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What to do with a lawless Supreme Court?

May 4, 2026 – 11:58 am

Can democracy flourish, or even survive,
if two-thirds of the justices on the Supreme Court don’t believe in it?

[A previous version of this post didn’t load for some users, so I republished under a similar title.]

One of the great moments in American politics happened on March 15, 1965. It was barely a week since “Bloody Sunday“, when Alabama state police attacked civil rights demonstrators trying to cross the Edmund Pettis Bridge in Selma.

Police (and non-police actors like slave patrols or the Ku Klux Klan) had been beating up Black people for over 100 years, but this time it was on TV, where the whole nation could see it. Nonviolent protesters had brought the reality of oppression into the nation’s living rooms: White people could maintain their dominance, but only by being villains, by brutalizing people who posed no threat.

How would the nation respond?

President Johnson answered by addressing a joint session of Congress, saying these words in his White Texas accent:

There is no Negro problem. There is no Southern problem. There is no Northern problem. There is only an American problem. …

What happened in Selma is part of a far larger movement which reaches into every section and state of America. It is the effort of American Negroes to secure for themselves the full blessings of American life. Their cause must be our cause, too. Because it is not just Negroes, but really it’s all of us who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice.

And we shall overcome.

Johnson backed those words up by proposing the Voting Rights Act, which he signed into law a few months later.

Undoing that landmark piece of legislation has been the life’s work of Chief Justice John Roberts. Wednesday he finished the task.

Immediate and long-term perspectives The decision the Supreme Court released Wednesday, Louisiana v Callais (called just “Callais” in most media coverage), requires explanation both in an immediate and a long-term sense. Immediately, it blesses a practice the VRA was passed to eliminate: “cracking” minority communities and spreading them among multiple districts so that all (or nearly all) districts have a White majority. Or, looked at from the other side, Callais makes illegal the practice of intentionally gathering minority voters into a district where they might form a majority and elect a candidate of their own choosing.

Possibly immediately (if Louisiana can get away with the redistricting it now wants to do even after some absentee votes in its primary have already been mailed, and if other southern states can follow suit), but certainly by 2028, red states in the Deep South will redraw their maps so that maybe ten or so Black congresspeople are gerrymandered out of their jobs. By 2029, the congressional delegations of many Southern states may be as lily-white as they were before the VRA passed in 1965.

Bad as that outcome is, you can’t appreciate the full horror of this decision without seeing the larger context: Callais is the culmination of John Roberts’ 13-year program to repeal the VRA by judicial fiat, in contravention of the intention of the Congresses that passed it and kept renewing it. During those years, a series of corrupt decisions [1] have built on each other to get us where we are today: It is now hard to imagine any state action — no matter how racist — that could be reversed by bringing that state to court under the VRA.

In 2013’s Shelby County decision, Roberts threw out Section 5 of the VRA. Section 5 required a list of states with a history of Jim Crow election practices to get any changes to their election rules pre-cleared by the federal Justice Department. Roberts decided that this provision (which had been re-authorized by Congress as recently as 2006 and had been upheld in numerous Supreme Court precedents) violated the “equal sovereignty of the states”. He got around the precedential history by saying “things have changed dramatically” since the first version of the VRA was passed in 1965.

Here’s what I had to say about that at the time (in a piece I demurely titled “This Court Sucks“):

“Things have changed” is not a legal argument. It’s a fine point to make on a blog or at a dinner party, but a Supreme Court justice has to do better than that.

If Roberts were being a real judge here, he’d spell out what “equal sovereignty” has and hasn’t meant in American legal history. He’d enunciate an abstract standard by which Jim Crow was “exceptional” in 1965 and which justified the steps taken then. He’d explain how that standard was violated by the renewal of the VRA in 2006. And he’d lay down a set of conditions that Congress would need to satisfy to make the VRA acceptable today. (If you want to see what a real legal opinion looks like, read Justice Ginsburg’s dissent. Whether you agree with her or not, she is clearly doing something far more rigorous than what Roberts is doing.)

Roberts doesn’t do any of that. The VRA was vaguely justified in 1965 and is vaguely unjustified now, because “things have changed”. If I were a congressman, I would have no idea how to revise the VRA so that it passes constitutional muster. If Congress does revise it, lower court judges who rule on it will just be guessing about its constitutionality. It will have to go back to the Supreme Court before anyone knows whether it’s really a law again, because there are no standards in Roberts’ opinion by which a revision can be judged.

This isn’t law. It’s politics. It’s mush.

The mush has continued since. If Shelby County eliminated blocking racist election laws before they take effect, the Brnovich decision in 2021 made it harder to use Section 2 of the VRA to challenge such laws after they take effect. On a parallel track, the Rucho decision in 2019 said that partisan gerrymandering cases were “nonjusticiable”. In other words, partisan gerrymandering might be an unsavory practice, but neither the laws nor the Constitution give the courts power to do anything about it.

Sleight of hand. And that brings us to Wednesday’s Callais decision, written by Justice Alito. Once again, we are told that “things have changed”, so laws protecting minority voting rights are no longer necessary. [2] That sets up two legal sleights of hand: intent, and the confusion of partisan with racial gerrymandering.

One issue has run through the history of the VRA’s interpretation: Does the VRA only outlaw intentionally racist election practices? Or does it outlaw practices that have the effect of disenfranchising minority voters or diminishing their power, regardless of motive? The difference is important, because intent can be hard to prove in court. Many of the Jim Crow practices didn’t explicitly mention race: Poll taxes might be justified as a way to raise revenue, and the effect of discouraging poor people from voting, or the fact that Black voters are disproportionately poor — that might be portrayed as entirely accidental. Literacy tests might simply be a means of raising the quality of the average voter, unrelated to an educational system that favors White children. And so on.

This kind of thing was well understood even in 1965. [3]

As Justice Kagan explains in her dissent, the Court hobbled VRA enforcement by shifting to an “intent” interpretation in a 1980 decision. So Congress rewrote the VRA in 1982 to specify an “effects” interpretation. Alito denies that he is reinstating the “intent” view in contravention of Congress, but he is. He explicitly writes:

§2 of the VRA requires evidence giving rise to a strong inference of intentional discrimination.

The second sleight-of-hand makes use of the corrupt Rucho decision on partisan gerrymandering.

The upshot of Rucho was that, as far as federal law is concerned, a state legislature may use partisan advantage as a factor in redistricting. And litigants cannot circumvent that rule by dressing their political-gerrymandering claims in racial garb. Imposing liability “based on the racial effects of a political gerrymander in a jurisdiction in which race and partisan preference are very closely correlated . . . would, if accepted, provide a convenient way for future litigants and lower courts to sidestep our holding in Rucho that partisan-gerrymandering claims are not justiciable in federal court.” Alexander, 602 U. S., at 21. “Instead of claiming that a State impermissibly set a target Republican-Democratic breakdown, a plaintiff could simply reverse-engineer the partisan data into racial data and argue that the State impermissibly set a particular [racial] target. Our decisions cannot be evaded with such ease.”

Since intent is what matters, and a pro-Republican gerrymander looks just like a White-racist gerrymander, it’s impossible to prove racist (rather than partisan) intent. So the VRA’s protection against racial gerrymanders — effectively the last piece of the VRA still standing — is effectively dead.

But Kagan’s dissent calls Alito on his shenanigans:

[T]o its (modest) credit, the Rucho Court did not pretend that partisan gerrymanders were something in need of safeguarding. To the contrary, the Court conceded that they were “incompatible with democratic principles” and “lead to results that reasonably seem unjust.” (The Court’s rationale was only that federal courts lack competence to deal with gerrymanders, not that they were protected by law or beneficial as policy.) Today, though, the majority straight-facedly holds that the Voting Rights Act must be brought low to make the world safe for partisan gerrymanders. For how else, the majority reasons, can we preserve the authority of States to engage in this practice than by stripping minority citizens of their rights to an equal political process?

Rucho wrung its hands over partisan gerrymandering as a disreputable practice, and claimed only that the Court had no power to interfere with it. But now, Alito presents partisan gerrymandering as a state’s right, which Congress dare not impinge on and the Court is obligated to protect. There is, of course, no legal argument to back up that claim. It’s just how the Court’s Republican majority wants things to be, so Alito has slipped it between the lines. [4]

In fact, Alito has the logic exactly backwards: He says courts can’t throw out racial gerrymanders because they might accidentally throw out partisan gerrymanders. But the VRA says courts must throw out partisan gerrymanders if they have the same effect as a racial gerrymander. That’s the law as written, but under this Court, written law doesn’t mean much.

How to handle a corrupt court. Not long ago, when Democrats controlled the White House and both houses of Congress, some members of the party suggested expanding the Supreme Court to 13 justices, so that four new justices could outvote the corrupt Republican ones. This proposal never got close to implementation, because it was widely viewed as too radical. The party’s center saw raw exercises of power like that distasteful, as something dirty that we needed to keep clear of if we ever wanted to restore purity to our government.

In view of what Trump has been doing in his second term, and the increasingly aggressive partisanship of the current Supreme Court majority, that view now seems naive.

The purity viewpoint has already begun to change, as we have seen in the recent gerrymandering battle. Democrats could have clutched their pearls and held onto their purity as Texas made five Democratic seats in Congress vanish. But Gavin Newsom decided to fight fire with fire in California, and the state’s voters backed him up. More recently in Virginia, “centrist” Governor Abigail Spanberger made the same choice, and the electorate of her swing state agreed.

Legal purists worry about the Supreme Court losing authority if it is seen as just another political branch of government. But that’s what it already is, and public respect for it is waning, for good reasons.

We’ve been here before. In 1937, FDR called for a plan to expand the Supreme Court, which had been invalidating just about everything he tried to do. That proposal failed, in that it did not pass Congress. But it also succeeded in making the Court back off.

If Democrats take power again in 2029, a similar strategy is called for: Immediately pass legislation to restore voting rights, and to undo the other excesses of this corrupt Supreme Court. And have a court-expansion proposal ready to vote on if the Court tries to interfere.

The Roberts Court has become the enemy of multi-racial democracy. If we’re going to make up the ground that we’ve lost, and someday go beyond our previous accomplishments to achieve the democratic republic Americans have long envisioned, we’re not just going to have to overcome white supremacists or Republicans or oligarchs. We’re going to have to overcome a corrupt, partisan, racist Supreme Court as well.

And we shall overcome.

[1] I use the word corrupt carefully. It would be one thing if Roberts and the conservative majority that has been built around him professed some different-but-arguable legal theory that made the VRA unconstitutional or unenforceable. But I’ve been reading these decisions since Shelby County in 2013, and none of them make a recognizable legal argument. They are simply results that the Court majority wants. Josh Marshall explains:

In our thinned out political discourse people often use the term “corruption” to refer only to venal corruption – bribes, conflicts of interest mostly involving money, kept Justices like Clarence Thomas. That is neither the only nor the most significant form of corruption. In most cases venal corruption is significantly self-correcting. It gets exposed and prosecuted. The more general meaning of corruption is when a form of rot takes over an office or institution because of systemic and ingrained abuses of power. That is the case with the Supreme Court and it’s especially dangerous with the Supreme Court because a mix of history and restraint have left very few checks on its abuses. The Supreme Court is given specific powers to achieve specific ends. Over the last 15 years it has assumed vast new powers and used them consistently for anti-constitutional ends. Far from interpreting or defending the constitution it is at war with it.

[2] Justice Kagan’s dissent nails this perfectly:

So the majority moves on again, now to a grab-bag of “developments” that it somehow thinks license it to rewrite a statute. The majority first summons the slogan of Shelby County, in which the Court ordained itself the arbiter of when civil rights laws are no longer needed. “ ‘[T]hings have changed dramatically,’ ” today’s majority echoes, pointing to increases in African American voting registration and to the success of “ ‘African-Americans attain[ing] political office’ ”—“particularly in the South, where many §2 suits arise.” No doubt that is so, in large measure because of the Voting Rights Act. But it is a separate question whether those gains will endure once the Act’s protections are gone. See Shelby County, 570 U. S., at 590 (Ginsburg, J., dissenting) (noting the fallacy of “throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet”). And surely—but apparently not—the proper actor to answer that question is Congress. … It is for the people’s representatives in Congress to decide when the Nation need no longer worry about the dilution of minority voting strength.

[3] Johnson said as much in his speech:

Every device of which human ingenuity is capable has been used to deny this right. The Negro citizen may go to register only to be told that the day is wrong, or the hour is late, or the official in charge is absent. And if he persists, and if he manages to present himself to the registrar, he may be disqualified because he did not spell out his middle name or because he abbreviated a word on the application. And if he manages to fill out an application he is given a test. The registrar is the sole judge of whether he passes this test. He may be asked to recite the entire Constitution, or explain the most complex provisions of state law. And even a college degree cannot be used to prove that he can read and write. For the fact is that the only way to pass these barriers is to show a white skin.

Experience has clearly shown that the existing process of law cannot overcome systematic and ingenious discrimination. No law that we now have on the books–and I have helped to put three of them there–can ensure the right to vote when local officials are determined to deny it.

