Did I fall asleep and wake up back in the ‘70’s? Because it’s deja vu all over again.We are reviewing the decision and will introduce legislation to correct the discriminatory laws on the books and pass repeals in the fall. https://t.co/dVpNxqnF2H
— Robin Vos (@repvos) June 29, 2023
Just remember white is not a race, so it cannot discriminate against races, but can only be discriminated against.
Joy-Ann Reid went to Harvard because she was smart, had the grades, and a Harvard recruiter came looking for her in Denver. That was affirmative action. George W. Bush was a legacy, because his family was white and rich and could accumulate wealth people who look like Ms. Reid were legally incapable of doing. The Tulsa Massacre was in 1921, after all. The Tuskegee Experiment ran from 1932 to 1972. None of this is pre-Civil War history, IOW.“That affirmative action is okay with this majority,” says @JoyAnnReid on legacy admissions vs. race-based admissions. “But you people who want to get in just because of your brains, but you’re not from a legacy—too bad, you can’t come in." pic.twitter.com/hTIRpQSXob
— All In with Chris Hayes (@allinwithchris) June 30, 2023
And the ‘70’s were the decade of the great push for affirmative action. Tuskegee ran for 40 years. The Tulsa Massacre was so buried in history it was this century before it became widely acknowledged.
But affirmative action is discriminatory and cannot be tolerated and so must be ended. Sure; why not? After all, it affects white people, and we adjudge it affects us adversely.
Can’t have that, can we?
And now the fallout from the affirmative action decision. Of course Brown stood at the center of the majority argument, willfully bent and twisted to serve as a tool to strike down any attempt to correct the harm from discrimination. Under that logic, black farmers denied equal access to crop loans? Terrible that it happened, but it would be discriminatory to now have a program to address past wrongs. To implement it would require us to make a racial distinction, so discriminatory. The decision is pernicious, it's the beginning not the end of a drive to eliminate any effort to address past and present discrimination. Scholarships for minority students? Discrimination! Additional efforts to reach out to minority students to get them to apply? Discrimination! Conservative district court judges will gleefully quote that line "Eliminating racial discrimination means eliminating all of it" as they strike down any effort that would support minority students. There is the argument that education will make us better people. I disagree, it takes a lot of fancy Ivy League education to turn a case meant to lift up blacks and other minorities from oppression to provide access to schools and colleges, and to turn it into a weapon that when applied will result in few blacks and other minorities having access to schools and colleges.
ReplyDelete303 Creative will also turn out to be as pernicious or more. The NY Times may have headlines implying that the first amendment angle was really just a way for conservatives to go after the LGBTQ+ community, but the eventual reality will show just the opposite. The religious angle was a way to cloak the case as religious freedom while opening the door to overt racism and all forms of bigotry. The next cases are already on the horizon. If serving a black or gay person is compelled speech, then why am I forced to hire someone that is black or gay? Isn't that also compelling me to speak by having them in my business? Expect equal opportunity employment laws to be the next in the cross hairs of the reactionary majority of the court.
As terrible as these two decisions are, the most revealing of this court was the habeas case on actual innocence. These six justices speak "freedom" with their lips and pens, talk about "fairness" in oral arguments, run on about oppressive government. However, when presented with government imprisoning actual innocent people they chose to deliberately choose the most cramped and narrow reading to deny any relief. This wasn't an accident, these six have agency and power that they refused to use. They are the end result of a long process to stack this court with extremist ideologues, and they are very willing participants. Their callous disregard for the falsely imprisoned says more about them then either of the other cases (and helps explain those cases and their decisions of the last several terms). There really is an emptiness to their souls.
ReplyDeleteFinally, yesterday was the day this country celebrated its independence. One of the things we point to as an icon of our freedom is the Constitution. Like many, I used to think of it as a great document and system, with a few flaws here and there that didn't significantly detract from its overall greatness. No longer. Our national original sin of slavery is of course embodied in the Constitution, but it's worse than that. The 3/5's counting of slaves isn't that slaves were only 3/5's of a human. They were zero of a human, they were property.* They had no rights at all, they could be abused, raped and even killed at will. The 3/5's is about political power. At the time, slaves were valuable property. I've seen articles that point out that at the time of the civil war, the value of slaves in many states exceeded the value of everything else. So our Constitution said that property owners, particularly owners of a certain kind of property, ultimately get more political power because their votes are inflated by counting property for purposes of apportionment of representation and ultimately power. The wealthier you were (by owning slaves), the more political power you received. In this light, Citizens United isn't a surprise, it's an inevitability. Money (property) is power. So it is entirely appropriate that you can use your money to obtain outsized power. This is not at all the egalitarian democracy of our friend the Thought Criminal. Of some votes are more important than others. Gerrymandering, vote suppression, all are acceptable when some voters by design have more power than other voters. The majority of this court believes this too, striking down most of the VRA, indifference to gerrymandering and other forms of unequal representation, Citizens United, making bribery laws so narrow that short of a written agreement they won't apply, and so on. It even goes to their gleeful personal acceptance of largess from the wealthy and powerful.
* I am thinking about chattel slavery. In law school I took a class titled Chattel Security. It was about about how to obtain legal security in physical property other than real property. Post graduation, the title was changed to Secured Transactions and if I ordered my transcript (which I will need soon to do, but that's a different topic) it will say Secured Transactions instead of Chattel Security. Graduates complained that prospective employers were confused about the class title and it even carried a negative connotation given chattel slavery. In many ways it's like the word evangelical, which causes much confusion when used with my denomination of the ELCA (Evangelical Lutheran Church of America) and the more common use of evangelical for ultra conservatives today.