The Supreme Court has Denied the Stay Request on the NC Case

The Supreme Court denied North Carolina's application to stay the mandate of the Fourth Circuit decision that essentially struck down NC's omnibus voting law.  The Chief Justice, and Justices Kennedy, Alito would have granted the stay except for the preregistration issue.  Justice Thomas would have granted the stay in its entirety.  Some brief observations:

First, as I noted here, on a Court that is evenly divided on contentious voting issues, the courts of appeals are essentially courts of last resort.  But more importantly, they know that and they are behaving that way. The Fourth Circuit wrote the opinion it did because it knew that its decision was effectively unreviewable as long as no one defected from the liberal bloc.

Second, the fact that the conservative justices would have granted the stay (Justice Thomas in toto, the others everything but the preregistration), tells us a lot about the strength of the application for stay by petitioners (and the strength of the ideological divide on these issues).  The application for stay was very strong and obviously attractive to the conservative Justices, presumably the applicant's primary target.  The application was addressed to the soft spot in the lower court opinion, including the Fourth Circuit's understanding of intentional discrimination and the manner in which the Fourth Circuit's analysis limited the Supreme Court's decision in Shelby County.

Third, there are simply two different ways of thinking about law and political participation in this country.  One way of thinking about it appeals to liberals and the other way of thinking about it appeals to conservatives.

Lastly, liberals, particularly liberal academics, depending upon the outcome of the election, may get a chance to not only develop their theories of race and political participation (or of political participation writ large), they may see those theories implemented.  It will be interesting to see what the new scholarship on these issues will look like.  An example of what I have in mind is this recent paper by Pam Karlan.

The D-Word: On Discrimination

I was recently reminded once again that "discrimination" is a powerful word.  I recently joined an over-forty soccer league and we had our first game recently. From my perspective, the referee was calling most of the fouls against our team and in favor of the other team.  After yet another call that went against our team, which resulted in a booking of one of our players, I ran to the referee and shouted "this is discrimination."

The accusation of discrimination upset both the referee and some of the players on the other team.   The referee proceeded to tell me that his father was black and a couple of the players on the other team, who were Latino claimed that the charge of discrimination was absurd because they were non-white.  Words were exchanged.

As it turns out, I was not accusing the referee of racial discrimination, that would have been a non-sensical accusation. Both teams (my team and the opposing team) were predominantly white.  The people of color on my team included two Latinos who could be visually identified as such, two players of Asian descent, and myself.  The people of color on the other team included at least three Latino players but at least two could phenotypically pass as Anglos.  The foul that resulted in a yellow card was called against one of my white teammates.  The referee appeared to me to be Latino and his seemed limited.

I was not accusing him of racial discrimination or of discriminating against me.  I was accusing him of favoring the other team and discriminating against my team. My accusation was not about skin color but shirt color.

But it was interesting to me how an accusation of (a) discrimination (b) by a black person is not only a conversation stopper but evokes deep anger. People get angry about being accused of racial discrimination even when they are discriminating.  And of course the ability to level a charge of discrimination is an extremely powerful weapon.  This is why some have tried to reduce the power of the charge by inventing the concept of "playing the race card."

My opponents and the referee thought I was playing the race card.  I doubt that the referee and my opponents would have a similar reaction if I had used the word "bias" or "favoritism" instead of discrimination.  Moreover, my guess (and this is only a guess) is that if one of my white teammates had leveled the charge of discrimination, the referee would have laughed it off.

I wonder what we be gained and lost, if anything,  if people of color substituted phrases like "racial bias" or "racial favoritism" and the like for "racial discrimination"?  Would a change in discourse inhibit our ability to effectively describe racial discrimination and articulate it as such or would it enhance our ability to communicate with others the cost of racial bias and how it might be addressed?

