Category: Race

Poor Messaging

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Yale academics have written a study showing that Democratic Party anti-racism messaging harmed the party politically.

Obviously, some of the this can be ascribed to the racism of a portion of the electorate, but there is also the issue that anti-racism messaging has been offered as an alternative to basic issues of social justice, labor rights, and inequality.

That’s why Hillary Clinton’s, “Basket of Deplorables,” quote was so damaging.

The subtext was, “If you did not have the talent and initiative to get a post-graduate degree at an elite institution, screw you.”

The Democratic Party establishment (There is no Democratic Party establishment) has completely eschewed issues of socioeconomic class, because they are creatures of the top 1%, and racial reductionist statements allow them to check the various “social justice” text box while continue to serve the agenda of the economic elites.

The is the exact opposite of the answer that Jesse Jackson gave during his 1988 Presidential campaign when he was asked, “How you are going to get the support of the white steelworker?” and he replied, “By making him aware he has more in common with the black steel workers by being a worker, than with the boss by being white.”

Bernie Sanders message in 2016 and 2020 was very similar, and (thankfully) Biden appears to be governing more toward the Jackson end of the Democratic Party ideological spectrum than he is toward the Clinton/Obama side of the spectrum, even if he did not campaign that way:

Beginning about a decade ago, the Democratic Party went through two important changes related to racism. The first is that the backlash against Barack Obama made far more white liberals aware of how deeply racial resentment inspired American conservatism. (Black people had by and large realized this all along.)

The second is that the party, which in previous years had painstakingly avoided the impression its agenda was mainly designed to help minorities, began emphasizing this very point. That change occurred in 2016, when Hillary Clinton started infusing her rhetoric with conscious appeals to racial equity. And it continued in 2020 — even though Joe Biden employed less race-conscious rhetoric than his more progressive rivals, he still cast some of his plans as explicitly anti-racist.

But is it working? Yale political scientists Micah English and Josh Kalla have found that adding explicitly race-conscious ideas to Democratic messages reduces their support. English and Kalla’s experiment borrows real-world messages from Democratic politicians and tests them with both a race-conscious component and a mix of race and class messaging. In either instance, telling subjects that a proposal would reduce racial inequity makes them less likely to support it:

 

Bigotry is evil, and it needs to be fought on every level, but using anti-racist virtue signaling as an alternative to meaningful change in a profoundly dysfunctional society, ends up harming both the progressive project and the ability to fight racism, because it reduces every government action to a zero sum game where the only determinant is ethnicity.

When the Washington Post Editorial Board Condemns Something, It Is a Hearty Endorsement

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They just came out guns blazing in their condemnation of the NAACP’s opposition to charter schools.

Don’t worry. They are just proving that the NAACP is right.

From their support for the ill conceived adventures in Iraq and Libya, to their endorsement of privatizing Social Security, there is perhaps no group in the country that has proven to more reliably and spectacularly wrong.

Fred Hiatt and his merry band of useful idiots are the veritable Washington Generals (taste the irony there) of punditry, which says a lot.

Comedy Central Goes Full “Unblackening”

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They just canceled Larry Wilmore’s show:

For almost a decade, the combination of Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert made Comedy Central destination viewing for fans of late-night comedy and barbed political commentary.

But over the last 12 months, the post-Stewart and post-Colbert era has not been as easy for the network.

On Monday, Comedy Central announced that it was canceling “The Nightly Show With Larry Wilmore” because of falling ratings and a distinct lack of buzz.

The final episode of Mr. Wilmore’s 11:30 p.m. show — the slot formerly occupied by Mr. Colbert before he left for CBS — will be Thursday.

Kent Alterman, Comedy Central’s president, said he informed Mr. Wilmore of the news late last week. The move, Mr. Alterman said in an interview, was made for a simple reason: The show “hasn’t resonated.”

“Even though we’ve given it a year and a half, we’ve been hoping against hope that it would start to click with our audience, but it hasn’t happened, and we haven’t seen evidence of it happening,” Mr. Alterman said.

