall into a Post Hoc Ergo Propter Hoc thing, but still - fewer cops and crime goes down?
Or is it more like "things get better when we get rid of the bad cops"?
IDK.
In a staggering report last month, the Department of Justice documented pervasive abuse, illegal use of force, racial bias and systemic dysfunction in the Minneapolis Police Department. City police officers engaged in brutality or made racist comments, even as a department investigator rode along in a patrol car. Complaints about police abuse were often slow-walked or dismissed without investigation. And after George Floyd’s death, instead of ending the policy of racial profiling, the police just buried the evidence.
The Minneapolis report was shocking, but it wasn’t surprising. It doesn’t read much differently from recent Justice Department reports about the police departments in Chicago, Baltimore, Cleveland, Albuquerque, New Orleans, Ferguson, Mo., or any of three recent reports from various sources about Minneapolis, from 2003, 2015 and 2016.
Amid spiking nationwide homicide rates in 2020 and 2021 and a continuing shortage of police officers, many in law enforcement have pointed to investigations like these — along with “defund the police”-style activism — as the problem. With all the criticism they are weathering, the argument goes, officers are so hemmed in, they can no longer do their job right; eventually they quit, defeated and demoralized. Fewer police officers, more crime.
Lying just below the surface of that characterization is a starkly cynical message to marginalized communities: You can have accountable and constitutional policing, or you can have safety. But you can’t have both.
In accord with that view, some academic studies have found that more police officers can correlate with less crime. But the studies don’t account for factors that the Minneapolis report highlights — the social costs of police brutality and misconduct, how they can erode public trust, how that erosion of trust affects public safety — and they don’t account for the potential benefits of less coercive, less confrontational alternatives to the police. We don’t have as many studies that take those factors into account, but to see the effects in real time, you need only step over the Minneapolis city line.
Golden Valley is a suburb of about 22,000 that in many ways is as idyllic as its name suggests. The median annual household income tops $100,000, there’s very little crime, and 15 percent of the town is devoted to parks and green spaces, including Theodore Wirth Park on its eastern border, a lush space that hosts a bike path and a parkway.
But the town’s Elysian charm comes with a dark past. Just on the other side of the park lies the neighborhood of Willard-Hay. There, the median household income drops to about $55,000 per year, and there’s quite a bit more crime. Willard-Hay is 26 percent white and 40 percent Black. Golden Valley is 85 percent white and 5 percent Black — the result of pervasive racial covenants.
“We enjoy prosperity and security in this community,” said Shep Harris, the mayor since 2012. “But that has come at a cost. I think it took incidents like the murder of George Floyd to help us see that more clearly.” The residents of the strongly left-leaning town decided change was necessary. One step was eliminating those racial covenants. Another was changing the Police Department, which had a reputation for mistreating people of color.
The first hire was Officer Alice White, the force’s first high-ranking Black woman. The second was Virgil Green, the town’s first Black police chief.
“When I started, Black folks I’d speak to in Minneapolis seemed surprised that I’d been hired,” Chief Green said when I spoke with him recently. “They told me they and most people they knew avoided driving through Golden Valley.”
Members of the overwhelmingly white police force responded to both hires by quitting — in droves.
An outside investigation later revealed that some officers had run an opposition campaign against Chief Green. One of those officers recorded herself making a series of racist comments during a call with city officials, then sent the recording to other police officers. She was fired — prompting yet another wave of resignations.
The typical Golden Valley police officer makes a six-figure salary with good benefits. The city has almost no violent crime. It’s a good gig. Yet in just two years, more than half the department quit.
“I haven’t been on the job long enough to make any significant changes,” Chief Green said. “Yet we’re losing officers left and right. It’s hard not to think that they just don’t want to work under a Black supervisor.”
The interesting thing is that according to Chief Green, despite the reduction in staff, crime — already low — has gone down in Golden Valley. The town plans to staff the department back up, just not right away. “I’ve heard that the police union is cautioning officers from coming to work here,” Mr. Harris said. “But that’s OK. We want to take the time to hire officers who share our vision and are excited to work toward our goals.”
Mr. Harris is quick to point out that Golden Valley may not be the perfect model for the rest of the country. “This is a wealthy community with very little crime,” he said. “We can afford to go through this change. I realize that may not be the case in other places.”
