“Has ‘Caucasian’ Lost Its Meaning?”: A Polite Euphemism That Hides More Than It Reveals
As a racial classification, the term Caucasian has many flaws, dating as it does from a time when the study of race was based on skull measurements and travel diaries. It has long been entirely unmoored from its geographical reference point, the Caucasus region. Its equivalents from that era are obsolete — nobody refers to Asians as “Mongolian” or blacks as “Negroid.”
And yet, there it was in the recent Supreme Court decision on affirmative action. The plaintiff, noted Justice Anthony M. Kennedy in his majority opinion, was Caucasian.
To me, having covered the South for many years, the term seems like one of those polite euphemisms that hides more than it reveals. There is no legal reason to use it. It rarely appears in federal statutes, and the Census Bureau has never put a checkbox by the word Caucasian. (White is an option.)
The Supreme Court, which can be more colloquial, has used the term in only 64 cases, including a pair from the 1920s that reveal its limitations. In one, the court ruled that a Japanese man could not become a citizen because, although he may have been light-skinned, he was not Caucasian. In the other, an Indian was told that he could not become a citizen because, although he may have been technically Caucasian, he was certainly not white. (A similar debate erupted more recently when the Tsarnaev brothers, believed to be responsible for the Boston Marathon bombing, were revealed to be Muslims from the Caucasus.)
The use of Caucasian to mean white was popularized in the late 18th century by Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, a German anthropologist, who decreed that it encompassed Europeans and the inhabitants of a region reaching from the Obi River in Russia to the Ganges to the Caspian Sea, plus northern Africans. He chose it because the Caucasus was home to “the most beautiful race of men, I mean the Georgians,” and because among his collection of 245 human skulls, the Georgian one was his favorite wrote Nell Irvin Painter, a historian who explored the term’s origins in her book “The History of White People.”
In 1889, the editors of the original Oxford English Dictionary noted that the term Caucasian had been “practically discarded.” But they spoke too soon. Blumenbach’s authority had given the word a pseudoscientific sheen that preserved its appeal. Even now, the word gives discussions of race a weird technocratic gravitas, as when the police insist that you step out of your “vehicle” instead of your car.
“If you want to show that you’re being dispassionate then you use the more scientific term Caucasian,” Ms. Painter said.
Susan Glisson, who as the executive director of the William Winter Institute for Racial Reconciliation in Oxford, Miss., regularly witnesses Southerners sorting through their racial vocabulary, said she rarely hears “Caucasian.” “Most of the folks who work in this field know that it’s a completely ridiculous term to assign to whites,” she said. “I think it’s a term of last resort for people who are really uncomfortable talking about race. They use the term that’s going to make them be as distant from it as possible.”
There is another reason to use it, said Jennifer L. Hochschild, a professor of government and African-American studies at Harvard. “The court, or some clever clerk, doesn’t really want to use the word white in part because roughly half of Hispanics consider themselves white.” She added, “White turns out to be a much more ambiguous term now than we used to think it was.”
There are a number of terms that refer to various degrees of blackness, both current and out of favor: African-American, mulatto, Negro, colored, octaroon. There are not a lot of options for whites. In Texas, they say Anglo. And there is the pejorative we were so pithily reminded of when a witness in the racially charged George Zimmerman trial said the victim, Trayvon Martin, had called Mr. Zimmerman a “creepy-ass cracker.”
In the South, I was often asked about my ethnic origins, and I had a ready answer. “My father is from India,” I would recite, phrasing it in such a way as to avoid being mistaken for an American Indian. “And my mom is white.” Almost invariably, if I was speaking to black people, they would nod with understanding. If I was speaking to white people, I would get a puzzled look. “What kind of white?” they would ask. Only when I explained the Norwegian, Scottish and German mix of my ancestry would I get the nod.
I theorized that this was because blacks understood “white” as a category, both historical and contemporary — a coherent group that wielded power and excluded others. Whites, I believed, were less comfortable with that notion.