So the VRA was designed to go beyond “the existing process of law”. That is precisely what Roberts, Alito, and their allies have undone, because (in their judgment and their judgment alone) “things have changed”.

[4] It’s tempting to give a pass to the Republican judges who didn’t write on this topic: Kavanaugh, Gorsuch, and Barrett. But they had to see the logical holes in this argument, and they then chose to vote for it without posting a dissent on any particular.

By weeklysift | Posted in Articles | Also tagged 2026 election, law | Comments (6)

What to do about a lawless Supreme Court?

May 4, 2026 – 10:56 am

Can democracy flourish, or even survive,
if two-thirds of the justices on the Supreme Court don’t believe in it?

How would the nation respond?

President Johnson answered by addressing a joint session of Congress, saying these words in his White Texas accent:

There is no Negro problem. There is no Southern problem. There is no Northern problem. There is only an American problem. …

What happened in Selma is part of a far larger movement which reaches into every section and state of America. It is the effort of American Negroes to secure for themselves the full blessings of American life. Their cause must be our cause, too. Because it is not just Negroes, but really it’s all of us who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice.

And we shall overcome.

Johnson backed those words up by proposing the Voting Rights Act, which he signed into law a few months later.

Undoing that landmark piece of legislation has been the life’s work of Chief Justice John Roberts. Wednesday he finished the task.

Here’s what I had to say about that at the time (in a piece I demurely titled “This Court Sucks“):

“Things have changed” is not a legal argument. It’s a fine point to make on a blog or at a dinner party, but a Supreme Court justice has to do better than that.

If Roberts were being a real judge here, he’d spell out what “equal sovereignty” has and hasn’t meant in American legal history. He’d enunciate an abstract standard by which Jim Crow was “exceptional” in 1965 and which justified the steps taken then. He’d explain how that standard was violated by the renewal of the VRA in 2006. And he’d lay down a set of conditions that Congress would need to satisfy to make the VRA acceptable today. (If you want to see what a real legal opinion looks like, read Justice Ginsburg’s dissent. Whether you agree with her or not, she is clearly doing something far more rigorous than what Roberts is doing.)

Roberts doesn’t do any of that. The VRA was vaguely justified in 1965 and is vaguely unjustified now, because “things have changed”. If I were a congressman, I would have no idea how to revise the VRA so that it passes constitutional muster. If Congress does revise it, lower court judges who rule on it will just be guessing about its constitutionality. It will have to go back to the Supreme Court before anyone knows whether it’s really a law again, because there are no standards in Roberts’ opinion by which a revision can be judged.

This isn’t law. It’s politics. It’s mush.

This kind of thing was well understood even in 1965. [3]

§2 of the VRA requires evidence giving rise to a strong inference of intentional discrimination.

The second sleight-of-hand makes use of the corrupt Rucho decision on partisan gerrymandering.

The upshot of Rucho was that, as far as federal law is concerned, a state legislature may use partisan advantage as a factor in redistricting. And litigants cannot circumvent that rule by dressing their political-gerrymandering claims in racial garb. Imposing liability “based on the racial effects of a political gerrymander in a jurisdiction in which race and partisan preference are very closely correlated . . . would, if accepted, provide a convenient way for future litigants and lower courts to sidestep our holding in Rucho that partisan-gerrymandering claims are not justiciable in federal court.” Alexander, 602 U. S., at 21. “Instead of claiming that a State impermissibly set a target Republican-Democratic breakdown, a plaintiff could simply reverse-engineer the partisan data into racial data and argue that the State impermissibly set a particular [racial] target. Our decisions cannot be evaded with such ease.”

But Kagan’s dissent calls Alito on his shenanigans:

[T]o its (modest) credit, the Rucho Court did not pretend that partisan gerrymanders were something in need of safeguarding. To the contrary, the Court conceded that they were “incompatible with democratic principles” and “lead to results that reasonably seem unjust.” (The Court’s rationale was only that federal courts lack competence to deal with gerrymanders, not that they were protected by law or beneficial as policy.) Today, though, the majority straight-facedly holds that the Voting Rights Act must be brought low to make the world safe for partisan gerrymanders. For how else, the majority reasons, can we preserve the authority of States to engage in this practice than by stripping minority citizens of their rights to an equal political process?

In view of what Trump has been doing in his second term, and the increasingly aggressive partisanship of the current Supreme Court majority, that view now seems naive.

The Roberts Court has become the enemy of multi-racial democracy. If we’re going to make up the ground that we’ve lost, and someday go beyond our previous accomplishmens to achieve the democratic republic Americans have long envisioned, we’re not just going to have to overcome white supremacists or Republicans or oligarchs. We’re going to have to overcome a corrupt, partisan, racist Supreme Court as well.

And we shall overcome.

In our thinned out political discourse people often use the term “corruption” to refer only to venal corruption – bribes, conflicts of interest mostly involving money, kept Justices like Clarence Thomas. That is neither the only nor the most significant form of corruption. In most cases venal corruption is significantly self-correcting. It gets exposed and prosecuted. The more general meaning of corruption is when a form of rot takes over an office or institution because of systemic and ingrained abuses of power. That is the case with the Supreme Court and it’s especially dangerous with the Supreme Court because a mix of history and restraint have left very few checks on its abuses. The Supreme Court is given specific powers to achieve specific ends. Over the last 15 years it has assumed vast new powers and used them consistently for anti-constitutional ends. Far from interpreting or defending the constitution it is at war with it.

[2] Justice Kagan’s dissent nails this perfectly:

So the majority moves on again, now to a grab-bag of “developments” that it somehow thinks license it to rewrite a statute. The majority first summons the slogan of Shelby County, in which the Court ordained itself the arbiter of when civil rights laws are no longer needed. “ ‘[T]hings have changed dramatically,’ ” today’s majority echoes, pointing to increases in African American voting registration and to the success of “ ‘African-Americans attain[ing] political office’ ”—“particularly in the South, where many §2 suits arise.” No doubt that is so, in large measure because of the Voting Rights Act. But it is a separate question whether those gains will endure once the Act’s protections are gone. See Shelby County, 570 U. S., at 590 (Ginsburg, J., dissenting) (noting the fallacy of “throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet”). And surely—but apparently not—the proper actor to answer that question is Congress. … It is for the people’s representatives in Congress to decide when the Nation need no longer worry about the dilution of minority voting strength.

[3] Johnson said as much in his speech:

Every device of which human ingenuity is capable has been used to deny this right. The Negro citizen may go to register only to be told that the day is wrong, or the hour is late, or the official in charge is absent. And if he persists, and if he manages to present himself to the registrar, he may be disqualified because he did not spell out his middle name or because he abbreviated a word on the application. And if he manages to fill out an application he is given a test. The registrar is the sole judge of whether he passes this test. He may be asked to recite the entire Constitution, or explain the most complex provisions of state law. And even a college degree cannot be used to prove that he can read and write. For the fact is that the only way to pass these barriers is to show a white skin.

Experience has clearly shown that the existing process of law cannot overcome systematic and ingenious discrimination. No law that we now have on the books–and I have helped to put three of them there–can ensure the right to vote when local officials are determined to deny it.

By weeklysift | Posted in Articles | Also tagged 2026 election, law | Comments (2)

Lessons from the Haitian Fright

September 16, 2024 – 9:52 am

Many Americans are ready to believe and pass on any horrifying rumor they hear about non-White immigrants, without checking their sources or looking too hard at the evidence. Trump, Vance, and other Republican politicians have been eager to exploit this gullibility.

The Simpsons is set in Springfield because there are 35 Springfields in various states, including five in Wisconsin alone. So wherever you live, the Simpson house might be just down the road. Given this near-universality, it shouldn’t be surprising that the Trump/Vance lies about the Springfield in Ohio have grabbed public attention on both sides of our political divide. If immigrants really are stealing and eating pets in Springfield, your pets may be in danger too. Conversely, if Trump can tell such a baseless and vicious lie about Springfield, he could just as easily lie about your town, your neighbors, or even you.

It’s important to be clear from the beginning: He is lying. Everybody from the local police to the city manager to the Republican governor of Ohio has denied this pernicious internet rumor, which is a lesson in how easy it is to create “evidence” for anything. (Here’s a photo that purports to show a Haitian in Springfield carrying off two geese, presumably to eat. Actually it’s a non-Haitian in Columbus, removing two road-kill geese from the pavement.)

Lots of articles trace the rumor through right-wing sources that invented it, so I’ll cover that history only briefly: The influx of legal Haitian immigrants in recent years had created discomfort among some White Springfield citizens. During Covid, city services got stretched — as services did nearly everywhere — and some locals blamed the Haitians. In any large group, somebody will eventually do something wrong; last year, an unlicensed Haitian driver killed an 11-year-old boy (whose parents have begged the public not to use their son’s death to fan hatred). That created an exploitable opportunity for neo-Nazi groups like Blood Pride, which began targeting Springfield with negative disinformation about the immigrants. From there, stories multiplied until the eating-dogs-and-cats rumor got started. It spread mainly online, and not so much by word-of-mouth in Springfield itself. Then J. D. Vance picked it up, from which it got to Trump.

If you want more detail, I can recommend a post on Justin Ling’s blog Bug-Eyed and Shameless, which relates the story to the Irish Fright of 1688, when tens of thousands of panicked Englishmen barricaded bridges and crossroads to stop the advance of marauding Irish troops, who in fact did not exist.

The Irish Fright didn’t make it into my high-school history texts, but maybe it should have. There’s a lot to learn from what what 19th-century historian Charles Mackay famously dubbed “extraordinary popular delusions“.

How racism manifests. To begin with, the Haitian Fright of 2024 provides a teaching opportunity about racism. I am constantly seeing accounts from White people online and on television, who believe they are not racist because they don’t internally experience what they imagine racism to be: a blind and senseless hatred of other races. “I don’t hate anyone,” they claim, and believe that they are telling the truth.

But the Haitian Fright points out a more subtle and widespread kind of racism: a propensity to believe (and even pass on) negative stories about other races without requiring evidence. A sudden influx of Scots or Danes could have put just as big a strain Springfield’s schools and hospitals, but I doubt we’d be hearing stories about them eating cats.

A similar lesson can be drawn from the Birther controversy of the Obama years (where Trump also was a major player). Many Whites were eager to believe that Barack Obama wasn’t a legitimate president, so they credited any justification for that belief, no matter how flimsy. The birther story served to mediate their racism: They could deny that they disapproved of Obama’s presidency because he was Black, and instead disapprove because he wasn’t really an American. But they believed that evidence-free claim because he was Black.

Myths about immigration. Similarly, many Americans claim that they don’t object to immigrants per se, but only to illegal immigrants. If people would only come to America “the right way, like my ancestors did”, they would be welcomed.

Personally, my ancestors arrived in the United States from Germany in the mid-1800s. And yes, they did come “the right way”, but at the time there was no wrong way. Other than occasional quarantines for health reasons, the US had few restrictions on immigration prior to the openly racist Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882.

You know who else is here the right way? The Haitians in Springfield. They qualify for a program known as “temporary protected status“, which provides legal status to people from countries which (because of either natural disaster or political unrest) are not safe to return to. Others came “as part of a parole program that allows citizens and lawful residents to apply to have their family members from Haiti come to the United States”.

And Springfield is lucky to have them. Governor DeWine said yesterday:

Here’s what we do know, though. What we know is that the Haitians who are in Springfield are legal. They came to Springfield to work. Ohio is on the move, and Springfield has really made a great resurgence with a lot of companies coming in. The Haitians came in to work for these companies. What the companies tell us is that they are very good workers. They’re happy to have them there. And frankly, that has helped the economy.

This matches an observation Deborah and James Fallows made in their book Our Towns, about their travels across America, particularly in the section about Dodge City, Kansas: One key difference between small towns that are dying and those that are thriving is that the thriving towns are welcoming immigrants rather than discouraging them.

Governor DeWine had previously mentioned his own trips to Haiti and observed:

[I]n Haiti education is prized. So when you look at all of these things, people who want to work, people who value their kids, who value education, you know, these are positive influences on our community in Springfield, and any comment about that otherwise, I think, is hurtful and is not helpful to the city of Springfield and the people of Springfield.

In short, whatever you may think you want out of immigrants — legal status, work ethic, family values … anything other than white skin and speaking English since birth — the Haitians of Springfield have it.

Another complaint I’ve run into is that the Biden administration “sent” the Haitians to Springfield. Here’s J. D. Vance:

Kamala Harris dropped 20,000 Haitian migrants into a small Ohio town and chaos has ensued.

But like any person with legal status in the US, the Haitians can go where they like. They weren’t “sent” or “dropped”, they came to Springfield looking for work and a low cost of living.

Thousands of new jobs had been created [in Springfield], thanks to a successful effort by the city’s leadership and Chamber of Commerce to attract new business to Springfield, which sits between Columbus and Dayton. Once a manufacturing hub, Springfield saw its economy shrink after factories closed and jobs migrated overseas. By about 2015, its population had dwindled to under 60,000, from about 80,000 in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

Companies that set up shop, however, confronted a dire labor shortage.