There is reason to think it may. When New York’s officers engaged in an announced slowdown in policing in late 2014 and early 2015, civilian complaints of major crime in the city dropped. And despite significant staffing shortages at law enforcement agencies around the country, if trends continue, 2023 will have the largest percentage drop in homicides in U.S. history. It’s true that such a drop would come after a two-year surge, but the fact that it would also occur after a significant reduction in law enforcement personnel suggests the surge may have been due more to the pandemic and its effects than depolicing.
At the very least, the steady stream of Justice Department reports depicting rampant police abuse ought to temper the claim that policing shortages are fueling crime. It’s no coincidence that the cities we most associate with violence also have long and documented histories of police abuse. When people don’t trust law enforcement, they stop cooperating and resolve disputes in other ways. Instead of fighting to retain police officers who feel threatened by accountability and perpetuate that distrust, cities might consider just letting them leave.
Jul 1, 2023
Why We're Here
Dihydrogen monoxide is a name for the water molecule, which comprises two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom (H2O).
The dihydrogen monoxide parody involves calling water by an unfamiliar chemical name, usually "dihydrogen monoxide" (DHMO), and listing some of water's properties in a particularly alarming manner, such as accelerating corrosion (rust) and causing suffocation (drowning). The parody often calls for dihydrogen monoxide to be banned, regulated, or labeled as dangerous. It plays into chemophobia and demonstrates how a lack of scientific literacy and an exaggerated analysis can lead to misplaced fears. The parody has been used with other chemical names for water, such as hydrogen hydroxide, dihydrogen oxide, and hydric acid.
History
In 1983 on April Fools' Day, an edition of the Durand Express, a weekly newspaper in Durand, Michigan, reported that "dihydrogen oxide" had been found in the city's water pipes, and warned that it was fatal if inhaled, and could produce blistering vapors. The first appearance of the parody on the Internet was attributed by the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette to the "Coalition to Ban Dihydrogen Monoxide", a parody organization at the University of California, Santa Cruz following on-campus postings and newsgroup discussions in 1990.
This new version of the parody was created by housemates while attending UC Santa Cruz, in 1989–1990, revised by Craig Jackson in 1994, and brought to widespread public attention in 1997 when Nathan Zohner, a 14-year-old student, gathered petitions to ban "DHMO" as the basis of his science project, titled "How Gullible Are We?"
Jackson's original site included the following warning:
Dihydrogen monoxide:
- is also known as hydroxyl acid, and is the major component of acid rain.
- contributes to the "greenhouse effect".
- may cause severe burns.
- contributes to the erosion of our natural landscape.
- accelerates corrosion and rusting of many metals.
- may cause electrical failures and decreased effectiveness of automobile brakes.
- has been found in excised tumors of terminal cancer patients.
- as an industrial solvent and coolant.
- in nuclear power plants.
- in the production of styrofoam.
- as a fire retardant.
- in many forms of cruel animal research.
- in the distribution of pesticides. Even after washing, produce remains contaminated by this chemical.
- as an additive in certain "junk-foods" and other food products.
A mock material safety data sheet has also been created for H2O.
Jun 30, 2023
Fuckin' SCOTUS, Man
Seems like we just saw 6 people take it upon themselves to chip away at the rights of all Americans as they effectively repealed a good 10% of the 14th amendment.
The Supreme Court Turns ‘Equal Protection’ Upside Down
In striking down affirmative action in higher education on Thursday, the Supreme Court’s conservative majority said it had to do so because the Constitution forbids any form of racial distinction. With a single opinion, the justices overturned decades of precedents that upheld race-conscious admissions policies as consistent with the 14th Amendment’s equal protection clause and ignored the reality of modern America, where prejudice and racism endure.
As Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in dissent, the decision cements “a superficial rule of colorblindness as a constitutional principle in an endemically segregated society where race has always mattered and continues to matter.”
The result of Thursday’s decision means the end of a system that provided decades of opportunity for thousands of students who might otherwise have been turned away from some of the nation’s biggest colleges and universities. The effects will be felt nationwide, and soon. In states that have already banned affirmative action in higher education, the percentage of Black students has dropped, in some cases dramatically. Black enrollment at the University of Michigan was 4 percent in 2021, down from 7 percent in 2006 before Michigan voters prohibited the consideration of race in college admissions. The story is similar in California, despite that state’s intensive efforts to recruit more minority students by other means.
That this ruling has been long anticipated does not change the context in which it was handed down. For the second time in just over a year, the Supreme Court tossed out a longstanding precedent intended, however imperfectly, to expand basic rights and freedoms to a large group of Americans who had suffered under a legal system that treated them as second-class citizens. Last year it was women seeking the constitutional right to have an abortion; this year it is chiefly Black and Latino students who want a shot at the economic opportunity that can come from a college degree.
