Thoughts for Sunday

Show me, Lord, my life’s end
    and the number of my days;
    let me know how fleeting my life is.
You have made my days a mere handbreadth;
    the span of my years is as nothing before you.
Everyone is but a breath,
    even those who seem secure.

Surely everyone goes around like a mere phantom;
    in vain they rush about, heaping up wealth
    without knowing whose it will finally be.

But now, Lord, what do I look for?
    My hope is in you.

We pray that in his waning days our grandfather owned these words.

The Zimmerman Trial

I've been following the Zimmerman trial from a distance. Last year the surge of media attention was necessary to secure an arrest. Now it has just become a predictable attempt by our adolescent media to get ratings and make a spectacle of a serious situation. Charles Blow has a good editorial in the Times today that nicely summarizes my attitude toward the trial.

There have always been three interrelated yet distinct issues here that are easy to confuse or blend together. It's important to keep them at least somewhat separate. Let's deal with them in no particular order.

1) Morality -- We have known from the earliest days of this case, ever since the 911 tapes were released, that Zimmerman did something horrible. The wrongness of his actions ought not be questioned, which is one of the reasons this case is so fraught with tension. People who ordinarily seem to be decent have said that what Zimmerman did was not just legal, but morally justifiable. That is an utterly indecent idea that a Christian cannot accept.

2) Florida law -- Florida has an unjust law on its books that offers extraordinary latitude for people to use deadly force merely for feeling their physical safety is threatened. Importantly to this case, this law even protects people who initiate a confrontation. Zimmerman's immoral behavior needs to be separated from the legal case. It is not clear that Zimmerman did anything illegal under Florida law, and it seems extremely unlikely that a jury would find that he did so beyond a reasonable doubt.

3) Racism -- The background to this case is the near certain knowledge that if all the evidence were exactly the same but the demographic profiles of the case were different, an arrest would have been made immediately and a conviction would be likely. The scenario is this: An armed black man in a predominantly black neighborhood sees a white teenager slowly walking through the neighborhood and begins to follow him. What happens next is murky, but the white teenager ends up dead.

Some conservatives at that point would say, "hey, the media would have ignored that!" Actually, yes, that's part of the point, because an arrest would have quickly been made and justice would have taken its course. In the Zimmerman case, media attention started after authorities declined to make an arrest.

To sum it up, I don't expect a conviction (especially with the racially imbalanced jury) but I can live with that. The solution is not to convict one man, but to remove the unjust laws that Florida and other states have instituted. What I can't accept is a defense of Zimmerman on anything more than technical legal grounds. The number of people who seem to be in some sense "on his side" in terms of their sympathy and moral feeling really drives home how hostile this country is toward black people.

Conservatives Hail Progress, Ignore Context

It is important to be precise about what the Supreme Court did to the Voting Rights Act yesterday. There has been some overwrought commentary from the left, to the effect that we're going back to Jim Crow, or that the Voting Rights Act is gone. None of those things are true, and crying wolf hurts the cause of racial equality. Witness National Review's gleeful singling out of the most excessive statements from liberals.

That said, yes, of course it was a bad decision. It's not going to take us back to Jim Crow, but what it does mean is that the new racists and vote suppressors, represented by groups such as True the Vote, will be empowered. Officials in Texas, North Carolina, and Mississippi have already expressed their satisfaction with the fact that they can now move forward with voting laws that section 5 was standing in the way of until yesterday. Voter ID laws with racially disparate effects can now move ahead. Less visible but perhaps more important are the developments likely to take place in small jurisdictions such as counties and cities. Instead of needing to clear the requirements of section 5 in advance, they can now implement a law and are only constrained by the ability of local people to bring a suit after the fact.

The net effect of these changes will be to make it harder for people to vote. It won't bring back "literacy" tests and poll taxes. But it is likely to only exacerbate the subtle discrimination in voting procedures that caused blacks to wait in line to vote, on average, about twice as long as whites in the last election. So, we're not in danger of going back to Jim Crow. If, somehow, the court were to eventually strike down section 2, then yes, we can appropriately talk about Jim Crow. But that's not going to happen. We're simply forging ahead into the latest iteration of American racism. It's not Jim Crow, but that doesn't make it acceptable.