Haitians in Florida, Haiti and South America heard from friends and family about Springfield and its need for workers. They began arriving to take jobs in warehouses, manufacturing and the service sector, and employers urged the new workers to encourage other Haitians to join them.

We often hear how jarring it must be for a town of 60,000 to accommodate 15,000-or-so new residents. But few note that the immigrants are simply restoring Springfield to its historic size. They are making Springfield great again.

Consequences. History teaches that lies can lead to violence, particularly when they make a group of people seem monstrous or subhuman. The pet-eating lie has been likened to the blood libel against Jews, which often circulated prior to pogroms. According to the libel, Jews needed the blood of Christian children to ritually prepare matzah for Passover. So any child who went missing prior to Passover could spark a bloody attack on a town’s Jews.

Often associated with the Middle Ages, a blood libel pogrom happened as recently as 1946 in Poland. Forty-two newly returned Holocaust survivors were killed.

The pet-eating lie has not yet led to any murders in Springfield. But a series of bomb threats followed Trump’s outburst at Tuesday’s debate. City hall had to be shut down on Thursday. Friday, a middle school closed and two elementary schools had to be evacuated. Saturday, two hospitals went into lockdown. Two local colleges have temporarily shut down in-person classes. I can only imagine the bullying that Haitian children are experiencing in schools all over the country.

Thank you, Mr. Trump.

Trump has expressed no remorse and repeated the lie Friday in California, long after it had been widely debunked. On talk shows Sunday, J. D. Vance simultaneously acknowledged that the stories are false while justifying his own role in continuing to spread them.

On Sunday, Ohio’s junior senator was pressed by journalists as to why the Trump campaign was spreading a claim it could provide no evidence for beyond the anecdotal “I heard it on television” excuse Trump himself gave during the debate.

On CNN, he seemingly admitted that his claims were lies, then continued by saying that he would keep spreading such tales, even knowing them to be untrue, if they resulted in the media talking about issues he claimed were still just as real despite the deception.

“If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do,” said the senator.

It is worth pointing out that even though non-citizens can’t vote, anyone legally in the State of Ohio is Vance’s constituent. (That’s why congressional districts are distributed according to total population rather than the number of citizens, a provision Republicans are trying to overturn.) He has a responsibility to them whether he recognizes it or not.

Vance’s interviews point out something else: He and Trump are often accused of “falling for” the pet-eating lie, as if the problem were simply their gullibility in the face of an internet conspiracy theory. But they haven’t fallen for anything. They looked for a hateful lie they could tell about immigrants, and they found one.

What is a joke? The internet is now full of cat-and-dog-eating memes, most of which are intended to be humorous. Both sides are spreading them with very different motives. For Democrats, the lie is so unbelievable that people who are taken in by it deserve to be laughed at. That’s why many of my liberal friends have shared The Kiffness’ musical version of Trump’s debate lines. The song doesn’t explicitly criticize Trump, but does make him seem ridiculous.

Meanwhile, Republicans are indulging in bully-humor, as they so often do. By posting a cat-eating meme with three laugh-till-I-cry emojis, Ted Cruz can promote cruelty towards immigrants while hiding behind a veneer of comedy. When challenged, he is undoubtedly saying, “It’s a joke! Doesn’t anybody have a sense of humor any more?”

The problem, of course, is that not everyone agrees that it’s a joke. Many on the internet still take the Haitian Fright seriously, and virtually no Republicans are condemning Trump for promoting it. (Even Governor DeWine has stopped short of faulting Trump or specifically asking him to stop.) And even if they did agree, jokes can still be cruel.

As for the liberal memes, I have changed my mind several times. Yes, Trump deserves to be ridiculed for this. And yet I find myself agreeing with media studies scholar Whitney Phillips:

While Phillips said she doesn’t begrudge people “having fun online,” she warned that liberals who think they’re cutting Trump down to size risk giving oxygen to a trope that ultimately plays into his hands — and endangers the Haitians who were its original targets.

“When you’re making a joke using the frame” of immigrants as cultural invaders, she said, even if you’re pushing back on it, “the frame is still amplified.”

By weeklysift | Posted in Articles | Also tagged 2024 election, culture wars | Comments (8)

The Unfathomable Mystery of Biracial Americans

August 5, 2024 – 9:14 am

Thanks, Donald. Without your help, I never would have found a truly endearing Kamala video.

It all started with Donald Trump saying something that made even less sense than he usually does. Wednesday in Chicago, during his half-hour interview at a convention of the National Association of Black Journalists, he called attention to the great conundrum of Kamala Harris’ biracial identity.

She was always of Indian heritage, and she was only promoting Indian heritage. I didn’t know she was Black until a number of years ago, when she happened to turn Black, and now she wants to be known as Black. So I don’t know, is she Indian or is she Black?

The first thing to note about this comment, which I’ll forget if I don’t mention it right away, is that it’s a lie. Not just that Harris has been open about her blackness all along, but that Trump himself knew.

Trump donated to Harris twice in 2011 and 2014, during her campaign for attorney general of California, around the time she was being touted as “the female Obama” precisely because she is Black. In 2020, a Trump campaign spokesperson pointed to those donations as proof that Trump was not racist, saying, “I’ll note that Kamala Harris is a Black woman and he donated to her campaign, so I hope we can squash this racism argument now.”

Now on to the “Is she Indian or is she Black?” part. I plan to say some serious things in this article, but I won’t be able to get through it without mixing in some humor, because I just can’t pretend that I’m taking this question seriously. I mean, we’re not talking about the wave/particle duality of light here. Harris was born in Oakland to a mother from India and a Black Jamaican father. That really shouldn’t be hard to understand, even if you’re a 78-year-old ex-president whose Secretary of State once called him “a fucking moron” and whose top economic adviser judged him to be “dumb as shit“. According to the 2020 census, multiracial people make up over 1/10th of the US population, so you might expect Trump to have met such a person at some time or another.

Knowing that Harris likes to use Venn diagrams, The F*cking News made one to help her explain the situation.

And Trump’s notion that Kamala at some point “turned Black” evoked memories of a 2016 SNL cold open..

But enough levity: What is going on here?

Unfortunately, I can’t start discussing that question without getting into the ways Trump has dug himself in deeper. I mean, we all say really, really dumb things from time to time, especially under pressure. But after the fact, most of us try to compensate in one of two ways: We either apologize, or we just shut up and hope everybody forgets about it. (That’s the great virtue of the current era: No matter how badly you embarrass yourself, the 24-hour news cycle rolls on, and your blunders will soon scroll off everybody’s news feeds.)

But not Donald Trump. After having time to listen to advisers and think it through, he has spent the last several days continuing to make some kind of a controversy out of Harris simultaneously identifying both with her mother’s family and her father’s family, like that’s just impossible without some kind of betrayal or duplicity.

Remember Trump’s birther days, when he claimed that the detectives he had sent to Hawaii to investigate Obama’s birth certificate “cannot believe what they’re finding”? (Michael Cohen has since verified what I long suspected: “He never sent anybody anywhere, he just said it and everybody sort of bought into it.”) Well, birtherism is back: On TruthSocial, Trump reposted Laura Loomer’s image of Kamala’s birth certificate, which lists her father as coming from Jamaica, not Africa (which no one ever claimed).

He also posted a photo of Harris with her mother’s Indian family, as if that proved something. See: She’s been claiming all along to be Indian, so she can’t possibly have been Black.

But the crowning piece of Trump’s evidence is a video where Kamala herself says “I am Indian.” It’s a 36-second clip from a longer video of Kamala cooking with another Indian-American woman.

Crazy Kamala is saying she’s Indian, not Black. This is a big deal. Stone cold phony.

But he couldn’t even edit the video well enough to make his point: The two women agree that they both have South Indian roots, and Kamala says, “You look like the entire one-half of my family.” The host is not at all confused about Harris’ family having another half, because why would she be? It’s perfectly simple, as everyone but Trump understands.

But here I got curious: I myself have been experimenting with cooking Indian food lately, so I couldn’t help wondering what they made. It wasn’t hard to find out that the other woman was the actress Mindy Kaling, and from there a little googling led to a 9-minute video on Kamala’s own YouTube channel. It was made in 2019, the first time Kamala ran for president. They’re cooking masala dosa.

You should absolutely watch this; I wish I could get every voter to watch it. It’s most endearing, humanizing view of Kamala Harris I’ve ever seen. (Thank you, Donald, for helping me find it.) It’s two women cooking together, laughing a lot, and bonding over memories of how their mothers cooked. (Both families stored their spices in re-purposed Taster’s Choice Coffee jars.)

If you get charmed by it, watch the follow-up of other Indian-American women’s reactions.

I find it impossible to imagine a comparable Trump video. I know cooking is typically a female bonding thing, so I wouldn’t expect to see Trump cook with anybody. But translate this into male stereotypes any way you want: fishing, outdoor grilling, carpentry, going to the big game. Trump could never make a video like this, because Trump doesn’t bond; he either dominates or submits. He’s either the Big Dog, or the runt who trails after the Big Dog (as Trump did with Putin in Helsinki).

The other thing I can’t imagine is anybody thinking this video disproves the authenticity of Harris’ blackness. Whose character is so narrow that there isn’t room to be different with different people, while still being yourself? (The Emmy-winning TV series “Severance” resonates precisely because it builds on the common experience of being different at work than you are at home.) Being both Indian and Black doesn’t make Harris “a chameleon”, as J. D. Vance charged. It makes her a typical resident of our complex 21st century society. (You’d think J. D. would understand biracial identity, since his own children are both Indian and White. Do you think he’ll make them choose someday?)

Which brings us back to the question: What is Trump doing? He’s lying. He knows he’s lying. He’s saying something incredibly stupid and then doubling down on it. But why?

Some writers warn us not to overthink questions like this. Trump’s niece Mary advises:

After eight years of covering Donald, too many journalists have gotten into the habit of seeing strategy in his crude and instinctive behavior. The truth is quite simple–Donald can’t help himself. When it comes to him, we shouldn’t overthink it. He is exactly what he seems: a racist, a misogynist, a liar.

And Josh Marshall agrees:

[W]e don’t have to fall into this Trump confusion matrix where we’re kind of beguiled by some mysterious, secret, ingenious plan that explains why a bizarre racist outburst that normal people look at and think “What’s wrong with him?” is actually a genius political move. It’s just an outburst and attempted reset. No more, no less.

But at the risk of giving Trump too much credit, let’s start with a simpler question: Why did he accept the NABJ invitation to begin with? Three possibilities present themselves:

He wanted to appeal for Black votes. This wouldn’t be unreasonable, given Trump/Biden polls that showed him making inroads with Black men. But if that had been his motive, he would have behaved differently. He’d have fended off aggressive questions without rancor and repeatedly returned to nostalgia for the pre-Covid economy, as if anything in his policy proposals would bring it back. The fact that he was combative from the very first question indicates that he wasn’t there to win Black votes.
He wanted to convince White suburban voters that he’s not racist. Overt racism plays badly among educated suburban voters, especially women. That’s why dog whistling was invented: to appeal to White racists without scaring White moderates. That’s also why all Trump’s campaigns have been so diligent about recruiting somebody to stand behind him at rallies with a “Blacks for Trump” sign. It’s not important that Trump have much actual Black support, but he has to appear to have Black support, to placate White moderates. From this point of view, the ideal thing would have been to make no real news at the NABJ convention. Then the story would be the simple fact of Trump’s appearance before a Black audience rather than anything he said. Obviously, that’s not what happened.
He wanted to pick fights that will appeal to his White racist base. This interview will produce many clips that will go viral in the White racist echo chamber: Black women try to trap Trump, but he is not intimidated and stands up to them, challenging the suggestion that he is too chicken to debate Harris, and proving that he will stand up for you when the critical race theory goblins come for you.

It seems clear to me that the third option is correct: Trump’s false claim that Harris wasn’t Black until recently, and that before that she only emphasized the Asian half of her heritage, only makes sense if you’re playing to a White racist audience. Black people understand that being only half African is more than enough to get racists to treat you as Black. And choosing to emphasize some other part of your heritage is never an option, because racism isn’t a choice you make, it’s a choice racists make about you. Also, non-racist Whites have no trouble processing the notion of mixed-race, which Trump seems so confused by.

So Trump’s script casts the Black journalists as antagonists in his performance as the Champion of Beleaguered White Men. Once you see that, his subsequent actions only need to make sense in the worldview of racist White men, who often frame race as a scam, a way for non-Whites to claim some kind of sympathy or benefit. The Atlantic’s Adam Serwer spells it out.