The awkward timing of the cancellation, just 12 weeks before the presidential election, ultimately came down to a contract, Mr. Alterman said. Mr. Wilmore’s deal, along with those of several of the show’s other staff members, was set to expire in a few weeks and the network had to decide now whether to renew or cancel.
Continue reading the main story

For the time being, Comedy Central’s 12 a.m. show, “@midnight,” will replace “The Nightly Show” at 11:30 p.m. “The Daily Show” with Trevor Noah remains at 11 p.m. Mr. Alterman said he hoped to name a full-time replacement for “The Nightly Show” sometime next year.

………

“The Nightly Show” has been known for a signature segment, “Keep It 100,” (slang for telling the truth, no matter the consequences) and for Mr. Wilmore’s often stinging commentary on race and this year’s election. (He called the election to find Barack Obama’s successor “The Unblackening.”) Though the late-show genre remains heavy on easygoing laughter, any one episode of “The Nightly Show” could occasionally go for prolonged stretches without a single joke, something that intrigued some critics but failed to attract a broader audience.

“I’m really grateful to Comedy Central, Jon Stewart and our fans to have had this opportunity,” Mr. Wilmore said in a statement. “But I’m also saddened and surprised we won’t be covering this crazy election or ‘The Unblackening’ as we’ve coined it. And keeping it 100, I guess I hadn’t counted on ‘The Unblackening’ happening to my time slot as well.”

It wasn’t getting the demographic that the network wanted, White Bros, because it attempted a meaningful dialogue on race, which is about as welcome by that demo as a turd in a punch bowl.

I’m bummed.

This is a Very Interesting Perspective on Black Lives Matter

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Even more than the now moribund Occupy movement, Black Lives Matter appears to be a movement without goals.

There is nothing approaching a statement of goals, just a vague statement of principles, which are unattainable because they are little more than a word salad of good sounding words.

Over at Orchestrated Pulse, R.L. Stephens II says that this serves a purpose, and that many of the “leaders” of the nominally leaderless Black Lives Matter movement have personal career goals at the core of their actions:

The latest effort to storm Bernie Sanders’ appearances is only making the problem more obvious. The two women that interrupted Sanders last weekend seemingly did so unilaterally. You can’t build real mass political power that way, but building effective power is not their point. Make no mistake, this Bernie Sanders hoopla is ultimately about campaign jobs and foundation funding, not emancipation for the masses. These interruptions will create career opportunities for a few activists and political operatives—the Black leadership desired by [BLM activist] Tia [Oso] and others—but, as with Ferguson, the masses of Black people will be unaffected. 

I have heard variants of this complaint for decades, that some elements of the Black political class are driven more by a desire for patronage positions than by a desire for substantive change.

Certainly, this would explain why BLM activists have not been as active, or as effective, at confronting Hillary Clinton.

If the name of the game is patronage, than it naturally makes sense to hitch your star to Hillary, who has been a creature of this sort of politics, for decades.

Read the rest.

H/t Naked Capitalism.

I Cannot Believe that I am Saying This………

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It turns out now that the best evidence now is that at least one of the protesteris a bit of a nut, who was in the not too distant past a Teabagger supporter of Sarah Palin.

IMNSHO, you cannot manufacture this kind of lunacy, so I’m going with a small group of nuts:

An interesting development has occurred within the Black Lives Matter movement and it has caused many outside and from within the movement to question the wisdom in the most recent interruption of Bernie Sanders campaign. While no one can deny its effectiveness, especially considering Senator Sanders newest addition to his team is a Black Lives Matter activist, this interruption happened after Bernie had already begun shifting his campaign towards publicizing his stance on racial issues.

When individuals place themselves in the public eye they become scrutinized at every level. While looking into these activists for the Black Lives Matter movement, it became readily apparent that either they were not officially a part of the BLM movement, or they were not organized until just around the time of the incident.

………

Then more startling information came out concerning Marissa Johnson, the main agitator who berated Bernie for being a racist. According to her own Facebook profile she was a huge Tea Party supporter and had supported Sarah Palin in her 2008 Vice Presidential candidacy.