I'm actually more disturbed by the conservative reaction to the ruling than by the decision itself. I have not yet seen a single conservative criticize the decision. They are making it abundantly clear that they oppose proactive federal efforts to protect Americans' rights. Indeed, the predominant line of argument conservatives are taking implies that they envision the eventual repeal of all civil rights laws. They are treating yesterday's decision as almost self-evident progress. The idea seems to be that since we've made so much progress against racism, civil rights laws are now ugly distortions in our otherwise colorblind corpus of law. Removing protections is thus not a step back, but a ratification of the progress we've made.

As always, context is the terrifying enemy of racial conservatives. So let's introduce them to some context. In the United States of 2013, minorities are racially profiled with impunity, arrested for drug crimes out of all proportion to their use of drugs, receive harsher average sentences for identical crimes, attend unequally funded schools, frequently attend segregated schools that are, according to the Brown decision, inherently unequal, live in neighborhoods of much higher average poverty than almost any whites are exposed to, bear the brunt of environmental pollution, face pervasive discrimination in hiring even when their qualifications are identical, are discriminated against by realtors and banks, and, you get the idea. We're not going to have a debate about these things; if you do not accept them you are not ready to have an honest discussion. The point is, given this state of affairs, the urgent priority is to identify what more we can do to tear down this racist edifice. Worrying about repealing old civil rights laws, even if they were no longer needed, would be pretty low on our list of priorities.

So what are conservatives thinking? One of the most common fallacies is to set the 1950s and 60s as a baseline. Conservatives are astonishingly indifferent to the question of what a society with no racial privilege might look like. They are content to merely ask if we have advanced from the baseline of murderous police state. And we have! With that proved, they rest their case. Don't believe me? Look at the National Review piece I referenced above. The title, and I'm not kidding, is: "Yes, Race Relations Have Improved Since 1965." You can see how that title is born of the kind of thinking I just described. Because otherwise you quickly realize that whether race relations have improved since 1965 is neither here nor there. Imagine a conservative saying we don't need the NRA anymore because crime is down and second amendment rights have been expanded. That's basically what they're saying here. And really, "race relations"? This is not about people getting along; this is about severing a 400 year old link between race, money, and power. The editors at National Review conclude like this:

Instead of gnashing our teeth and reliving old battles, we Americans should consider it a source of great pride that legal provisions contrived to ensure that the Jim Crow era was brought to a welcome close have finally outlived their necessity.

By what and who's standard? As I've found in my thesis research, conservatives assured us that the VRA had outlived its usefulness when it came up for renewal in 1970! There really wasn't a gap between fighting against the law's passage and then turning around saying, "look, all better now!" Today, no one, not even Justice Roberts, has claimed that there is no discrimination in the covered jurisdictions. The idea is that it is much better than it used to be. And so it is! But that is an absurd basis for repealing a law. Imagine if we went around striking down everything that governs abuses that are no longer as egregious as they once were. Clean water act, gone. Child labor laws, gone.

The difference is that this section of the VRA only applied to part of the country. And the court simply decided that the disparate treatment of states was more grievous than the racial discrimination those states continue to practice. (Again, because Jim Crow is the baseline. We've made so much progress that current discrimination doesn't really count). The idea was that we're perpetually punishing these states for past sins. This misses a crucial fact. Before yesterday's ruling, areas that were subject to preclearance were allowed to get out from under that requirement and join the rest of the nation. All they had to do was demonstrate 10 years of compliance with the law. Thus the whole conservative narrative about how we're treating these states unfairly for eternity completely collapses. They were free to get out from under preclearance but they couldn't do it, precisely because of their ongoing discrimination. They couldn't demonstrate 10 years of compliance!

The Wall Street Journal editorial page provided another example of leading conservative opinion, and framed the ruling much as National Review did:

The U.S. has a long and difficult history with racial discrimination, but on Tuesday the Supreme Court marked a milestone worth celebrating when it ruled that a section of the 1965 Voting Rights Act has outlived its usefulness. The political left is reacting as if this means a return to Jim Crow, but the ruling is best understood as a sign of the racial progress that progressives claim to believe in...

Far from a civil-rights defeat, Tuesday's ruling is a triumph of racial progress and corrective politics. The Voting Rights Act was designed to eliminate barriers to minority voting, and it succeeded as well as any modern law. You'd think that liberals who claim to believe in human progress would recognize progress when it occurs, rather than assume that whatever is is right.