Trump’s attack on Harris is meant to evoke this worldview, in which Black advancement is a kind of liberal conspiracy to deprive white people of what is rightfully theirs. Trump is saying that Harris became Black only when it was obvious that being Black conferred social advantage. … Trump’s smear of Harris is also an accusation of racial disloyalty—that she was ashamed of being Black until it was politically convenient. Racial treason is something Trump finds particularly offensive. He has begun referring to Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, who is Jewish, as “Palestinian,” doubly racist in that it turns Palestinian into an epithet and castigates a Jewish man for being insufficiently loyal to his own people. The idea that liberal Jews are not truly Jewish operates similarly to Trump’s attack on Harris, in that it gives the speaker permission to attack a Jewish target in anti-Semitic terms because the target is not “truly” Jewish. Attacking Harris in racist terms, under this logic, is not racist, because she is not “truly” Black. The point of this rhetorical maze is simply to justify racist attacks on a particular target while deflecting accusations of bigotry.

And Noah Berlatsky elaborates:

[A]s a fascist, he believes that only white people—or more specifically, only his own white cishet Christian male voters—are authentic and real. Everyone else, to Trump, is fake and inauthentic. … Trump can say that Jewish people who don’t vote for him, “hate their religion,” because as a white Christian fascist, he defines what Jewishness means. He can say Obama isn’t American, because as a white Christian fascist, he defines what America is. He can say Harris isn’t Black, because he is the fascist leader, and he defines what Blackness is. For that matter, he can lie about crowd size, about the weather, about his own actions and beliefs, because as the white fascist patriarch, he is the one authentic measure of truth. He is real. Nothing else is.

Serwer and Berlatsky were writing before Trump began smearing Algerian boxer Imane Khelif, both on Truth Social and at his Atlanta rally, referring to her as “a good male boxer” who “transitioned”, and pledging “I WILL KEEP MEN OUT OF WOMEN’S SPORTS.” Khelif is female from birth, and gender transitions are illegal in Algeria, but what does it matter? As the fascist leader, Trump defines what gender means.

In short, Trump was trying to stoke up the energy of his base by appealing to their sense of racial and gender grievance, promoting resentment that women and people of color are taking what is rightfully theirs, and arguing that they are doing it under the false flags of anti-racism and anti-sexism, because racism and sexism haven’t been a thing in decades and were never that big a deal to begin with.

The fact that he may have confused or angered anyone else, like me or you, is just a side effect.

I don’t have any special insight into the White racist community, so I’m not sure how well this is working. I can only trust that White racists are not a majority of the electorate, and hope that the rest of us show up in large enough numbers to outvote them.

By weeklysift | Posted in Articles | Also tagged 2024 election | Comments (11)

Alito’s Flags Aren’t the Worst of It

May 27, 2024 – 9:40 am

While we were watching the flags, Alito wrote a decision that greenlights racial gerrymanders and opens a door for Jim Crow to come back.

Samuel Alito has long been my least favorite Supreme Court justice, even before his anti-American-democracy flags (which I’ll cover in the weekly summary post that will follow this one), and even before he wrote the Dobbs decision. You might think I just dislike him because his judicial philosophy is different from mine, but I don’t think that’s it. You see, I’m not convinced he has a judicial philosophy.

What makes Alito a frustrating judge for me is that his rulings seem to have nothing to do with the law. In just about any case, you can predict Alito’s opinion by asking three simple questions:

Does one outcome favor the Republican Party?
Does one outcome favor the Catholic Church?
Does one outcome favor the Haves over the Have-Nots?

If the answer to any of those questions is “yes”, that’s where Alito will come down. You can safely make that prediction without knowing anything about the facts of the case or the relevant laws. All the stuff people argue about in law school is irrelevant.

Other justices will sometimes surprise. Even bought-and-paid-for Clarence Thomas has a few legal hobby horses that occasionally cause him to take a position I wouldn’t have expected. But as best I can tell, Alito has none. He has partisan commitments and he votes to support them; end of story.

Whenever I read an Alito opinion, I’m reminded of a distinction that occurs in religion, between theology and apologetics. Theology attempts to ascertain truths about God, but apologetics develops convincing arguments to defend prior religious beliefs. The two often resemble each other: When Thomas Aquinas claims to prove the existence of God through reason, is he nailing down something previously in doubt (theology), or is he evangelizing to rational people who otherwise might not believe in God (apologetics)? It can be hard to tell.

Similarly, Alito’s written opinions often resemble legal reasoning. He cites precedents, makes deductions, and in general constructs arguments that lead to conclusions. But the arguments appear to have nothing to do with how he reached those conclusions. Instead, they give a gloss of legality to Alito’s prior convictions.

The Dobbs decision is an obvious example: Ostensibly, Alito argues that

Our nation’s historical understanding of ordered liberty does not prevent the people’s elected representatives from deciding how abortion should be regulated.

The Dobbs opinion is one long history lesson justifying that claim. But its history is carefully edited, and Alito does not address the points made in an amicus brief by actual historians. [1] He appears to have no interest in history beyond how it might justify fulfilling the Catholic goal of overturning Roe v Wade.

This week gave us another example, whose importance is in danger of being lost in the controversy over Alito’s flags: He wrote the majority opinion in Alexander v South Carolina NAACP, a decision that Vox’ Ian Milhiser calls “a love letter to gerrymandering“. This decision gives states a green light to engage in all manner of racial gerrymandering; the practice is still technically unconstitutional, but under the standards of Alexander, it becomes nearly impossible to establish in court.

Gerrymandering. Let’s review a little: Gerrymandering means drawing the lines of electoral districts so that your side can win a decisive majority in some legislative body with only a minority of actual votes. There are numerous examples of this happening in state legislatures and even in the U.S. Congress. In extreme examples, a near-50/50 state can wind up with a legislative supermajority for one party. (Basically, you pack all of the other party’s voters into a few districts, which they win with 90% majorities. Then you distribute your voters so that you have reliable 55-45 wins in the other districts.)

On paper, gerrymandering is a cross-partisan problem, and there are states where Democrats gerrymander. But Democrats have tried to ban the practice, and on the whole it favors Republicans, whose rural voters are already more distributed geographically, and who have less shame generally about subverting democracy.

Not that many years ago, optimists thought partisan gerrymandering might get banned by the courts as a violation of basic democratic principles. That hope went out the window in the 2019 Rucho decision, where Chief Justice Roberts declared partisan gerrymanding “nonjusticiable”, meaning that whatever damage the practice might do to democracy, courts have no power to stop it.

But racial gerrymandering, where you draw lines to diminish the voting power of some racial minority, is still considered a violation of the 14th Amendment. The problem is how to tell the difference when a racial minority has predictable voting patterns. If South Carolina moves voters from one congressional district to another, how do we know whether they’re being moved because they’re Black (unconstitutional) or because they’re Democrats (nonjusticiable)?

The Alexander case. Here’s how Alito makes that determination in the current case:

The Constitution entrusts state legislatures with the primary responsibility for drawing congressional districts, and redistricting is an inescapably political enterprise. Legislators are almost always aware of the political ramifications of the maps they adopt, and claims that a map is unconstitutional because it was drawn to achieve a partisan end are not justiciable in federal court. Thus, as far as the Federal Constitution is concerned, a legislature may pursue partisan ends when it engages in redistricting. By contrast, if a legislature gives race a predominant role in redistricting decisions, the resulting map is subjected to strict scrutiny and may be held unconstitutional.

These doctrinal lines collide when race and partisan preference are highly correlated. We have navigated this tension by endorsing two related propositions. First, a party challenging a map’s constitutionality must disentangle race and politics if it wishes to prove that the legislature was motivated by race as opposed to partisanship. Second, in assessing a legislature’s work, we start with a presumption that the legislature acted in good faith.

In Alexander, Alito’s assumption of the legislature’s good faith bulldozes all evidence to the contrary. In particular, it bulldozes the deference higher courts are supposed to give to the factual findings of lower courts. In Alexander, a three-judge panel held a trial where they listened to witnesses and compiled a record that runs thousands of pages. That panel concluded unanimously that South Carolina’s gerrymander was motivated by race.

On appeal, higher courts are supposed to accept such judgments unless there is a clear error in the record. (The reason for this is simple: The appellate judges can read the record, but they didn’t hear the testimony. They have no basis for rejecting the lower-court judges’ conclusions about who was or wasn’t telling the truth.) But Alito rejects the lower-court findings because the three-judge panel made the “clear error” of not giving him the finding he wanted. They should have accepted South Carolina’s claims that race was not the motive if there was any possibility that it might be true.

Justice Kagan’s dissent shreds this argument, and concludes:

What a message to send to state legislators and mapmakers about racial gerrymandering. For reasons I’ve addressed, those actors will often have an incentive to use race as a proxy to achieve partisan ends.
And occasionally they might want to straight-up suppress the electoral influence of minority voters. Go right ahead, this Court says to States today. Go ahead, though you have no recognized justification for using race, such as to comply with statutes ensuring equal voting rights. Go ahead, though you are (at best) using race as a short-cut to bring about partisan gains—to elect more Republicans in one case, more Democrats in another. It will be easy enough to cover your tracks in the end: Just raise a “possibility” of non-race-based decision-making, and it will be “dispositive.” And so this “odious” practice of sorting citizens, built on racial generalizations and exploiting racial divisions, will continue.

Disrespect for precedent. Kagan also points out that the Court heard a nearly identical case in 2017: Cooper v Harris. In that case, Alito made a nearly identical argument, but he lost 5-3, and the lower court’s rejection of North Carolina’s map was upheld.

Cases like that are supposed to be binding precedents, but this Court no longer respects precedent, so it reached the opposite conclusion in this case.

What changed since 2017? Were new laws or constitutional amendments passed? Did we learn something new about gerrymandering that called previous conclusions into question?

Not at all. As with Dobbs, the only thing that has changed is the composition of the Court. With the addition of the Trump justices, the three dissenters in Cooper have become the majority. Kagan writes:

Today, for all practical purposes, the Cooper dissent becomes the law.

Going forward. As with Dobbs, the arguments in the decision have much broader implications. When you read Alito’s opinion, it’s easy to forget that the Court’s precedents against racist laws come out of an ugly history. Ignoring this history, Alito expresses great sympathy for state officials who might find themselves accused of racism

[W]hen a federal court finds that race drove a legislature’s districting decisions, it is declaring that the legislature engaged in “offensive and demeaning” conduct that “bears an uncomfortable resemblance to political apartheid.” We should not be quick to hurl such accusations at the political branches.

But you will search Alito’s opinion in vain to find any expression of sympathy for the victims of racism. It’s as if racism exists only as an “accusation”, something disreputably used to stain the reputations of White people, who deserve our “presumption of good faith”.

Kagan calls out Alito’s message to legislatures that want to gerrymander away the electoral power of non-White voters: “Go ahead.” But the Alexander decision is even bigger than that. It says “Go ahead” to any legislative attempt to reestablish Jim Crow. If legislatures just avoid announcing their racist intentions openly, if they create plausible cover stories for laws that disadvantage racial minorities, the Supreme Court will “start with a presumption that the legislature acted in good faith” and be quick to dismiss any evidence to the contrary.

[1] The historians’ brief begins:

When the United States was founded and for many subsequent decades, Americans relied on the English common law. The common law did not regulate abortion in early pregnancy. Indeed, the common law did not even recognize abortion as occurring at that stage. That is because the common law did not legally acknowledge a fetus as existing separately from a pregnant woman until the woman felt fetal movement, called “quickening,” which could occur as late as the 25th week of pregnancy.

By weeklysift | Posted in Articles | Also tagged law | Comments (7)

Those University Presidents

December 18, 2023 – 10:25 am

William Faulkner’s classic story about a lynching, “Dry September“, starts with this paragraph:

Through the bloody September twilight, aftermath of sixty-two rainless days, it had gone like a fire in dry grass: the rumor, the story, whatever it was. Something about Miss Minnie Cooper and a Negro. Attacked, insulted, frightened: none of them, gathered in the barber shop on that Saturday evening where the ceiling fan stirred, without freshening it, the vitiated air, sending back upon them, in recurrent surges of stale pomade and lotion, their own stale breath and odors, knew exactly what had happened.

The beauty of that description is that by the time you get to “knew exactly what had happened”, you’ve forgotten that the subject is “none of them”. That’s how viral public outrage works sometimes: The more the story goes around, the simpler it becomes, until you start to forget how little you actually know.

We’ve had an example of viral public outrage these last two weeks: Something about Jews and genocide, and university presidents being OK with it, or not willing to condemn it, or something. It was horrible, whatever it was. And heads have rolled. Penn’s Liz Magill has already been forced out, while Harvard’s Claudine Gay and MIT’s Sally Kornbluth have managed to hang on. The House has passed a resolution citing statistics about antisemitic incidents on college campuses, “strongly condemning” the three presidents’ testimony as “evasive and dismissive”, and demanding that they all resign. The MIT Israel Alliance went a step further, calling for the resignations not just of the university’s president, but of board members “who support tacitly, or otherwise, the calls for genocide of Jews.”

The heart of the issue is a widely circulated video of a three-and-a-half-minute chunk of a five-and-a-half-hour hearing. [The video and transcript of the full hearing is available online. I’ve scanned the transcript, but I confess I have neither watched nor read the whole session. Unless otherwise sourced, the quotes below are from the transcript.] In that clip, Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY) badgers all three presidents to answer yes or no about whether “calling for the genocide of Jews” violates their institutions’ harassment policy. All three give similar answers to President Gay:

The rules around bullying and harassment are quite specific. And if the context in which that language is used, amounts to bullying and harassment, then we take — we take action against it.