………

While none of that necessarily qualifies her as being a troll, or as some on the internet have accused an operative who is just trying to delegitimize the Sanders campaign. It is very possible that Johnson was a staunch Tea Party supporter in 2008 and has now changed her political persuasion to more closely mirror that of Bernie Sanders or Martin O’Malley. Eight years are a long time for an individual to reflect upon politics and their effects in the real world.

Although it is quite disquieting when you dig deeper into the facts. The Facebook page and social media presence of Johnson’s faction BLM Seattle did not exist until the day of the rally. Two hours after the interruption her Facebook page had been live for less than 24 hours and had garnered less than 50 followers. Again, this may all relate back to poor planning and nothing nefarious, but it is certainly not indicative of someone attempting to achieve legitimacy within the political spectrum. Johnson is also a member of a group called Outside Agitators 206, a movement within the larger Black Lives Matter movement, based out of Seattle. Unfortunately, they don’t appear to hold the same goals as the larger movement and actually made a public statement declaring their intent was to “declare war on the Democratic Party“. ………

I would note that there has been no formal comment by BLM on this protest, and I would argue that there can’t be one, because, much like the Occupy movement, there is no head, there is no tail, and there is no way to determine if someone is official, a nut, or an agent provocateur.

On the other hand, I think that the preponderance of the evidence here is that this specific protest is the product of the bat-sh%$ insane wing of BLM, so I apologize to the Clinton campaign.

BTW, read what the Bear who Swims has said about Occupy and its ilk about the tendency of groups like Occupy, and BLM to function as “Useful Idiots”.

Here is a particularly good bit:

Say what you like about the reactionaries, they have spent the last 30 years do these things. They have

  • Used mass media to explain their theories, and why they are better.
  • Popularized goals and objects and made them part of the political discussion through poltical organizing and outreach.
  • Created a cadre of individuals who are willing to take on public office at all levels of govenment to implement their policies.
  • Created a core group of constituencies who are loyal to their cause — even against their own interested.

Let us put that another way, they have play practical electoral politics effectively.  In the course of this they have created a separate reactionary nationalism, which while at odds with the views of many, has no counter balance.

Go read what the Bear, AKA my brother, AKA the hairiest Saroff, AKA Stephen wrote.

He has been involved in politics for a long time, and has little patience for folks who think that it is noble to rearrange deck chairs on a certain White Star Line ocean liner as an alternative to identifying and avoiding icebergs.

Chuck Todd, go F%$# Yourself

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I understand that gun control is an incendiary issue, so it makes sense to have a discussion, and even to have a discussion about guns that involves talking with felons, but there is no excuse for Meet the Press decide to have all the felons in its video to be black:

While the country — and South Carolina, in particular — is once again debating racism in America, NBC’s Meet the Press on Sunday offered a video of men in prison expressing regret for their own gun violence. All of the men in the video are black.

The segment was part of Sunday’s show, which focused on the recent killing of nine black people at a bible study group in Charleston, South Carolina. The alleged shooter, Dylann Roof, is accused of making racist statements during the rampage and in an online manifesto that describes black people as “stupid and violent.” He has been seen in photos online holding a Confederate flag and wearing the flags of apartheid-era South Africa and white-ruled Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe.

“The circumstances you are about to see are very different from the racist violence in Charleston,” Meet the Press host Chuck Todd said in the introduction to the video.

“The last thing we wanted was to cloud the discussion of the topic,” Todd wrote on the NBC website after receiving a wave of negative feedback on social media about the video.

“The original decision to air this segment was made before Wednesday’s massacre. However, the staff and I had an internal debate about whether to show it at all this week. When we discussed putting it off, that conversation centered around race and perception – not the conversation we wanted the segment to invoke,” he said.

In a panel discussion responding to the blowback, Todd said, “It wasn’t meant to be a black and white issue. And I understand maybe it’s one of those moments when people are only seeing through black and white.”

 This has to be the lamest non-apology apology that I have ever heard in my life.

Translated to English, Todd is saying, “Who cares if the only felons we show are black?  You are too hung up on race.”

I’ve always thought that Todd was a lame and shallow product of the insular and narcissistic White House press corps(e), but this is a whole new level of wankitude.

Mazel Tov!!