Why now? Nothing has changed in either case — not public opinion, not the underlying facts, not even the behavior of the two schools targeted in the court’s decision, which were both following the guidelines the Supreme Court set out in a previous ruling on affirmative action in 2003.
Only one thing has changed: the court’s membership. With their supermajority now firmly in charge, the Republican-appointed justices have had free rein to upend swaths of American law in order to achieve long-held goals of the conservative movement. Ending any form of racial consideration has long been high on that list, part of a continuing effort to pretend that racial inequality no longer exists — what Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson described in her dissent as a “let-them-eat-cake obliviousness” to the role of race in daily life.
It has been the special project of an indefatigable right-wing activist named Edward Blum, who for years has coordinated the legal challenges to affirmative action, including the current lawsuits, which targeted race-conscious admissions practices at Harvard University and the University of North Carolina.
Thursday’s ruling, written by Chief Justice John Roberts and joined by all of the Republican-appointed justices, takes a long time to make a simple — and simplistic — point: There is no real difference between the centuries of racial discrimination against Black people and targeted race-conscious efforts to help Black people. Both are equally bad, in this view.
The chief justice has long adhered to this view of race. As he wrote in a 2007 case striking down race-conscious state programs aimed at integrating public schools, “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.” It was a memorable line, because it flattered the commonly held belief that any race-based discrimination is not just wrong but unconstitutional.
The problem is that, as a matter of history, it’s not true. The 14th Amendment, ratified in the aftermath of the Civil War, was expressly intended to allow for race-conscious legislation, as Justice Sotomayor noted emphatically on Thursday. The same Congress that passed the amendment enacted several such laws, including the Freedmen’s Bureau Acts, which helped former slaves secure housing, food, jobs and education.
The bureau was an obvious and essential measure to remedy at least some of the harm that slavery inflicted on Black Americans. The first affirmative-action programs, a century later, had the same goal, only then it was necessary to address the decades of state-sanctioned discrimination against Black people that followed Reconstruction, and that continued to impose unique and specific hurdles to their ability to fully join American society. As President Lyndon Johnson said in a 1965 commencement speech at Howard University, “You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line of a race and then say, ‘You are free to compete with all the others,’ and still justly believe that you have been completely fair.”
And yet despite the success of affirmative action programs in raising minority enrollment, or more likely because of it, the pushback was immediate. Allan Bakke, a white man rejected by the medical school at the University of California, Davis, said he was the victim of racial discrimination and filed a lawsuit. In a complicated split opinion in the 1978 Bakke case, the Supreme Court allowed race to be considered in college admissions, but only for the purpose of increasing diversity on campus, not as a way to alleviate the long-term effects of discrimination.
The focus on diversity was an orchestrated compromise meant to win over the court’s key swing justice, Lewis Powell. It worked, and yet at the same time it set the stage for affirmative action’s ultimate demise. By limiting it to a hard-to-define concept like diversity, the court opened the door to endless challenges. Some justices have asked, for example, why certain types of diversity mattered more than others. Why only racial diversity and not religious or political diversity?
But diversity — whether on campus, in business, or in government and society at large — remains a vital goal for any institution, and it will now be more difficult to achieve. The word is not a “trendy slogan,” as Justice Jackson wrote in her dissent. Diversifying medical schools by opening up the profession to Black physicians can save lives, she notes. Black infants, for example, are more likely to survive under the care of a Black doctor. Diversity also expands economic benefits and social understanding. A diverse student body, she wrote, means that “students of every race will come to have a greater appreciation and understanding of civic virtue, democratic values, and our country’s commitment to equality.”
What’s especially interesting in Thursday’s opinions is not where the justices disagree but where they agree: The Equal Protection Clause allows for race-conscious programs, as long as they are narrowly tailored to meet a compelling government interest. In fact, the opinion explicitly permits affirmative action in military academies, in what seems to be an acknowledgment that diversity in the armed forces remains a national priority. The real debate, then, is over exactly where to draw that line. What sort of harm is sufficiently clear and traceable to permit an exception to the 14th Amendment, and what isn’t? For nearly half a century, the court drew the line to permit affirmative action in higher education. On Thursday, it moved that line.
None of this is to deny the legitimate critique of affirmative action as it functions today. Unlike abortion rights, most Americans oppose race-based admissions programs for colleges, polls show. These programs have, for instance, been insufficient for addressing economic disparities, which are a crippling barrier to millions of Americans of all colors.