Again and again, Stefanik rejects the suggestion that the context matters:

Yes or no, calling for the genocide of Jews does not constitute bullying and harassment?

None of the presidents is willing to give that clear yes-or-no, resulting in national outrage at their “lack of moral clarity” (to use Stefanik’s words), and costing at least one of them her job.

So why couldn’t they give that yes-or-no answer? If we’re going to understand what this exchange was really about, we’re going to have to examine — dare I use the word? — context.

Framing the hearing: not antisemitism, wokeness. The hearing was held before the House Committee on Education and the Work Force (which I honestly had never heard of before), chaired by Rep. Virginia Foxx (R-NC).

The first thing to understand about this hearing is that it was only superficially intended to discuss antisemitism. Antisemitism was just a convenient tool to use in the House Republican majority’s larger battle against “wokeness”, particularly as it appears in elite universities, which Republicans see as enemy outposts.

That purpose was announced in the opening statement given by Chair Foxx:

[A]fter the events of the past two months, it is clear that rabid anti-Semitism and the university are two ideas that cannot be cleaved from one another. We must be clear on the ideological dimension of this problem. For years, universities have stoked the flames of an ideology which goes by many names—anti-racism, anti-colonialism, critical race theory, DEI, intersectionality, the list goes on.

This value system taught in universities is absolutely foreign to 99 percent of Americans. It centers the identity on immutable racial and sexual characteristics. It presents a delusion that the color of one’s skin and expression of one’s chromosomes sort society into classes of oppressed and oppressors. And now it is clear that Jews are at the bottom of the totem pole and without protection under this critical theory framework. … Institutional anti-Semitism and hate are among the poison fruits of your institution’s cultures.

The buck for what has happened must stop on the President’s desk, along with the responsibility for making never again true on campus. Do you have the courage to truly confront and condemn the ideology driving anti-Semitism, or will you offer weak, blame shifting excuses and yet another responsibility dodging task force?

So the topic here isn’t really antisemitism, it’s “the ideology driving anti-Semitism”, which is “anti-racism, anti-colonialism, critical race theory, DEI, intersectionality.” As an example of this ideology, Foxx names courses like Harvard’s “Race and Racism in the Making of the United States as a Global Power”, whose title alone is so sinister that its wrongness needs no explanation.

Even the Harvard Divinity School has a page devoted to “Social and Racial Justice.” [1]

This larger focus is why much of the questioning by Republican members is about Blacks, not Jews. Rep Bob Good (R-VA), for example, uses Harvard’s history of affirmative action against it:

We know, of course, that Harvard has a history of dividing people based on race, based on the Supreme Court’s decision and students for Fair Admission versus Harvard.

Ranking Democrat Donald Norcross (NJ) pointed out in his opening statement that Republican interest in antisemitism or any other form of discrimination on campus has been quite selective:

Today we’ll hear from representatives of universities on their efforts to protect students and address discrimination on campus. Of note, this is an opportunity that my Republican colleagues denied us in 2017, when committee Democrats called for a hearing six years ago on campus discrimination, when white supremacists marched through the University of Virginia grounds shouting “Jews will not replace us.” We didn’t — couldn’t get a hearing back then.

And while my colleagues claim to be committed to combating discrimination on campus, they’re also contradictorily and simultaneously stoking culture wars that can be divisive and discriminatory. Moreover, House Republicans are proposing significant cuts to the Department of Education’s offices — Office of Civil Rights, the very office responsible for upholding student civil rights and investigating discrimination claims.

You can’t have it both ways. You can’t call for action then hamstring the agency charged with taking that action to protect students’ civil rights. In stark contrast, the Biden administration has taken an active role in helping institutions protect students as part of the White House’s national strategy to combat anti-Semitism. [2]

So no. They’re not talking about antisemitism because they see antisemitism as a problem. They’re using it as a bludgeon against Academia in general.

Why were the presidents called to testify? So that the committee could beat up on them. The title the committee gave the hearing was “Holding Campus Leaders Accountable and Confronting Antisemitism“. Antisemitism got second billing; humiliating university presidents was the main goal. Foxx’ opening statement was also clear about that:

Today, each of you will have a chance to answer to and atone for the many specific instances of vitriolic, hate-filled antisemitism on your respective campuses that have denied students the safe learning environment they are due. [italics added]

You might imagine calling three distinguished university presidents together in a spirit of real perplexity: How is this happening? What needs to change? But no: They’re not there to give insight; they’re there to atone.

What does it mean to “call for the genocide of Jews”? It’s important to recognize the mismatch between the questioners and the witnesses. The questioners — particularly Stefanik — were there to make particular political points to the nation. The administrators were there to protect their institutions, and so they mostly did not engage when the politicians framed larger political issues. This turned out to be a mistake on their part, and it cost them.

So what exactly counts as “genocide” or a “call for genocide”? In her questioning of President Gay, Stefanik identifies “intifada” with killing Jews in Israel, and “global intifada” with killing Jews everywhere in the world.

And you understand that the use of the term intifada in the context of the Israeli Arab conflict is indeed a call for violent armed resistance against the state of Israel, including violence against civilians and the genocide of Jews. … And there have been multiple marches at Harvard with students chanting quote, “there is only one solution intifada revolution.” and quote, “globalize the intifada.” Is that correct? … So, based upon your testimony, you understand that this call for intifada is to commit genocide against the Jewish people in Israel and globally, correct?

Gay isn’t there to fight the Palestinian/Israeli political battle, and doesn’t want to get pushed into that corner, so she doesn’t dispute Stefanik’s framing (and may not have the background to do so). No one in the room is there to argue the Palestinian case, so the intifada=genocide framing goes unquestioned. But it shouldn’t have. On the liberal Jewish website Forward, Mira Fox does the analysis that no one at the committee hearing felt called to do:

Arabic contains many words for revolts or uprisings, each with a different valence — and often understood differently in the West, and when used in English in ways that don’t capture the words’ full meaning. … Intifada connotes an uprising against an oppressor. But that’s a relatively new meaning for the word, which comes from a verb root meaning “to shake off” or “dust off.” It only acquired its revolutionary implications during the Iraqi Intifada in 1952, a series of strikes and riots protesting the monarchy at the time. In Arabic, [University of Virginia Professor Mohammed] Sawaie said, it is also used to talk about the Arab Spring, and other revolts against oppressive regimes.

… Daniel Lefkowitz, a professor of language and culture in the Middle East at the University of Virginia who lived in Israel for several years in the early 2000s, hypothesized that, for most Palestinians, the word brings up memories of the First Intifada, a largely non-violent Palestinian protest largely involving work stoppages, boycotts and demonstrations.

… But for Israelis, and many Jews, the word brings up memories, instead, of the Second Intifada, a far bloodier Palestinian uprising characterized by suicide bombings on buses and at cafés that killed about 1,000 Israeli civilians.

So it’s important to understand that when American college students call for “intifada”, they might be calling for the indiscriminate killing of Jews, but they might also be calling for resistance (which they might intend to be either violent or non-violent) to Israel’s oppression of Palestinians. Similarly “global intifada” might mean attacks on Jews or Israelis wherever, but it might also mean showing non-violent international support for Palestinian resistance to the Israeli occupation.

It depends on the context.

Similarly, the slogan “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” clearly refers to the whole region between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River, which includes both Israel proper as well as the areas commonly envisioned as a Palestinian state. Wanting that whole region to be “Palestine” might mean ethnically cleansing it of Jews. Or it might refer to what is known as the one-state solution: a multi-ethnic democracy where Palestinians and Jews have equal rights. Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) sees it as

“an aspirational call for freedom, human rights, and peaceful coexistence, not death, destruction, or hate.” Tlaib supports the establishment of a single, binational Palestinian-Jewish state in place of what is now Israel, the West Bank and Gaza.

Naturally, bigots can adopt ambiguous rhetoric in order to give themselves cover, so you can’t always take seriously people’s own explanations of what their slogans mean. (“All lives matter” is a good example. Taken literally, it is uncontroversial, but it is also commonly used by white supremacists to dispute the idea that Black lives matter.) But conversely, contending that you know what other people’s words mean — and they don’t — is a claim of supremacy: your interpretation is the only one that matters.

So what was Stefanik asking? The presidents also made opening statements, and all were clear about several points:

The Hamas attacks on October 7 were wrong and horrible. President Magill: “Let me begin by saying that I, and the University of Pennsylvania, are horrified by and condemn Hamas’s abhorrent terrorist attack on Israel on October 7th. There is no justification—none—for those heinous attacks.”
Antisemitism exists on campus and is unacceptable. President Kornbluth: “Let me repeat what I said in my very first message to campus. In that video, I said, ‘The brutality perpetrated on innocent civilians in Israel by terrorists from Hamas is horrifying. In my opinion, such a deliberate attack on civilians can never be justified.’ I also made clear that students were feeling unsafe ‘because of their Jewish faith, or their ties to Israel’ and said, ‘That should trouble every one of us deeply.’ I have reinforced this message, including in a November 14th campus video. As I said then, ‘Antisemitism is real, and it is rising in the world. We cannot let it poison our community’.”
No student (whether Jew, Muslim, or anything else), should feel unsafe, unwelcome, or intimidated on their own campus. President Gay: “I am deeply troubled by instances of inflammatory rhetoric and division on campus. Individuals are reporting feeling threatened by others in our community. The chilling effect created by these tactics threatens to turn our community of learning and trust into an environment of alienation and fear. Reckless and thoughtless rhetoric—in person and online, on campus and off—is undermining feelings of belonging among members of the Harvard community. Efforts to threaten or intimidate members of our community betray Harvard’s core values.”

The question Stefanik badgered the presidents with, though, was far more specific than whether the Hamas attacks were evil or antisemitism is wrong. She asked specifically about the harassment policies at the universities.

Does calling for the genocide of Jews violate Harvard’s rules on bullying and harassment?

That’s a legal question, and it should surprise no one that the presidents gave legalistic answers, all of which amounted to: It depends.

Their caution was undoubtedly raised by the framing Stefanik had already done: In her view, anyone who chanted or otherwise promoted common pro-Palestinian slogans was calling for genocide against Jews. Once that’s understood, and calling for genocide is defined as harassment, then any student who demonstrated in favor of Palestinian rights is subject to official punishment from their university.

It’s no wonder that the presidents didn’t want to go there.

How should context matter? You might think that a hearing lasting more than five hours would have ample time for everyone to explain themselves. But when a hearing is directed by people who don’t want to hear explanations, time can get away from you.

So if you want to know what “context” has to do with anything, I suggest looking at another Forward article “The university presidents were right and American Jews’ moral panic is wrong” by Jay Michaelson.

If someone says “Gaza should be turned into a parking lot” in the Knesset, or at some right-wing political rally, that is indeed a call for genocide. But is it harassment? No. And yet, if the same phrase is shouted in the faces of Palestinians who are marching in their own rally, or if it’s spray-painted on a mosque, then it is.

Now switch out “Gaza” for “Israel.” The same logic holds. If someone says “Israel must be pushed into the sea” in a college political science seminar, that may be a genocidal statement, even an antisemitic one, but it isn’t harassment. But if someone spray-paints it on a synagogue, or shouts it at a group of Jews, that’s harassment.

Michaelson concludes that the pain Jews feel in the aftermath of October 7 is being “exploited by people who do not have our best interests at heart.”

Just look around you. Is it not odd that, if you’re a relatively moderate or liberal American Jew, your current villain is a distinguished university president and your hero is a hard-right rabble-rouser who campaigned for a guy who praised Adolf Hitler? (Carl Paladino, if you want to look it up.) Don’t you see that you’re being played? Our pain is being weaponized as part of a longstanding hard-right attack on institutions of higher education. Do you really think that will be good for the Jews?

Blacks, not Jews. Much of Stefanik’s questioning was not about how Jews are protected by universities, but how Blacks are protected. She began one segment with

Dr. Gay, a Harvard student calling for the mass murder of African Americans is not protected free speech at Harvard, correct?

When Gay didn’t immediately say yes or no, Stefanik cut her off.

That’s a yes-or-no question. Is that correct? Is that OK for students to call for the mass murder of African Americans at Harvard? Is that protected free speech? … And isn’t it true that Harvard previously rescinded multiple offers of admissions for applicants and accepted freshmen for sharing offensive memes, racist statements, sometimes as young as 16 years old? Did Harvard not rescind those offers of admission?

This leads up to questions about what actions Harvard has taken against students who support intifada. (Stefanik knows Gay can’t answer about recent demonstrations because all those cases would be ongoing.) At times it seems like antisemitism is actually a stalking horse for another topic entirely: Not “Why are Palestinians treated so leniently when they intimidate Jews?” but “Why are white supremacists treated so harshly when they intimidate Blacks?”

