Senator McCain will vote "no" on Kagan -- Is he serious?

Just yesterday, Senator McCain announced his intention to vote "no" on General Kagan's nomination to the Supreme Court.  Clearly, that is his prerogative.  What I find far more amusing are his stated reasons for his vote.  Does he think we are that stupid?

The Senator began with a very serious -- and promising -- charge: "In 1987, I had my first opportunity to provide 'advice and consent' on a Supreme Court nominee. At that time, I stated that the qualifications essential for evaluating a nominee for the bench included 'integrity, character, legal competence and ability, experience, and philosophy and judicial temperament.' On that test, Elena Kagan fails." These are all good reasons for voting down a judicial nominee.  The better question is how Senator McCain reached the conclusion that Kagan failed on any of these metrics.  What exactly persuaded him that she was not fit to join the Supreme Court?

Turns out, she failed McCain's fuzzy test on one piece of evidence alone: her approach to military recruitment while dean at Harvard law.

I don't know whether to laugh or cry.

Looking for Justice Marshall

A recent survey conducted by the Kellogg Foundation, due out today, reveals startling conclusions about the available opportunities for children of color in their communities.  In general, these children have fewer opportunities to gain access to good health care and education, and their communities are less safe and fail to provide them with adequate support.  According to Gail Christopher, a Kellogg Foundation vice president, "you have major, major pockets of poverty in this country, many of which are tied to race."

These findings remind me of the work of Robert Coles, Jonathan Kozol and Alex Kotlowitz, among others.  These are not new findings.  Coles and Kozol, for example, have documented the destabilizing effects of race and poverty on the children of this country for well over forty years.   Yet we still find ourselves in the same place.

Time Magazine Finds Humor in "Dot Head"; Forgets Navroze Mody

The most read and the most emailed piece on the Time Magazine site right now is Joel Stein's "My Own Private India." In it Stein says that the increasing presence of Indian-Americans in his hometown of Edison, New Jersey "bothers[] me so much."

Faced with a flurry of criticism, Time Magazine has now posted the following non-apology apology:

TIME responds: We sincerely regret that any of our readers were upset by Joel Stein’s recent humor column “My Own Private India.” It was in no way intended to cause offense.

The apology does not in fact concede that there is reason for offense. That was not the "intent[]" of this "humor" piece.

Perhaps the most serious error in the piece is that it is an ostensible humor piece lacking any humor. What is most galling, however, is that this ostensibly serious news magazine fails to have any sense of history.

Stein writes:

My town is totally unfamiliar to me. The Pizza Hut where my busboy friends stole pies for our drunken parties is now an Indian sweets shop with a completely inappropriate roof. The A&P I shoplifted from is now an Indian grocery. The multiplex where we snuck into R-rated movies now shows only Bollywood films and serves samosas. The Italian restaurant that my friends stole cash from as waiters is now Moghul, one of the most famous Indian restaurants in the country. There is an entire generation of white children in Edison who have nowhere to learn crime.

Perhaps if magazines like Time had spent more time on better reporting, the editors would have recognized the obvious logical and historical error in this "funny" paragraph. The "white children" in Edison inclined towards crime could now practice their craft on Indian Americans.  Indeed, this was the case in the 1980s suburban New Jersey, the passing of which Stein laments.

Back then, folks like Stein's friends not only harassed Indian Americans as "dot heads," they also physically attacked them.  As the Harvard Pluralism project reminds us:

in 1987, a thirty-year-old Indian immigrant bank manager, Navroze Mody, was beaten to death by a gang chanting "Hindu, Hindu!" A group which called itself the "Dot Busters," which included local teenagers, had been targeting the hard-working community of Indian immigrants with low-level harassment for months. The "dot" referred to the bindi Hindu women wear on their foreheads.

In July of 1987, a month before Mody's death, a local newspaper called attention to the rising number of harassment incidents. In response, it received a letter, signed "Jersey City Dot Busters:"

"I'm writing about your article during July about the abuse of Indian People. Well I'm here to state the other side. I hate them, if you had to live near them you would also. We are an organization called dot busters. We have been around for 2 years. We will go to any extreme to get Indians to move out of Jersey City. If I'm walking down the street and I see a Hindu and the setting is right, I will hit him or her. We plan some of our most extreme attacks such as breaking windows, breaking car windows, and crashing family parties. We use the phone books and look up the name Patel. Have you seen how many of them there are? Do you even live in Jersey City? Do you walk down Central avenue and experience what its like to be near them: we have and we just don't want it anymore. You said that they will have to start protecting themselves because the police cannot always be there. They will never do anything. They are a week race Physically and mentally. We are going to continue our way. We will never be stopped."

In Jersey City, a few weeks after Mody's death, a young resident in medicine, Dr. Sharan, was assaulted by three young men with baseball bats as he walked home late one night. One of the young people yelled, "There's a dothead! Let's get him!" as they set out with their bats. Sharan was beaten severely and left unconscious with a fractured skull. He was in a coma for a week, in the hospital for three weeks, and suffered permanent neurological damage.

A search on Time's website of its content in the 1980s and 1990s reveals no mention of the "Dot Busters" or of Navroze Mody--though perhaps the archive is not as comprehensive as it appears (or, more likely, the search engine is not particularly good). A group of thugs terrorized a particular group in the country on account of its race or national origin or religion--even going so far as to kill someone--and the country's major newsmagazine seems to have failed to find it worthy of significant attention.  As a child growing up in a far more gentle environment in 1980s Ohio, I learned of the terror of the "Dot Busters" from Indian-American media.