This and other shortcomings require their own solutions. This ruling against Harvard and University of North Carolina should be a call to action, for private and state universities alike, to create new paths to ensure that qualified students can find opportunity on their campuses. More evidence is needed around whether the most commonly proposed alternatives — giving a leg up to students from lower socioeconomic groups, for example, or admitting the top 10 percent of students from each high school in a state — boost minorities into better jobs and more stable lives.
Many schools, of course, already engage in one particularly insidious form of wealth-based affirmative action: legacy admissions. The children of alumni — who are overwhelmingly white — enjoy a far better chance than other applicants of getting accepted to the nation’s top colleges and universities, which, as this board has argued, constitutes “a form of property transfer from one generation to another.” It has a far larger impact on the racial and socioeconomic makeup of student bodies than race-based affirmative action ever has. At Harvard, an estimated 14 percent of students, most of whom are white, are there at least in part because of a legacy. Reducing or eliminating this practice could create new opportunities for all kinds of students who normally don’t have a chance of getting into a top school.
It’s nice to imagine an America where all people are treated the same, regardless of the color of their skin, but that is not the nation we live in today or ever have lived in. “Our country has never been colorblind,” Justice Jackson wrote. “Deeming race irrelevant in law does not make it so in life.”
This is a genuinely difficult task, but the solution is not to pretend that we have suddenly become colorblind. Any meaningful effort should take race into account. That’s not only permissible under the Constitution; it’s the only way it has ever succeeded.
I say this is the "judicial activism" that Republicans have been screaming about for decades.
Imagine that - conservatives accusing everybody else of doing exactly what they're been planning to do all along.
The Supreme Court Turns ‘Equal Protection’ Upside Down
In striking down affirmative action in higher education on Thursday, the Supreme Court’s conservative majority said it had to do so because the Constitution forbids any form of racial distinction. With a single opinion, the justices overturned decades of precedents that upheld race-conscious admissions policies as consistent with the 14th Amendment’s equal protection clause and ignored the reality of modern America, where prejudice and racism endure.
As Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in dissent, the decision cements “a superficial rule of colorblindness as a constitutional principle in an endemically segregated society where race has always mattered and continues to matter.”
The result of Thursday’s decision means the end of a system that provided decades of opportunity for thousands of students who might otherwise have been turned away from some of the nation’s biggest colleges and universities. The effects will be felt nationwide, and soon. In states that have already banned affirmative action in higher education, the percentage of Black students has dropped, in some cases dramatically. Black enrollment at the University of Michigan was 4 percent in 2021, down from 7 percent in 2006 before Michigan voters prohibited the consideration of race in college admissions. The story is similar in California, despite that state’s intensive efforts to recruit more minority students by other means.
That this ruling has been long anticipated does not change the context in which it was handed down. For the second time in just over a year, the Supreme Court tossed out a longstanding precedent intended, however imperfectly, to expand basic rights and freedoms to a large group of Americans who had suffered under a legal system that treated them as second-class citizens. Last year it was women seeking the constitutional right to have an abortion; this year it is chiefly Black and Latino students who want a shot at the economic opportunity that can come from a college degree.
Why now? Nothing has changed in either case — not public opinion, not the underlying facts, not even the behavior of the two schools targeted in the court’s decision, which were both following the guidelines the Supreme Court set out in a previous ruling on affirmative action in 2003.
Only one thing has changed: the court’s membership. With their supermajority now firmly in charge, the Republican-appointed justices have had free rein to upend swaths of American law in order to achieve long-held goals of the conservative movement. Ending any form of racial consideration has long been high on that list, part of a continuing effort to pretend that racial inequality no longer exists — what Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson described in her dissent as a “let-them-eat-cake obliviousness” to the role of race in daily life.
It has been the special project of an indefatigable right-wing activist named Edward Blum, who for years has coordinated the legal challenges to affirmative action, including the current lawsuits, which targeted race-conscious admissions practices at Harvard University and the University of North Carolina.
Thursday’s ruling, written by Chief Justice John Roberts and joined by all of the Republican-appointed justices, takes a long time to make a simple — and simplistic — point: There is no real difference between the centuries of racial discrimination against Black people and targeted race-conscious efforts to help Black people. Both are equally bad, in this view.
The chief justice has long adhered to this view of race. As he wrote in a 2007 case striking down race-conscious state programs aimed at integrating public schools, “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.” It was a memorable line, because it flattered the commonly held belief that any race-based discrimination is not just wrong but unconstitutional.