Divide and conquer. Throughout history, one of the ways ruling minorities have stayed in power has been to turn disadvantaged groups against one another. Today, we can see that most clearly in the way that rural working-class Whites have been turned against Hispanic immigrants and urban Blacks. In this hearing, we see an attempt to drive a wedge between Blacks and Jews, and in particular to turn Jews against Black-led anti-racism programs.

Perhaps the primary distinction that critical theory makes is between privileged groups and underprivileged groups, but American Jews have a foot in both camps. In terms of median income, American Jews are a comparatively wealthy group. On average they have high educational achievement. Blacks and Hispanics can only envy the number of Jews (like President Kornbluth) who have risen to positions of institutional power and influence.

But on the other hand, Jews historically have always been one pogrom away from disaster. [3] Their very success makes them easy to scapegoat and subject to conspiracy theories. The recent increase in antisemitic hate crimes — not just on campus, but throughout America and the world — is very real. [4]

Like Blacks and other underprivileged groups, Jews are vulnerable to collective blame. For example, if you are against Israel’s policy towards Palestinians, it makes perfect sense to demonstrate in front of the Israeli embassy, or some other outpost of the Israeli government. But it makes no sense to demonstrate in front of a Jewish-owned restaurant. Jewishness is an ethnic and religious identity, not membership in a faction.

Victims of antisemitism and other victims of bigotry — like, say, the three young Palestinian men shot in Vermont — could look at each other and gloat: “Now maybe they’ll know what it feels like.” But for the sake of the world, we have to hope that they’ll decide instead to grasp what they have in common.

What can be done? Rep. Foxx has a clear remedy in mind: Jews, and anyone who opposes antisemitism whether they are Jewish or not, need to reject wokeness in all its forms. In particular, universities should have to worry about their government funding until they abandon any attempt to teach about structural racism, white male privilege, LGBTQ rights, or any other woke concept. In short, the US needs to follow the example of Ron DeSantis’ Florida.

In my opinion, though, the resurgence of antisemitism both on campus and in the larger world, together with the simultaneous increase in Islamophobia, anti-Asian hate, and many other forms of bigotry, deserve a better discussion than they got in this manipulative and exploitive hearing.

As so often happens when the Right stokes a controversy, we find ourselves talking about something other than the real problem. [5] As we debate about the attitudes of university presidents, the lived experience of students — Jews and Palestinians alike — who feel unsafe on campus or intimidated out of expressing their political views has faded into the background.

Of course you would expect that university presidents would see education as a key component of a solution here. President Gay in particular promises

a robust program of education and training for students, faculty, and staff on antisemitism and Islamophobia broadly and at Harvard specifically. These educational programs will provide history and
context about the roots of certain rhetoric that has been heard on our campus in recent weeks, and its impact on Jewish and Muslim members of our community. The goal is to identify antisemitism and Islamophobia in daily life and interrupt its harmful influence.

But I also think that in this hearing the Right has exploited a hole in much anti-racist literature, which (at least in what I have read, which is a non-trivial but far from comprehensive sample) says little about antisemitism. This isn’t just a failure of inclusion, it overlooks a valuable resource. Antisemitism is perhaps the longest-standing and best-documented manifestation of bigotry. Its history should be a storehouse of examples of key anti-racist concepts, such as structural bigotry and how privilege can be embedded in rules that seem to apply equally to everyone. (Requiring employees of all religions to work on Saturdays but not Sundays, for example. Jews who want to observe their religion’s day of rest can seem to be asking for “special rights”.)

The relationship between Judaism and anti-racism goes way back. Many Jews were important activists in the Civil Rights movement, and Black leaders have often used the symbolism of the Exodus (as when Martin Luther King identified himself with Moses and said he had “been to the mountaintop”). Much of our modern thinking about social justice traces its roots back to the Hebrew prophets.

That history and that commonality is too important to let the Right drive a wedge between the two communities today.

[1] I once sat in on an HDS class and thought about applying, so this hits home: Good heavens! Ministers-in-training are learning about social and racial justice? Maybe liberal professors will assign them to read radical pro-justice texts like the Book of Amos or the Sermon on the Mount. Wake up, America!

[2] Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD) isn’t on that committee and so wasn’t at the hearing, but fleshed out similar points in a subsequent tweetstorm, asking Stefanik five yes-or-no questions. He noted Great Replacement Theory’s role in the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting and asked if Stefanik rejected that theory. He also called attention to the antisemitic tropes employed by the Trump campaign and asked if she endorsed his candidacy.

Unsurprisingly, Stefanik dodged Raskin’s questions, and instead answered with a recitation of Trump pro-Israel policies, as if supporting the Netanyahu government were incompatible with antisemitism. In fact, the two positions can go hand-in-hand for ethno-nationalists, who support Jewish supremacy in Israel and White-Christian supremacy in the US. Many in the KKK would argue that Jews should have a homeland in Israel and they should all go there.

[3] For example, many Jews were doing quite well in Weimar Germany, but that didn’t save them when the Nazis came to power.

[4] Similar observations apply Chinese Americans, the so-called “model minority”. Many Chinese are quite successful in America, but during the recent pandemic we saw how easy it was to blame them for spreading “the Kung Flu“.

[5] For example, rather than discuss changing gender roles and how to treat people who don’t identify with either traditional gender, too often we end up discussing largely imaginary problems, like predatory men claiming to be trans so that they can enter women’s bathrooms, or the possibility that the comparatively small number of trans athletes might somehow come to dominate women’s sports.

By weeklysift | Posted in Articles, Expand Your Vocabulary | Also tagged culture wars | Comments (13)

The DeSantis-approved version of American racial history

July 24, 2023 – 9:08 am

Our story of slavery, Jim Crow, and continuing racism yields many heroes but no villains.

Wednesday, the Florida State Board of Education approved its new standards for teaching social studies, as required by last year’s Stop WOKE Act. The standards document is 216 pages, but the part that sparked immediate controversy was the African American History strand, contained in pages 3-21.

Most of the controversy centered on just two lines. “Instruction includes how slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit” on page 6, and “Instruction includes acts of violence perpetrated against and by African Americans but is not limited to 1906 Atlanta Race Riot, 1919 Washington, D.C. Race Riot, 1920 Ocoee Massacre, 1921 Tulsa Massacre and the 1923 Rosewood Massacre” on page 17.

Critics objected to the page 6 reference because it perpetuates a trope that goes all the way back to the slavery era itself: that slaves benefited from their enslavement. The problem with the page 17 reference is the “against and by” phrase, which frames attacks by Whites against Blacks as battles between Whites and Blacks.

Those criticisms are valid, but after reading the standards as a whole, I have larger objections.

Nonetheless, let me start by giving the Devil his due: If kids come out of Florida schools knowing everything in the standards, they’ll have had a better education on race than my generation did growing up in the 1960s and 70s. (Though that isn’t saying much. For example, I had never heard of the Harlem Renaissance or Ida B. Wells until I visited the Smithsonian’s African American History and Culture Museum a few years ago. My high school texts grudgingly noticed Booker T. Washington and George Washington Carver, but that was about it for Black contributions to American history and culture.) That’s due to progress generally, not just in Florida.

But having acknowledged that, here’s the central problem with the standards: Florida wants to tell a story about race in America that has heroes but no villains. This is in line with the demands of DeSantis’ Stop WOKE Act, which requires that students be indoctrinated with an upbeat narrative:

American history … shall be defined as the creation of a new nation based largely on the universal principles stated in the Declaration of Independence.

To tell that story, the standards identify a lot of high-achieving Black Americans, as well as many admirable Whites who were abolitionists or allies of the civil rights movement. But slavery itself just sort of happened; it emerged out of vague historical and economic forces. Ditto for Jim Crow. So Thaddeus Stevens and Harriet Tubman get shout-outs, but John Calhoun and Nathan Bedford Forrest — particularly Calhoun’s explicit rejection of the universal principles in the Declaration of Independence — are never mentioned.

Instruction includes how whites who supported Reconstruction policies for freed blacks after the Civil War (white southerners being called scalawags and white northerners being called carpetbaggers) were targeted.

But nothing about who targeted them. Heather Cox Richardson examines the standards’ use of the passive voice in more detail, but the gist is that identified people did good things, while bad things were done. So there’s nothing about the Lost Cause mythology that venerated the Confederacy, or the Dunning historical interpretation that painted Reconstruction as a benighted period (dominated by scalawags and carpetbaggers) from which the South needed to be “redeemed” by Jim Crow.

There’s also a bizarre highlighting of relatively minor Black conservatives like Thomas Sowell and Shelby Steele, who really don’t belong on a list (with several presidents and John Lewis) of “political figures who shaped the modern Civil Rights efforts”. And I think it’s fine that Clarence Thomas is listed among “African American pioneers in their field”, but where is the man he replaced on the Supreme Court, Thurgood Marshall?

Omissions are harder to catch than misplaced inclusions, and I suspect better historians than me will find some howlers. But I noticed a big one: The standards don’t mention Bacon’s Rebellion of 1677. Bacon’s Rebellion united Black slaves and White indentured servants against Virginia’s White upper class, and is often described as the motive for the Slave Codes of 1705 (also not mentioned), which solidified racial divisions in Virginia law (in hopes that the White and Black underclasses would never again find common causes).

And of course, the standards highlight any nascent abolitionism among the Founders, while turning a blind eye to their contradictory actions.

Instruction includes examples of how the members of the Continental Congress made attempts to end or limit slavery (e.g., the first draft of the Declaration of Independence that blamed King George III for sustaining the slave trade in the colonies, the calls of the Continental Congress for the end of involvement in the international slave trade, the Constitutional provision allowing for congressional action in 1808).

But no mention of why the Continental Congress’ attempts to limit slavery failed, why that first draft got edited, or who led the countervailing effort. No mention of George Washington’s slaves, or the Black descendants of Thomas Jefferson and the enslaved Sally Hemings.

In short, the Florida standards describe an America inexplicably beset by the dark impersonal forces of slavery and discrimination, against which heroic individuals of all races fought a centuries-long and ultimately successful battle.

Why tell this slanted story? Because Stop WOKE demands it:

An individual should not be made to feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress on account of his or her race.

So the State Board has rewritten American racial history to avoid all “psychological distress” (other than perhaps cognitive dissonance). Florida’s children should feel pride in their ancestors, no matter who they were, because previous generations of Americans were all heroes. There’s no need to ask Grandpa if he ever lynched anybody, or if Grandma was one of the people throwing rotten fruit at the first Black children trying to integrate a public school. Because although such things were done, nobody actually did them.

By weeklysift | Posted in Articles | Also tagged culture wars, education | Comments (3)

Two Glimpses into the Future

November 28, 2022 – 9:03 am

Will American democracy survive after Whites become a minority?
And will the super-rich care whether civilization survives at all?

Following 2020 and 2022 elections, a number of articles have suggested that Democrats losing their hold on Hispanic voters, a development portrayed in liberal circles as something ominous that needs to be fixed. For years, the increasing number of Hispanic Americans was thought to promise Democrats some sort of demographic inevitability, and now they seem to be blowing it.

I’m of two minds about this line of thought. On the one hand, no segment of the electorate should be taken for granted, so the complaints that Democrats are offering Hispanic voters “noble rhetoric but never a seat at the table” deserve serious attention.

On the other, the whole emerging Democratic majority argument now seems wrong-headed, for reasons that Yascha Mounk spells out in the The Great Experiment: Why diverse democracies fall apart and how they can endure.

Mounk is deeply worried about the possible future in which we have a White Party and a People of Color Party. If the major-party identities get fixed in such a tribal way, he has a hard time seeing how democracy in America avoids devolving into civil strife, as it has in, say, Lebanon. Democracy should be about voters who are open to changing their minds when the other party presents a compelling vision, not about rival blocs you are born into and never leave. In a racially-defined two-party system, neither party can hope to convince the other’s voters, so they will end up competing in less positive ways.

To the extent that the parties themselves believe in demographic inevitability, they start to take their own demographic groups for granted and cast the other party’s demographic groups as enemies. You can see this happening already among MAGA Republicans, who see the coming non-White majority as a “Great Replacement” of White people, and try to head off that threat by rigging the system so that the dawning non-White majority never achieves power: stop non-White immigration, stop non-White immigrants from becoming citizens, make it hard for non-White citizens to vote, herd them into gerrymandered districts that minimize their political strength, and so on. Some on the right are ready to jettison democracy entirely rather than face a future where Whites lose power.

Many Democrats, on the other hand, fail to see why they need to win Hispanic votes. I mean, they’re Hispanics. What’s wrong with them if they can’t see which party they’re supposed to support? Conversely, White Evangelicals get written off, and they shouldn’t be. There are good Christian reasons to support liberal policies, and that argument needs to be made.