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The new editor of The New Republic has announced that he will try to expand its bullpen beyond its white Ivy League past:

The best way for any new editor of this magazine to respect the spirit of the institution is to first recognize its defining characteristic is a habit of reinvention. The task before us is to ask what The New Republic should be one hundred years after its founding. We set out with many advantages: first, an owner who has committed to investing in quality journalism and who has granted his editorial staff the creative freedom to find a new path. We have an impressive editorial team that has demonstrated exceptional mettle and we will be adding to their ranks. And we have the heritage of sustaining a continuous conversation about America’s promise.

As we revive one proud legacy of The New Republic—the launching of new voices and experts—those new voices and experts will be diverse in race, gender, and background. As we build our editorial staff, we will reach out to talented journalists who might have previously felt unwelcome at The New Republic. If this publication is to be influential, and not merely survive, it can no longer afford to represent the views of one privileged class, nor appeal solely to a small demographic of political elites.

You know, I think poaching Ta-Nehisi Coates from The Atlantic might be a good start.

He’s a great writer, and has been aggressive critic of The New Republic‘s indifference, and occasional hostility, to the minority community, and it would do a lot to indicate that this is a clean break from the ignominious reign of the contemptible Marty Peretz.

I Know that this is Trolling, but I Approve

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Author H.A. Goodman is suggesting that black men should avail themselves of the right to open carry wherever possible.  He gives 2 highly convincing reasons:

I never thought I’d be an open-carry advocate.

However, I’m a firm believer in working within the American political system in order to change the status quo. If the Second Amendment is cherished by millions of Americans, then why not use it to further certain liberal ideals? Protecting African-American lives and alleviating tensions between the black community and law enforcement should be a top priority of all Americans and especially Congress; however, this is not the case. It speaks volumes that African-Americans vote over 90 percent Democrat during national elections, yet our future nominee in 2016 still hasn’t addressed an issue the whole nation is talking about, even after Darren Wilson’s acquittal and the flames that engulfed Ferguson.

He goes on to state that, “I’m not advocating armed insurrection. My name isn’t Cliven Bundy.”

He then gives three very good reasons for blacks to open carry:

1. Openly carrying a gun legally (in an open-carry state) is a public display indicating that an individual does not have a criminal record. This alone undermines the basis behind racial profiling.He’s right, of course.

If you have been convicted of a felony, the federally mandated background check will catch you.

Well it will if you don’t exploit the gun show loophole.

2. The epidemic of disproportionate force utilized against black men in America warrants an alternative, and legal, solution to this problem.

………

There are so many more instances of unarmed black males shot by police that there simply isn’t enough room in this article to continue. Therefore, regardless of your view of gun ownership, the predicament faced by African-Americans warrants a serious look at whether or not openly carrying a weapon will save black lives.

Anything that deflates the sense of impunity that many in law enforcement (aka the Thin Blue Line) will improve the quality of policing int he country.

3. The vast majority of African-American men will never commit a crime, so it’s time America realizes this fact. If openly carrying a gun will help our country overcome centuries of prejudice pertaining to skin color, then it’s an option that should be pursued.

This whole “Carry a gun, and show that you are not a criminal,” thing is trolling.

It’s trolling when the (almost completely caucasian) open carry ammosexuals do it, and it’s trolling when people of color do it.

But the right to troll is fundamental, and it should be available without regard to race, religion, sex, sexual orientation, or national origin.

BTW, if anyone wants to organize a gay black open carry parade in Houston or Dallas, TX, I will do what I can to help.

Open Carry This!

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Local Coverage

In an eerie echo of the actions that led Ronald Reagan to sign into California law what was then the most restrictive gun law in the United States, the the Huey Newton gun club is staging open carry demonstrations:

A Texas gun club named after one of the founders of the Black Panthers Party marched in Dallas on Wednesday to protest against police brutality, KTXA-TV reported.

 Around two dozen members of the Huey P. Newton Gun Club carried rifles and red, black and green flags as they marched through the city’s south side, sometimes chanting in support of Michael Brown, the 18-year-old man killed by a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri, on Aug. 9.