It's the same framing. Because we've made so much progress (and we have) current context is irrelevant. For the record, I've always thought section 5 should apply nationwide. The north and west are and always have been extremely racist, and have added hypocrisy on top of it. But that's a story for another time. If there is a push to replace the coverage formula with a simple nationwide application you can bet many liberals will oppose it. Northern liberals have nearly always turned into defenders of white privilege when the issues hit home.

Supreme Court Strikes Down Part of the VRA

Well, at least this court is not taking a sledgehammer to stuff. It seems to have a cautious, roundabout way of getting to what it wants. The Supreme Court struck down part of the Voting Rights Act today, though not, I suppose, the part we thought it might. Shelby County sued to overturn section 5, which requires covered jurisdictions to get approval from the Justice Department before making any changes in election laws. The court said section 5 is technically constitutional, and struck down section 4 instead.

But the important thing to understand is that section 5 is effectively inoperable without section 4. It is section 4 that contains the coverage formula determining which states and municipalities are subject to preclearance requirements. The court has ruled that the formulas are based on old data and old circumstances and thus unconstitutionally impose a burden on some parts of the country and not on others.

The court has invited congress to write a new formula, but we all know this congress will never do that. So without a formula, section 5 lies dormant. No one can be subject to preclearance when the standards for who qualifies are removed. I think this ruling was wrong on its merits, but the conservatives on this court are ideologically predisposed to removing protections of minority rights. The four liberals dissented, and I thought Ginsburg's point about congress's work in renewing the act seven years ago and the continued relevance of the coverage formula was right on:

I begin with the evidence on which Congress based its decision to continue the preclearance remedy. The surest way to evaluate whether that remedy remains in order is to see if preclearance is still effectively preventing discriminatory changes to voting laws...On that score, the record before Congress was huge. In fact, Congress found there were more DOJ objections between 1982 and 2004 (626) than there were between 1965 and the 1982 reauthorization (490)...

All told, between 1982 and 2006, DOJ objections blocked over 700 changes based on a determination that the changes were discriminatory...Congress found that the majority of DOJ objections included findings of discriminatory intent...and that the changes blocked by preclearance were "calculated decisions to keep minority voters from fully participating in the political process."

Set against that record, it can't seriously be argued that the de facto elimination of preclearance the court instituted today will not harm minority voting rights. What can be argued, and this seems to reflect the court's priorities, is that unequal treatment of states is to be guarded against more assiduously than unequal treatment of citizens. This perspective goes at least as far back as John Calhoun, the brilliant defender of slavery, who believed the fundamental principle of the constitution was not equality of individuals, but of states.

Yeah, it's really messed up.

Racist Justice System Becoming a Topic for Mainstream Discussion

It's encouraging to see Newsweek's investment in a long and deeply reported piece on how our society treats black men. It's worth your time. It is appropriately passionate and hopeful in its tone. This is a good example of why affirmative action is right. Read about the pervasiveness of these injustices against black men set in their historical context, and then try to tell me that affirmative action is some kind of great wrong against whites. It is absurd, and that's why campaigning against it is so offensive. It's not that you have to agree with it. It's just that if you're going to try to make something better, why not try to work on something that is actually causing human suffering?

So I should make clear, after my strongly worded post below, that I don't mind at all when people take a long look at it and say, "No, I don't support affirmative action. Here's what I think we should do..." That really doesn't bother me. The problem is that affirmative action is viscerally upsetting to many whites. That is nearly always proof positive of their racism. You don't get upset about something like affirmative action unless you devalue black life. You just don't. These are people who can't be bothered about our mass incarceration policies, but giving a black kid a leg up is offensive to them.

The author quotes Ta-Nehisi Coates, who has a way of getting to the root of things:

“If there’s one thing that’s missing in our country, it’s an acknowledgment of the broad humanity of black folks. Racism—and anti-black racism in particular—is the belief that there’s something wrong with black people … and I mean something in our bones.” He continued, “In our own community, we’ve internalized this. We wonder if we lack moral courage.”

“I want the country to understand that there’s nothing wrong with us,” Coates says, with urgency in his voice. “Things have happened in this country, but there’s nothing wrong with us. My job is to help close the gap between what they see in us and who we actually are.”