But Mounk is an optimist in that he believes the melting pot is still bubbling, at least for some groups. The original ethnic majority in the US was English, then Northern European (minus the Irish), and then grew to include Eastern and Southern Europeans (plus the Irish). (Jews, I think, are a special case — assimilated in some ways but not others, and still a political identity in a sense that Italians and Poles no longer are. Jews are separate enough that Doug Mastriano would try to make an issue of Josh Shapiro’s religion in the 2022 Pennsylvania governor’s race. But they’re accepted enough that he failed by a wide margin.) So why couldn’t it also absorb Hispanics, Asians, and Muslims? He thinks that’s starting to happen, and sees it as a good thing: There should be no need for either a White Party or a People of Color Party.

When their race or religion stops being a defining characteristic, Hispanic, Asian, and Muslim political views may come to more closely resemble the rest of the country. Hispanic businessmen, for example, may start to vote like other businessmen, Hispanic Catholics like other Catholics, and Asian or Muslim professionals like other professionals. If Republicans stop casting non-Whites and non-Christians as enemies, people of any race or religion may decide that they prefer lower taxes, less regulation, and other traditionally Republican policies.

Mounk glides over what this means for Black people, whose path into the mainstream has always been more difficult. (To an extent, non-Blackness has been the unifying principle of America’s ever-expanding “White” majority.) Mounk doesn’t explain why this will change, which I think is a major hole in his argument. But I believe this much of his thesis is sound: It’s a mistake to think that people will or won’t vote for you purely because they belong to this race or that religion. There’s nothing inevitable about Democratic dominance in a post-White-majority America — and that’s a good thing for democracy. Both parties would do well to recognize that fact and compete to win the allegiance of the new voters.

Another interesting recent book is Survival of the Richest: escape fantasies of the tech billionaires by Douglas Rushkoff.

Rushkoff describes himself in the introduction as a “Marxist media theorist” and “a humanist who writes about the impact of digital technology on our lives”. So he is “often mistaken for a futurist” and often finds himself at the same futuristic conferences as tech billionaires. One time he was paid to fly out to a desert compound, and discovered that the small conference he thought he would address was actually a handful billionaires who wanted advice on where to site their apocalyptic refuges and how to keep control of their mercenaries after the legal system collapses.

His book describes a fundamental change in capitalism and the capitalist mindset. Originally, the point of establishing some income-producing enterprise — a shop, a farm, a factory, or whatever — was to create something that could be passed down through the generations like a medieval fiefdom. (This is my interpretation of Rushkoff’s point, and the examples that follow are mine rather than his.) For example, I imagine Henry Ford would have been thrilled to glimpse a future in which the Ford Motor Company still existed 75 years after his death and was still a major source of wealth for his descendants. Some small-scale capitalist — let’s call him Jack — might well have a similar fantasy of a great-grandchild still owning and operating Jack’s Bar & Grill a century hence.

But recently, particularly in the tech world, the prevailing fantasy has shifted to one where you cash out. Elon Musk‘s original fortune, for example, came from co-founding Zip2 and then selling it to Compaq for $300 million. He then co-founded an online bank, which merged into PayPal, which was eventually bought by eBay.

These days, that’s what a tech entrepreneur hopes to do: turn an idea into a business that works, then sell that business and move on to the next idea. It’s as if, rather than open a Mom & Pop grocery and hope to pass it down to your kids someday, you started M&P Grocery Franchises with the idea of selling it to Walmart or Kroger in a few years.

The old model softened capitalism somewhat by connecting the capitalist to the community, because the community was the arena in which success would ultimately play out. Your shop might become a landmark, or your factory could make you a pillar of the community. Some rich families were easily identified with their cities, like the Pillsburys in Minneapolis or the Buschs in St. Louis.

The new model, though, is about transcending the community. You build a team to implement your idea. You hire workers to provide your service or build your product. And once all those relationships are established, you sell and move on.

Rushkoff refers to this as “The Mindset”, and he thinks it explains the wealthy’s disinterest in preventing possible future dystopias: My ultimate fantasy doesn’t rely on the world not going to hell, but on transcending Earth-bound society by colonizing Mars, or uploading my consciousness to the Cloud, or building my Bond-villain bunker in the wilds of Alaska (assuming I can figure out how to control my mercenaries after the legal system collapses).

[T]hese people once showered the world with madly optimistic business plans for how technology might benefit human society. Now they’ve reduced technological progress to a video game that one of them wins by finding the escape hatch.

By weeklysift | Posted in Articles | Also tagged books, democracy | Comments (14)

White replacement is MAGA’s unified field theory

May 16, 2022 – 11:10 am

https://theconversation.com/we-cannot-deny-the-violence-of-white-supremacy-any-more-86139

Republicans used to unite around the interests of the rich. Now they unite around a conspiracy theory that has repeatedly inspired mass shootings.

This weekend, we learned all over again that ideas have consequences. When people believe terrible ideas, they do terrible things.

The idea this time is White Replacement Theory: A conspiracy of Jews and liberals is trying to “replace” Whites as the dominant race in America and Europe by bringing in as many non-white immigrants as possible, by encouraging Black people to breed quickly, by diluting the white race through interbreeding, and by depressing white birth rates. The ultimate goal is the extinction of the white race, an outcome also known as white genocide. [1]

If someone really believed such a theory, what might they do? We found out Saturday:

18-year-old Payton Gendron parked his car in front of the entrance to a Tops Supermarket in a Black neighborhood in Buffalo, New York. Exiting the car wearing metal armor and holding an assault rifle, he shot and killed a female employee in front of the store, and a man packing groceries into the trunk of his car. After entering the store, he murdered the store’s guard, and by the end of his killing spree, he had shot 13 people, killing 10 of them.
Eleven of the people he shot were Black, and two were white. As the manifesto he left behind makes clear, this was fully intentional. The first listed goal in his manifesto was to “kill as many blacks as possible”.

Gendron lives in rural New York state, but (according to the manifesto he posted online) drove three hours to find a zip code with a large black population. So he wasn’t seeking revenge against particular Black people that he blamed for his real or imagined problems. He was striking a blow for the white race.

Surely now people will see … Sunday, Pete Buttigieg tweeted:

It should not be hard, especially today, for every elected official and media personality in America—left, right, and center—to unequivocally condemn white nationalism, “replacement theory,” and all that comes with it.

That might seem like a small thing to ask. After all, the Buffalo shooting feels like the kind of horrifying crime that should scare everybody straight. Sure, a news-channel entertainer like Tucker Carlson might pimp WRT to juice his ratings, a politician like Donald Trump might motivate his base by hyperbolically describing immigration as an “invasion“, and countless ignorant folks on social media might pass on these ideas to justify the racism they’ve carried all their lives. But Payton Gendron has shown us that this isn’t a game. When crazy ideas are thrown around loosely, crazy people latch onto them and do terrible things. Surely everyone will realize that now, and everything will change.

That feeling should last for at least another day or two. Enjoy it.

Because we’ve been here before, and nothing changed. We were here when Dylann Roof, 21, killed nine Black Christians during a Bible study class at the Mother Emmanuel Church in Charleston (a city he also picked because of the large number of Black people living there). And when Patrick Crusius, also 21, drove from his Dallas suburb to a WalMart in El Paso, where he tried to shoot as many Mexicans as possible; he ended up murdering 23 people of various races and nationalities and injuring 23 more. John Earnest,19, hoped to kill as many Jews as possible in Poway, California, but he wasn’t very good at it; he only murdered one and wounded three others before his gun jammed. Robert Bowers, in his 40s, also went after Jews, killing 11 worshipers at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh.

Those were all White Replacement Theory massacres. We know because the killers were only too happy to explain their actions. Posting a manifesto has become a standard part of a WRT massacre.

There have been WRT massacres in other countries as well. In New Zealand Brenton Tarrant attacked two mosques, killing 51 people. In Norway Anders Breivik’s murder spree was at the youth camp of Norway’s Labor Party; he killed 77 people in all, most of them White teens who were growing up liberal.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/15/us/replacement-theory-shooting-tucker-carlson.html

If conservative promoters of WRT were going to be scared straight, it would have happened by now. It might have happened after Charlottesville, when only Heather Heyer died, but the nation saw the spectacle of violent white supremacists marching down the streets chanting “Jews will not replace us.“

Remember? Then-president Trump responded by telling us that there were very fine people on both sides.

Nudges and dog whistles. Elected Republicans and Fox News hosts never explicitly tell anyone to go kill Blacks or Hispanics or Jews. But they do regularly say things that, if taken seriously, would logically result in race massacres. Why, for example, did Patrick Crusius take military weaponry to the biggest city on the US/Mexican border? Because he believed his country was being “invaded” by Mexicans, just as President Trump was saying.

When an army of foreigners invades your country, what can a heroic young man do other than go to the border and kill them? That’s what Ukrainians are doing now, and we all praise them for it.

The nudges these young men get from high-profile Republicans rarely mention race explicitly, but the meaning is not hard to decode.

In just the past year, Republican luminaries like Newt Gingrich, the former House speaker and Georgia congressman, and Elise Stefanik, the center-right New York congresswoman turned Trump acolyte (and third-ranking House Republican), have echoed replacement theory. Appearing on Fox, Mr. Gingrich declared that leftists were attempting to “drown” out “classic Americans.”

Would it surprise you to discover that some interpret “classic Americans” as “White people”?

Similarly, Tucker Carlson seldom talks about white and black in antagonistic terms. Instead, he looks into the camera and says “you” and “them”, leaving those terms open for his almost-entirely-white audience to interpret as they see fit. [2] But occasionally he almost comes right out with it.

He was more explicit in a video posted on Fox News’s YouTube account in September. Carlson said President Biden was encouraging immigration “to change the racial mix of the country, … to reduce the political power of people whose ancestors lived here, and dramatically increase the proportion of Americans newly arrived from the Third World.”

His Fox News colleague Laura Ingraham

told viewers in 2018 that Democrats “want to replace you, the American voters, with newly amnestied citizens and an ever-increasing number of chain migrants.” During a monologue on her program last year, she called immigration an “insurrection [that] seeks to overthrow everything we love about America by defaming it, silencing it, and even prosecuting it.

In her ads, Rep. Stefanik repeats the “insurrection” theme.

Radical Democrats are planning their most aggressive move yet: a PERMANENT ELECTION INSURRECTION. Their plan to grant amnesty to 11 MILLION illegal immigrants will overthrow our current electorate and create a permanent liberal majority in Washington.

She is no doubt aware that false conspiracy theories on the internet claim millions of illegal immigrants are already voting. By describing a path to citizenship (which doesn’t yet exist and would take years to walk) as an “INSURRECTION”, she justifies violence, like the violent attempt to keep President Trump in power after the voters rejected him in 2020.

Again, what would a heroic young White man logically do if he bought what Stefanik is selling? Someone is plotting an “insurrection” to “overthrow” his people. Is registering to vote or sending in $20 really an adequate response to that challenge?

The underground root system. Coincidentally, I was already planning to write something about WRT before Saturday, because this week it had shown up in an odd place: the Senate debate over codifying abortion rights through legislation. Republican Senator Steve Daines from Montana made a somewhat curious argument against that bill:

Why do we have laws in place that protect the eggs of a sea turtle or the eggs of eagles? Because when you destroy an egg, you’re killing a pre-born baby sea turtle or a pre-born baby eagle. Yet when it comes to a pre-born human baby rather than a sea turtle, that baby will be stripped of all protections in all 50 states under the Democrats’ bill we will be voting on tomorrow.

Most of the commenters on my social media feeds were mystified: What do sea turtles and eagles have to do with anything? Daines seemed to be talking in wild non sequiturs — unless you could fill in his unstated connection.

White replacement is the Rosetta Stone here: If laws protect sea turtle eggs and eagle eggs (I haven’t checked whether Daines was making that up), it’s because those species are endangered. You know what else is endangered? The white race, because White women are failing to reproduce at replacement rate. That is, in fact, why American women’s rights need to be taken away: because they’re not doing their primary job. They’re aborting their fetuses rather than producing the healthy White babies the race needs to avoid extinction.

Abortion isn’t the only issue with a hidden connection to WRT, as Gendron spelled out in his manifesto.

Gendron also argues that Jews are behind the movement for transgender inclusivity, supposedly sponsoring transgender summer camps for “Scandinavian style whites”.

Likewise, accepting same-sex relationships lowers the birth rate of Gingrich’s “classic Americans”. And then there’s the demoralizing effect of critical race theory.

The section ends by blaming Jews for creating “infighting” between people and races. The example Gendron’s manifesto provides is that “Jews are spreading ideas such as Critical Race Theory and white shame/guilt to brainwash Whites into hating themselves and their people”.

From the outside, the issues that motivate the MAGA wing of the GOP seem like an incoherent mess. But white replacement is an underground root system that connects them all.

What’s more, WRT explains the intensity of the MAGA movement, which otherwise is also a mystery. How can a bland figure like Joe Biden incite the kind of hatred and panic we’ve seen? Why would the prospect of a Biden administration be so scary that people styling themselves as “patriots” would invade the Capitol and threaten to hang the vice president rather than permit an orderly transfer of power?

And no matter how many revelations come out about the crimes of the Trump administration and the threat to democracy it posed, why are only a handful of Republicans ready to make a clean break with him?