 “If they don’t get these killer cops and corrupt cops under control,” a member identifying himself as Commander Drew X was quoted as saying. “What happened in Ferguson is going to be nationwide.”

 The club’s leader, Huey Freeman, said Wednesday’s march would be the first step in a campaign of “civilian patrols” through the area. The state’s open carry law allows “long gun” owners to display them unless it is meant “to cause alarm.”

 “We believe we can police ourselves and bring security to our community, ridding our community of black-on-black crime, violence, police terror, etcetera, etcetera,” Freeman told KXAS-TV.

Needless to say, I do not approve of open carry protests, but I do find a bit of schadenfreude in the the undoubted freakout that is going on in Dallas about black men open carrying.

A Fact of Ferguson that is Finally Getting Mainstream Notice

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The fact that more than 20% of the budget of the town of Ferguson comes from tickets and warrants issued by police shows that the police are not there to protect the populace, they are there to extract tribute from them:

Scratch any social crisis, and you’re likely to find economics not far below the surface. Via ArchCity Defenders, a St. Louis legal-aid nonprofit, we can see how this has worked to create the dismaying spectacle of the breakdown of justice in Ferguson. (H/t Alex Tabarrok, via Kevin Drum.)

According to the group’s recent report on the municipal court system in St. Louis County, the Ferguson court is a “chronic offender” in legal and economic harassment of its residents. There’s not much of a secret why: the municipality collects some $2.6 million a year in fines and court fees, typically from small-scale infractions like traffic violations. This is the second-largest source of income for that small, fiscally-strapped municipality.

………

For a low-income community–and for a black community subjected to the racial profiling, as the report documents–these fines can gather force like a boulder rolling downhill. 

Tabarrok points to the report’s observation that the Ferguson court processed the equivalent of three warrants and $312 in fines per household in 2013.

“You don’t get $321 in fines and fees and 3 warrants per household from an about-average crime rate,” he notes. “You get numbers like this from [B.S.] arrests for jaywalking” and what the report calls “low level harassment involving traffic stops, court appearances, high fines, and the threat of jail for failure to pay without a meaningful inquiry into whether an individual has the means to pay.”

The reason that the minorities in Ferguson do not see the police as their defenders and their protectors, it’s because they aren’t.

This arrangement, where peace officers have as their primary function tax collections, is fundamentally pathological and corrupt, and it needs to stop.

What a Surprise

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When Whites are asked about affirmative action in the context of Asian-Americans, suddenly they are much more supportive of affirmative action:

Critics of affirmative action generally argue that the country would be better off with a meritocracy, typically defined as an admissions system where high school grades and standardized test scores are the key factors, applied in the same way to applicants of all races and ethnicities.

But what if they think they favor meritocracy but at some level actually have a flexible definition, depending on which groups would be helped by certain policies? Frank L. Samson, assistant professor of sociology at the University of Miami, thinks his new research findings suggest that the definition of meritocracy used by white people is far more fluid than many would admit, and that this fluidity results in white people favoring certain policies (and groups) over others.

Specifically, he found, in a survey of white California adults, they generally favor admissions policies that place a high priority on high school grade-point averages and standardized test scores. But when these white people are focused on the success of Asian-American students, their views change.

As the saying goes, “Where you stand depends upon where you sit.”

Barack Obama Reveals that he is Black

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Barack Obama has spent pretty much all of his time on the national stage trying to avoid the accusation that he is the stereotypical “Angry Black Man“, and so, with the brief exception (which he walked away from as quickly as he could) of a comment on the arrest of Henry Louis Gates.

This is why Obama saying that 35 years ago that he would be Trayvon Martin was such a big deal:

Barack Obama used an unexpected speech at the White House to personally address the debates over race relations that have convulsed America since George Zimmerman was acquitted over the shooting of the unarmed teenager Trayvon Martin.

In remarks immediately interpreted as the most expansive comments on race since he became president, Obama said the US was still not “a post-racial society”.

“You know, when Trayvon Martin was first shot I said that this could have been my son. Another way of saying that is: Trayvon Martin could have been me 35 years ago,” he said.