A review of the last ten columnists published by Time Magazine reveals that 100% of them are white, and only 10% are female. Newsweek can boast the powerful writing of Fareed Zakaria (who was conservative enough to support the invasion of Iraq). Perhaps Time should apologize to the Indian-American community by replacing Stein with an Indian-American columnist. Kal Penn, who has the added virtue of actually being funny, would be ideal (see his punchy putdown of Stein's column here). 

Initial Impressions of Haiti

I was born in Port-au-Prince, Haiti and left a few months before my 9th birthday.  My younger brother and I boarded a flight to join our parents in the United States.  A little more than 30 years later, I return for the first time.  My memories of Haiti as a child were quite specific (house, school, a couple of friends, specific events--I got into a fight from which I still have a visible scar--etc.)  I doubt that I would remember POP pre-earthquake, I certainly did not recognize it post-earthquake.

Off to Haiti

I leave today for Port-au-Prince, Haiti.  I will be there until Friday.  I am not expecting to have email access.  So, I will blog about my trip when I come back.  I leave you readers in the capable hands of my fellow contributors.

Frank Rich on July 4, Race, and Thurgood Marshall

In today's New York Times, columnist Frank Rich reminds us that while all (wo)men are created equal, "slavery, America’s original sin of inequality, was left unaddressed in the Declaration of Independence signed 234 years ago today." The full column is here.

It's worth remembering that July 4 has not always been a day of celebration for African Americans. On July 5, 1852, Frederick Douglass gave a speech entitled, "What to the slave is the Fourth of July?" He addressed his white audience as "you" rather than "we." He spoke of "your fathers" and "your freedom." Then he told his listeners: "The rich inheritance of justice, liberty, prosperity and independence, bequeathed by your fathers, is shared by you, not by me. The sunlight that brought life and healing to you, has brought stripes and death to me. This Fourth [of] July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn."

Yet freed slaves reclaimed the Fourth of July just as abolitionists like Douglass had reclaimed the Declaration of Independence for its ideals of universal equality. In the immediate post-Civil War period, African Americans launched large public celebrations not only of Juneteenth (June 19), the anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation, but Independence Day on July 4. Fitzhugh Brundage, in The Southern Past: A Clash of Race and Memory, quotes the Atlanta Constitution's complaint that "Darktown has a sort of idea that the Fourth of July belongs to it [because] . . . every man, woman, and pickaninny believes the abolition of slavery and the Fourth of July are in some way mixed up." Blacks in Nashville in 1868 demanded integration of the streetcars on the Fourth of July.

Rich's column this July 4 reminds us what a travesty it is that Republican Senators used Elena Kagan's confirmation hearings as an excuse to trash the memory of Justice Thurgood Marshall, a genuine American hero, as an "activist judge." Unlike Frederick Douglass, who despite his bitter speech on July 5 insisted that the 1787 Constitution was a "liberty Constitution," Justice Marshall recognized what most historians have concluded, that the Constitution of 1787 authorized and supported slavery. Yet Marshall, in a moving speech at the Bicentennial of the Constitution in 1987, "commemorate[d] the suffering, struggle, and sacrifice that has triumphed over much of what was wrong with the original document, and observe the anniversary with hopes not realized and promises not fulfilled. I plan to celebrate the bicentennial of the Constitution as a living document, including the Bill of Rights and the other amendments protecting individual freedoms and human rights."

On this July 4, I'll be commemorating Thurgood Marshall and the ongoing struggle for racial justice.

Race in Japan and the United States compared

I’ve just returned from a month in Japan, sponsored by the Organization of American Historians and the Japanese Association for American Studies, and paid for by the U.S.-Japan Friendship Commission. I was a resident scholar at Kyoto University for two weeks and gave lectures there and at other universities in Kyoto and Tokyo. It was a wonderful opportunity for intellectual exchange with Japanese scholars of race, comparative and American studies. My host, Yasuko Takezawa, an anthropologist at the Institute for Research in the Humanities at Kyoto U. (and one of only two female full professors in the arts and sciences there!) is a brilliant scholar of race across cultures and she introduced me to a number of other scholars who are working on comparative race issues.

Of particular interest to me was new research on the burakumin, or untouchable caste of Japan, and other “invisible races” – groups at the bottom rung of Asian societies who are apparently phenotypically indistinguishable from other members of society but are marked in other ways (although often by imagined physical differences as well). Until recently, Japanese scholars denied that the burakumin were a racialized group, and resisted comparisons between the burakumin and racial minorities in other countries. However, Takezawa and other scholars are now calling for a broadly comparative approach to racialization that does not assume either a universal conception of race or racism, nor that race is an exclusively Western phenomenon only recently imported to the East. Archival research suggests that the burakumin were singled out as a race apart, with hereditary difference that justified separation and subordination, as early as the medieval era, and that such discrimination was often accompanied and produced by a racial ideology that figured them as physically different and inferior.

I found a great deal in common between their research on “invisible races” and my own findings about the history of race and racism in U.S. trials of racial identity, in which race did not depend necessarily on appearance or ancestry, but at least as much on racial performance, associations, “character,” and other “invisible” attributes. Even within the black/white paradigm, racial science has developed side by side with these other, equally insidious narratives about difference and subordination. While I don’t think that means racism is necessarily a universal feature of human societies, it does suggest that we can learn a great deal by widening our comparative perspective beyond the Atlantic world to other, less familiar cultures.

(Cross-posted from the Legal History Blog)