Because the perceived alternative is racial extinction. Otherwise it makes no sense.

Historically, American political parties have gone into the wilderness for a period of time after a disastrous administration. That’s where the GOP should be post-Trump, but it is being held together by white anxiety about the demographic trends. WRT channels that anxiety into positions on issues and energy for campaigns. And that’s why Republicans can’t walk away from it, even though it regularly and predictably leads to race massacres.

[1] I refuse to go down the rabbit hole of arguing that this is false. I’ll leave that to Farhad Manjoo and Chris Hayes. I will point out one thing: No matter how lily-white you may appear to be today, chances are your people met exactly the same kind of suspicion and hostility when they came to America. My people, the Germans, started arriving in large numbers in the 1700s, and Ben Franklin worried that we were so different we would never assimilate into the Pennsylvania colony. Hence the origin of the Pennsylvania Dutch (i.e., “Deutsch”).

[2] More than a year ago, Charles Blow pointed out something Carlson skips over:

[R]evealingly, he is admitting that Republicans do not and will not appeal to new citizens who are immigrants.

There’s no racial essence that predestines groups of people to vote a certain way. Black voters, for example, were loyal Republicans until FDR started to win them over in the 1930s. In 1956, Dwight Eisenhower still got nearly 40% of the Black vote, compared to the 8% Trump got in 2016.

If Republicans would abandon race-baiting and try to win over immigrants of all races and ethnicities, they might succeed. Demography is not destiny.

By weeklysift | Posted in Articles | Also tagged culture wars, democracy | Comments (15)

Racism in the NFL

February 7, 2022 – 10:10 am

https://theweek.com/political-satire/1009806/dont-look-behind-the-shield

The lack of coaching opportunities for Blacks in the NFL is more than just the usual it’s-hard-to-break-into-management problem, and a new lawsuit explores why.

As far back as 1908, when Jack Johnson won the heavyweight boxing championship, sports have been a prime setting for America to work out its racial issues. Blacks might have been barred from most opportunities to excel, and what they managed to accomplish in spite of racial barriers could usually be minimized. But sporting events have objective outcomes. In the 1930s, for example, Whites who wanted to downplay Black achievements could claim that jazz wasn’t really music. But they couldn’t claim that Jesse Owens wasn’t really fast.

In sports, the 20th century was a long story of racial barriers falling and Black athletes succeeding. In 1947, Jackie Robinson was the only Black player in the major leagues. But he became the rookie of the year that season, and by 1949 he was the National League’s most valuable player. Willie Mays entered the league in 1951, and Hank Aaron in 1954. By 1981, the major leagues were 18.7% Black, but then percentages began to fall, possibly because Black athletes drifted into other sports. In 2016, major league baseball players were 63.7% White, 27.4% Hispanic, 6.7% Black, and 2.1% Asian.

Basketball is the sport most dominated by Black players: In 2020, about 3/4 of NBA players were Black, a number that has been relatively stable for some while. The change from majority White to majority Black happened fairly quickly: The first three Black players entered the league in 1950. By 1957, Bill Russell was the most important player in a Celtic dynasty that would win 11 championships in the next 13 years. Whether White owners and executives continued to have racist beliefs or not, there was no arguing with that kind of success.

The story of race in the National Football League has always been more complicated. The NFL had a handful of Black players when it was getting started in the 1920s, but instituted an informal color barrier from 1933 to 1946. That barrier was broken not through the efforts a crusading White general manager like baseball’s Branch Rickey, but out of legal necessity: When the Cleveland Rams moved to Los Angeles in 1946, they played in the publicly-owned Los Angeles Coliseum. Public accommodations couldn’t be segregated even in that era, so the Rams needed at least one Black player. The Washington Redskins became the last team to integrate in 1962, when the Kennedy administration similarly threatened not to let them play in a stadium on federally-controlled land.

The quarterback mystique. But even as Black athletes in many sports succeeded in blowing up the myth of White superiority, racism established a fallback position: Some Blacks might possess a raw animal physicality, but only Whites had the intellectual and moral virtues that made athletes truly admirable.

And so an article about base-stealing baseball players might emphasize a Black player’s blazing speed, but a White player’s painstaking analysis of pitchers and their moves. Black basketball players might be imposing Goliaths like Wilt Chamberlain, but (as the sports magazines of my youth told the story) White players compensated through smarts, hard work, and an indomitable will to succeed. That racial distinction was rarely spelled in so many words, but whenever I heard an athlete described as “crafty” or “scrappy”, I could be pretty sure he was White.

Baseball and basketball are inherently egalitarian sports — everybody bats, anybody can shoot — so this pro-White image-making had limited effects. But football is more corporate and specialized. In particular, a racial mystique developed around the quarterback position: Of course arm strength and other physical gifts mattered, but intangible (White) qualities like leadership and courage were more important, and quarterbacks needed the (White) mental capacity to analyze defenses and make sound decisions under pressure.

As a result, it took decades for football’s conventional wisdom to recognize that Black athletes could be good quarterbacks. The prophecy was self-fulfilling: High school and college coaches didn’t want to “waste their time” training unsuitable Black players to be quarterbacks, so by the time the quarterback pipeline reached the NFL, it contained mostly White players. As that pipeline combined with NFL coaches’ own racial preconceptions, Black NFL quarterbacks remained exceptional and usually had short careers until Warren Moon and Randall Cunningham became stars in the 1980s.

Naturally, if Black athletes lacked the cerebral and moral virtues needed to be good quarterbacks, it followed that they couldn’t be good coaches either. All sports have had racial barriers to management positions, as the larger society still does in many fields. (Bill Russell once explained the dominance of Black players in the NBA by semi-seriously observing that young Black men weren’t distracted by their opportunities in banking.) But no other sport has such a wide gap between its majority of Black players and its tiny number of Black coaches: 69% of players are Black, but only one of the 32 head coaches (Mike Tomlin of the Pittsburgh Steelers). With only a slightly higher percentage of Black players, the NBA has seven Black head coaches.

Until a few weeks ago, Brian Flores of the Miami Dolphins had been a second Black head coach. But he was fired at the end of the season, a move that seemed mysterious: In 2019, Flores had joined a team mired in mediocrity. The Dolphins had managed only one winning season out of the previous ten. His first season had been even worse: 5-11. But then he turned the team around, going 10-6 in 2020 and 9-8 in 2021. 2021 had seemed like two different seasons: The team had started 1-7 (and if Flores had been fired then, it would made some sense), but then finished 8-1. Teams that finish with that kind of spurt usually have high hopes for the next season. They don’t usually fire the head coach. So Miami’s Channel 4 seemed a bit puzzled:

During a Monday morning news conference, the primary issues [team owner Stephen] Ross cited for the decision to fire Flores seemed to have little to do with the on-field product and more with communication within the team’s braintrust — though there were no specific examples offered of how the team determined Flores wasn’t the right fit in those regards.

Anyway, life in the NFL. Flores moved on to apply for other coaching vacancies. And then, for a minute, it seemed like he had found something. The Patriots’ Bill Belichick — Flores had been his defensive coordinator during the Super Bowl winning 2018 season — sent Flores a text congratulating him on landing the New York Giants head coaching job.

The weird thing was, Flores hadn’t heard anything and hadn’t even interviewed for the job yet. That was supposed to happen in a few days. After a quick back-and-forth it turned out that Belichick had gotten the wrong Brian: The Giants had decided to hire Brian Daboll, a White coach who had also been a Belichick assistant at one point.

But even though they were telling people like Belichick that the decision was made, the Giants didn’t inform Flores. They went ahead with his interview, then announced that Daboll was their new coach.

Why they would do that has a simple answer: the Rooney Rule.

Rooney Rule. Named after former Pittsburgh Steeler owner Dan Rooney, the Rooney Rule says that NFL teams have to interview non-White candidates for coaching and management jobs. It puts no quota on hiring, but Black candidates at least have to get in the door.

It was established in 2003 after a similar controversy: Tampa Bay had just fired coach Tony Dungy (who would later win a Super Bowl in Indianapolis), and Minnesota had sacked Dennis Green (after his first losing season in ten years). A study showed that Black NFL coaches had, on average, better records than White coaches, but were less likely to be hired and more likely to be fired.

Clearly, the rule didn’t solve the problem. Nearly 20 years later, the NFL is down to one Black coach again. Instead, the rule has become a box-checking exercise, in which Black coaching candidates are put through charade interviews without being seriously considered.

They have long suspected this, but the Belichick text was the first time it could be established in a particular case.

The Flores lawsuit. Tuesday, Flores filed a lawsuit in federal court in New York (where the NFL is headquartered). It’s a class-action suit on behalf of

All Black Head Coach, Offensive and Defensive Coordinators and Quarterbacks Coaches, as well as General Managers, and Black candidates for those positions during the applicable statute of limitations period

The suit asks the court to declare the league in violation of several non-discrimination laws, to award monetary damages (both compensatory and punitive), and for

injunctive relief necessary to cure Defendants’ discriminatory policies and practices

And that’s where it gets interesting. What would a court have to do to “cure” the NFL of racism?

The problem is that each team hires only one head coach at a time, and those decision depend on subjective judgements: How well does this coach’s management style fit the team’s vision and the talent on the field?

So far this year, five of the nine coaching vacancies have been filled (all by White coaches), but it’s hard to pick out any one of them as a racist decision. The Jaguars, for example, just hired Doug Pederson, who in his last job won the Super Bowl with a back-up quarterback.

The fact that a coin comes up heads once doesn’t prove it’s rigged. But if it keeps coming up heads again and again, it probably is.

What Flores claims. Several of the specific charges in Flores’ lawsuit have gotten attention from the media, but not enough attention has been paid to the suit’s larger narrative.

For example, the accusation that Dolphins’ owner Ross offered Flores a bonus for losing games so that the team could get a better draft pick (an officially denied practice known as “tanking”), has been widely reported. But the larger implication is that hiring Flores in the first place was a sham: He wasn’t hired to succeed; he was hired to be the fall guy for losing seasons that would build a team that some other coach (presumably White) could lead to victory in the future.

Another former Black coach (Hue Jackson of the Cleveland Browns) has told a confusing story that supports Flores up to a point: At first he seemed to imply that he also was offered money to tank, but later backed off to claim only that the management above him was trying to lose.

I told [the Browns’ owner] that what he was doing was very destructive, to not do this because it’s going to hurt my career and every other coach that worked with me and every player on the team. And I told him that it would hurt every Black coach that would follow me. And I have the documents to prove this.

The Miami tanking scheme (which Flores obviously did not implement), also throws a different light on the official explanation of poor “communication within the team’s braintrust” as a reason to get rid of him.

In other words, the NFL’s problem is even bigger than the numbers suggest: Of the few Black coaches hired, how many were hired to take the blame for an intentional failure?

Prospects. The Federalist Society, which wouldn’t be able to find racism in a Confederate plantation, outlines the difficulties Flores’ suit will run into in the hardball world of anti-discrimination law.

What the lawsuit doesn’t contain, however, is actual proof that the NFL is a systemically racist organization and needs to be punished for discriminatory behavior.
Most of Flores’ allegations don’t come close to proving legally actionable systemic discrimination, which must involve finding racist intent or internal statistical “patterns” of inequity. He points out that the NFL currently employs only one black head coach (and three minority head coaches, counting Ron Rivera and Robert Saleh) in Mike Tomlin of the Pittsburgh Steelers. But judging an organization by one year of results is not actionable.

I agree with their analysis this far: Flores can’t win purely on the evidence that he cites in his complaint. But the class-action lawsuit is an open invitation for other Black coaches and coaching candidate to join his class. Hue Jackson is telling his story. How many others will chime in?

Informally, there’s a lot of sympathy with Flores. I’ve heard ESPN analysts quote unnamed Black coaches saying “I’ve been on that interview” where Rooney-rule boxes are checked without any real chance at a job. But does that mean they’ll come forward?

https://claytoonz.com/2022/02/02/nfl-racism/

At some point, it’s not just about the law. The NFL needs public support. The racist blackballing of Colin Kaepernick is already a stain on the league, and so is the race-norming in the original concussion settlement. (Until a new settlement in June, Black players had a harder time claiming cognitive impairment, because the assumed baseline for cognitive function was lower for Blacks. In laymen’s terms: The league assumed Black players had less brainpower to lose.) Independent of what a judge might say, the NFL just can’t have a parade of Black players and coaches testifying about its racism.

And finally, there’s the discovery process. If Flores can get a look at NFL teams’ internal communications, who knows what he’ll find? The NFL is run by billionaires, and billionaires often assume the rules don’t apply to them.

By weeklysift | Posted in Articles | Comments (7)

The Weekly Sift

Tag Archives: race

What to do with a lawless Supreme Court?

What to do about a lawless Supreme Court?

Lessons from the Haitian Fright

The Unfathomable Mystery of Biracial Americans

Alito’s Flags Aren’t the Worst of It

Those University Presidents

The DeSantis-approved version of American racial history

Two Glimpses into the Future

White replacement is MAGA’s unified field theory

Racism in the NFL

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