The problem is that, as a matter of history, it’s not true. The 14th Amendment, ratified in the aftermath of the Civil War, was expressly intended to allow for race-conscious legislation, as Justice Sotomayor noted emphatically on Thursday. The same Congress that passed the amendment enacted several such laws, including the Freedmen’s Bureau Acts, which helped former slaves secure housing, food, jobs and education.
The bureau was an obvious and essential measure to remedy at least some of the harm that slavery inflicted on Black Americans. The first affirmative-action programs, a century later, had the same goal, only then it was necessary to address the decades of state-sanctioned discrimination against Black people that followed Reconstruction, and that continued to impose unique and specific hurdles to their ability to fully join American society. As President Lyndon Johnson said in a 1965 commencement speech at Howard University, “You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line of a race and then say, ‘You are free to compete with all the others,’ and still justly believe that you have been completely fair.”
And yet despite the success of affirmative action programs in raising minority enrollment, or more likely because of it, the pushback was immediate. Allan Bakke, a white man rejected by the medical school at the University of California, Davis, said he was the victim of racial discrimination and filed a lawsuit. In a complicated split opinion in the 1978 Bakke case, the Supreme Court allowed race to be considered in college admissions, but only for the purpose of increasing diversity on campus, not as a way to alleviate the long-term effects of discrimination.
The focus on diversity was an orchestrated compromise meant to win over the court’s key swing justice, Lewis Powell. It worked, and yet at the same time it set the stage for affirmative action’s ultimate demise. By limiting it to a hard-to-define concept like diversity, the court opened the door to endless challenges. Some justices have asked, for example, why certain types of diversity mattered more than others. Why only racial diversity and not religious or political diversity?
But diversity — whether on campus, in business, or in government and society at large — remains a vital goal for any institution, and it will now be more difficult to achieve. The word is not a “trendy slogan,” as Justice Jackson wrote in her dissent. Diversifying medical schools by opening up the profession to Black physicians can save lives, she notes. Black infants, for example, are more likely to survive under the care of a Black doctor. Diversity also expands economic benefits and social understanding. A diverse student body, she wrote, means that “students of every race will come to have a greater appreciation and understanding of civic virtue, democratic values, and our country’s commitment to equality.”
What’s especially interesting in Thursday’s opinions is not where the justices disagree but where they agree: The Equal Protection Clause allows for race-conscious programs, as long as they are narrowly tailored to meet a compelling government interest. In fact, the opinion explicitly permits affirmative action in military academies, in what seems to be an acknowledgment that diversity in the armed forces remains a national priority. The real debate, then, is over exactly where to draw that line. What sort of harm is sufficiently clear and traceable to permit an exception to the 14th Amendment, and what isn’t? For nearly half a century, the court drew the line to permit affirmative action in higher education. On Thursday, it moved that line.
None of this is to deny the legitimate critique of affirmative action as it functions today. Unlike abortion rights, most Americans oppose race-based admissions programs for colleges, polls show. These programs have, for instance, been insufficient for addressing economic disparities, which are a crippling barrier to millions of Americans of all colors.
This and other shortcomings require their own solutions. This ruling against Harvard and University of North Carolina should be a call to action, for private and state universities alike, to create new paths to ensure that qualified students can find opportunity on their campuses. More evidence is needed around whether the most commonly proposed alternatives — giving a leg up to students from lower socioeconomic groups, for example, or admitting the top 10 percent of students from each high school in a state — boost minorities into better jobs and more stable lives.
Many schools, of course, already engage in one particularly insidious form of wealth-based affirmative action: legacy admissions. The children of alumni — who are overwhelmingly white — enjoy a far better chance than other applicants of getting accepted to the nation’s top colleges and universities, which, as this board has argued, constitutes “a form of property transfer from one generation to another.” It has a far larger impact on the racial and socioeconomic makeup of student bodies than race-based affirmative action ever has. At Harvard, an estimated 14 percent of students, most of whom are white, are there at least in part because of a legacy. Reducing or eliminating this practice could create new opportunities for all kinds of students who normally don’t have a chance of getting into a top school.
It’s nice to imagine an America where all people are treated the same, regardless of the color of their skin, but that is not the nation we live in today or ever have lived in. “Our country has never been colorblind,” Justice Jackson wrote. “Deeming race irrelevant in law does not make it so in life.”
This is a genuinely difficult task, but the solution is not to pretend that we have suddenly become colorblind. Any meaningful effort should take race into account. That’s not only permissible under the Constitution; it’s the only way it has ever succeeded.
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