But once again, it appears that Obama immediately followed this up by pandering to bigots racial profilers by floating the name of New York City Police Commissioner Ray Kelly, who has aggressively profiled blacks, Hispanics, and Muslims:

Earlier this week, President Barack Obama endorsed New York City police commissioner, and stop-and-frisk cheerleader, Ray Kelly as an adequate replacement for Janet Napolitano as head of the Department of Homeland Security. Under Kelly, the New York Police Department’s policy on randomly stopping people in the streets and then questioning and patting them down for weapons and drugs, imposed a stiff burden on black and Latino residents. According to the ACLU in New York, between 2002 and 2011, black and Latino New Yorkers made up close to 90 percent of those stopped by police — 88 percent of whom had no weapons or drugs on them when it happened. Kelly has staunchly defended the policy regardless of the racial profiling it codifies and its fruitless conclusions.

But Obama told Univision on Wednesday that “Kelly has obviously done an extraordinary job in New York,” and that the police commissioner is “one of the best there is” — an “outstanding leader in New York.”

“Mr. Kelly might be very happy where he is,” said Obama. “But if he’s not I’d want to know about it. ‘Cause, you know, obviously he’d be very well qualified for the job.”

This endorsement seems tone deaf given the current conversations nationwide around national security. Kelly’s “extraordinary” work in New York City has led to the city council passing the Community Safety Act, which scales back the police’s ability to racially profile considerably. Kelly’s stop-and-frisk policy is being challenged in federal court by the Center for Constitutional Rights right now. Obama’s own Justice Department may be sending in a federal monitor to ensure that NYPD stops racial profiling. The following, questioning and apprehension of targeted black males is at the crux of the current debate around George Zimmerman’s killing Trayvon Martin.

Also, you have to read the New York Times OP/Ed by Ta-Nehisi Coates:

It was candidate Obama who in 2008 pledged to “ban racial profiling” on a federal level and work to have it prohibited on the state level. It was candidate Obama who told black people that if they voted they would get a new kind of politics. And it was State Senator Obama who understood that profiling was the antithesis of such politics. Those of us raising our boys in the wake of Trayvon, or beneath the eye of the Demographics Unit, cannot fathom how the president could forget this.

Of course, the best argument against allowing Ray Kelly anywhere near law enforcement are the words of Ray Kelly, who, writing in (where else) The Wall Street Journal, where he engages in transparent lying to defend his career:

Since 2002, the New York Police Department has taken tens of thousands of weapons off the street through proactive policing strategies. The effect this has had on the murder rate is staggering. In the 11 years before Mayor Michael Bloomberg took office, there were 13,212 murders in New York City. During the 11 years of his administration, there have been 5,849. That’s 7,383 lives saved—and if history is a guide, they are largely the lives of young men of color.

So far this year, murders are down 29% from the 50-year low achieved in 2012, and we’ve seen the fewest shootings in two decades.

He knows that these numbers are reflected nationwide in any number of cities with all sorts of different sorts of police tactics.

He knows these numbers, and the reason that he lies about this is because the only way that he can defend his contemptible policies is to misrepresent his numbers, and what they mean.

The Final word on George Zimmerman, Care of Alex Fraser

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Dear George Zimmerman,

For the rest of your life you are now going to feel what its like to be a black man in America.

You will feel people stare at you. Judging you for what you think are unfair reasons. You will lose out on getting jobs for something you feel is outside of your control. You will believe yourself to be an upstanding citizen and wonder why people choose to not see that.

People will cross the street when they see you coming. They will call you hurtful names. It will drive you so insane some days that you’ll want to scream at the top of your lungs. But you will have to wake up the next day, put on firm look and push through life.

I bet you never thought that by shooting a black male you’d end up inheriting all of his struggles.

Enjoy your “freedom.”

Sincerely,

A black male who could’ve been Trayvon Martin

From his Facebook page.

The Supreme Court Makes the Same Ruling It Always Does on Affirmative Action

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It allows for continuing affirmative action, but they have ruled against the specific remedy.