Monica Puig, citizenship and representation

A few days ago, Monica Puig won Olympic gold in tennis, the first athlete competing under the flag of Puerto Rico ever to do so.  I was sitting at my computer when I heard the news and a bolt of electricity shot through my body.   I cried the first time I saw Puig on the medal stand and heard "La Borinqueña" in the background, and cry every subsequent time I watch the clip. It took me back to my childhood, when my entire neighborhood sat around the television set and watched Wilfredo Benitez and Wilfredo Gomez win world championships in boxing.  The sense of pride is indescribable.  

Yet my passport tells me I am an American citizen.  My passport is wrong.

Caste, the 14th Amendment, and overcoming white supremacy

I just listened to a recent Diane Rehm show, Two Views On The Jim Crow South And Its Legacy, this morning. She interviews Charles Dew and Isabel Wilkerson.  From Professor Dew, I got some answers to questions I ask myself every time I see an old picture of a lynching.  From Professor Wilkerson, I got angry.  Not about what she said, but how her discussion recalled for me our 14th Amendment doctrine and its modern colorblind interpretation.  The moral equivalence of, say, Blacks growing up under Jim Crow and whites applying to college, escapes me.  If that's what the 14th Amendment really means, I am fully prepared to give it back.

The diversity of the 2016 US women's gymnastics team

How is this for an incredible picture?

I am almost at a loss for words.  When I first saw that picture, a million questions crossed my mind.  How did we get here?  How did US gymnastics put together an elite team of gymnasts that look like a microcosm of our society?  Could we replicate this success in other contexts? If the US gymnastics team could go this far over a generation, maybe there is hope for us?

It is easy to look at this picture differently, as a critique of efforts to diversify our society.  In other words, one can look at this picture and conclude that diversity efforts are unnecessary in a world where individual merit and hard work are rewarded. Chief Justice Roberts offered a variant of this argument in his opinion in Parents Involved: "The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race."  And once we stop, all will be well.

I don't buy it, and I don't think the Chief Justice buys it either.  A world where merit is rewarded accordingly, and where hard work takes you where you deserve to go, is not a world I recognize. It is the great American story, to be sure, but it is not reality.  Spend one moment in a hiring committee of your choice and you will know exactly what I mean.  Merit and desert are amorphous catch phrases devoid of any useful meaning.  They are conclusions, not arguments.

Which is why the US gymnastics team blows my mind.  It is one thing to put ten runners at the starting line if we are trying to decide who is the fastest of them all (think here, incidentally, about the Iliad, and particularly Achilles' struggle with merit and desert throughout the poem, and especially during the Games).  But gymnastics, where judges stand on the sidelines and award scores to individual competitors on the basis of what they see and understand, is clearly not racing.  This is a world where conventions and traditions must be followed.  This is also a world where athletes of color have been largely absent.

And that is the point.  This team is normalizing race within a sphere where race has almost served as a barrier of entry, no different from playing quarterback or running back.  And for that, I am thankful, and hopeful.  America's darlings are White, and Black, and Latina.  And so could be anyone else, whether Asian or American Indian, Muslim or Jew.

Indeed, my mind is blown.

Indeed.

A word on Justice Kennedy's "surprising" turn to the left

A few weeks ago, the US Supreme Court upheld the University of Texas' affirmative action plan in Fisher v. Texas.  The big story of the case was Justice Kennedy's apparent switch on questions of race.  How in the world does a justice who refers to the use of race by the state as a "corrosive category," and who argues that “[p]referment by race, when resorted to by the State, can be the most divisive of all policies, containing within it the potential to destroy confidence in the Constitution and in the idea of equality," vote to uphold an affirmative action plan?

This was the leading narrative in the wake of Fisher.  Justice Kennedy's opinion was "stunning," "surprising," even "shocking." But that's not quite right.  

More on North Carolina NAACP v. McCrory, the North Carolina Voter ID Case

Last week, a 3-judge court of the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals issued a unanimous opinion striking down North Carolina's voter identification laws.  Guy offered a terrific discussion of the opinion here, and I don't have much to add to his analysis.  It is dead on.  I want to focus instead on the lessons of the case about judicial behavior, race, and constitutional interpretation.