That is the nickel tour of
Fisher v. UT Austin:

Today a broad majority of the Court reinforced that affirmative action must be strictly reviewed, but it did not outlaw those programs. In an opinion that required only thirteen pages, the Court explained that a university’s use of race must meet a test known as “strict scrutiny.” Under this test, a university’s use of affirmative action will be constitutional only if it is “narrowly tailored.” The Court in Fisher took pains to make clear exactly what this means: courts can no longer simply rubber-stamp a university’s determination that it needs to use affirmative action to have a diverse student body. Instead, courts themselves will need to confirm that the use of race is “necessary” – that is, that there is no other realistic alternative that does not use race that would also create a diverse student body. Because the lower court had not done so, the Court sent the case back for it to determine whether the university could make this showing.

They have been making this same decision since Bakke.

I expect this to continue, until affirmative action is effectively a dead issue.

It’s All About the Racism

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I tend to see a lot more racism in American politics than most other white* people, and here we have a a case where it manifests as a primary motivation for anti gay bigotry:

Nance said he recorded a conversation with the woman, whose name is Jodie Brunstetter, on video, and that she confirmed that she used the term “Caucasian” in a discussion about the marriage amendment, but insisted that otherwise her comments had been taken out of context by other poll workers.

…Nance paraphrased the remarks, as told to him by those who were present: “During the conversation, Ms. Brunstetter said her husband was the architect of Amendment 1, and one of the reasons he wrote it was to protect the Caucasian race. She said Caucasians or whites created this country. We wrote the Constitution. This is about protecting the Constitution. There already is a law on the books against same-sex marriage, but this protects the Constitution from activist judges.”

Nance said he recruited a friend, who works for the Coalition to Protect All North Carolina Families, to witness his interview with Jodie Brunstetter. He said Brunstetter reluctantly acknowledged that she had used the term “Caucasian” and then repeated the statement previously attributed to her, but substituted the pronoun “we” for “Caucasian. Nance said Brunstetter insisted there was nothing racial about her remarks, but could not explain why she used the term “Caucasian.”

When you look at many of the motivations on many of the hot button issues of “social conservative”,† you find either racial animus or racial paranoia at its core.

First, we amp up gun regulations in order to take guns from the Black Panthers, and then the NRA goes insane because they want to have guns to protect themselves from black people.

It’s like 6 degrees of Kevin Bacon, only instead of Kevin Bacon, it’s racism.

*Nominally white. I’m Jewish, and my brother suggested that, while we are European pale, we aren’t any more white than an Irish immigrant was in 1880.
†For example, the right wing jihad against the courts, started with Brown v. Board of Ed, and Roe v. Wade didn’t become a cause celebre for the right wing until it became a proxy for Runyon v. McCrary, which held that private schools can be denied tax deductible status for being segregated.

I’m Hoping He Doesn’t Eat His Gun

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There needs to a public accounting of that happened in the killing of Trayvon Martin. With the special prosecutor has charging George Zimmerman witth 2nd degree murder, we should be seeing this:

George Zimmerman, the neighborhood watch volunteer who fatally shot Florida teenager Trayvon Martin 45 days ago, was charged with second-degree murder Wednesday, marking a turning point in a case that has provoked nationwide debate over racial profiling.

Florida special prosecutor Angela B. Corey, who announced the charge in Jacksonville, said that “the search for justice has brought us to this moment.” Zimmerman turned himself in and was brought Wednesday evening to the Seminole County jail.

Criminal justice lawyers said Corey faces an uphill battle in persuading a jury to convict Zimmerman of second-degree murder. Zimmerman told police he was fighting for his life in an altercation with Martin, who was 17 and unarmed, before he fired in self-defense.

Murder in the second degree, under Florida law, refers to a killing carried out without premeditation but with “a depraved mind regardless of human life.” If convicted, Zimmerman faces a maximum sentence of life in prison. His attorney, Mark O’Mara, [a new lawyer, after his old ones could not reach him, and he starting talking to the prosecutor on his own] said Wednesday that Zimmerman will plead not guilty.

My guess that the murder II charge is about trying to get a plea deal and/or presenting to the jury a way to split the difference and still get a conviction.

Then again, I don’t know what he said when he called the DA.