But Matthew Pratt Guterl, the author of “The Color of Race in America, 1900-1940,” had a different take. “They’re trying to trace your genealogy and figure out what your qualities are,” he said. “They’re looking in your face, they’re looking in the slope of your nose, the shape of your brow. There’s an effort to discern the truth of the matter, because all whitenesses are not equal.” In other words, they weren’t rejecting the category, they were policing its boundaries.
Such racial boundaries have increasingly been called into question in the debate over affirmative action, once regarded as a form of restitution to descendants of slaves, but now complicated by all sorts of questions about who, exactly, is being helped. “What if some of them aren’t poor, what if some of them don’t have American parentage, what if some of them are really stupid?” Ms. Painter, the historian, asked. “There’s all kinds of characteristics that we stuff into race without looking, and then they pop out and we think, ‘I can’t deal with that.’ ”
Doubtless, this society will continue to classify people by race for some time to come. And as we lumber toward justice, some of those classifications remain useful, even separate from other factors like economic class. Caucasian, though? Not so much.
By: Shaila Dewan, The New York Times, July 6, 2013
“The Arrogance Of The Third Political Branch”: The Supreme Court Uses Judicial Activism For Conservative Ends
We prefer to think of the Supreme Court as an institution apart from politics and above its struggles. In the wake of this week’s decision gutting the heart of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, its actions must now be viewed through the prism of the conservative movement’s five-decade-long quest for power.
Liberals will still win occasional and sometimes partial victories, as they did Wednesday on same-sex marriage. But on issues directly related to political and economic influence, the court’s conservative majority is operating as a political faction, determined to shape a future in which progressives will find themselves at a disadvantage.
It’s true that the rulings voiding the Defense of Marriage Act and California’s Proposition 8 show how the liberalizing trend on some social issues is hard for even a conservative court to resist.
The Defense of Marriage Act was invalidated because one of the conservatives, Justice Anthony Kennedy, has joined much of the American public in an admirable move toward greater sympathy for gay and lesbian rights.
And the decision on California’s anti-gay marriage law was reached by an ideologically eclectic majority on procedural grounds. Five justices held that the case had been improperly presented because the state of California declined to appeal a lower court’s ruling voiding the law.
This led to a middle-of-the-road outcome. The court declined to declare a national, Constitutional right to same-sex marriage, but did give gay-rights advocates a victory in California. By leaving the issue in the electoral sphere in most states, the court opened the way for further advances toward marriage equality, since public opinion is shifting steadily in its favor, fueled by strong support among younger Americans.
The marriage rulings, however, should not distract from the arrogance of power displayed in the voting rights decision written by Chief Justice John Roberts. His opinion involved little Constitutional analysis. He simply substituted the court’s judgment for Congress’ in deciding which states should be covered under the Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act, which required voting rules in states with a history of discrimination to be pre-cleared by the Justice Department.
The court instructed Congress to rewrite the law, even though these sophisticated conservatives certainly know how difficult this will be in the current political climate.
Whenever conservatives on the court have had the opportunity to tilt the playing field toward their own side, they have done so. And in other recent cases, the court has weakened the capacity of Americans to take on corporate power. The conservative majority seems determined to bring us back to the Gilded Age of the 1890s.
The voting rights decision should be seen as following a pattern set by the rulings in Bush v. Gore in 2000 and Citizens United in 2010.
Bush v. Gore had the effect of installing the conservatives’ choice in the White House and allowed him to influence the court’s subsequent direction with his appointments of Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito.
Citizens United swept aside a tradition going back to the Progressive Era — and to the Founders’ deep concern over political corruption — by vastly increasing the power of corporate and monied interests in the electoral sphere.
Tuesday’s Shelby County v. Holder ruling will make it far more difficult for African-Americans to challenge unfair electoral and districting practices. For many states, it will be a Magna Carta to make voting more difficult if they wish to.
The Constitution, through the 14th and 15th Amendments, gives Congress a strong mandate to offer federal redress against discriminatory and regressive actions by state and local governments. As Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg noted in her scalding but very precise dissent, “a governing political coalition has an incentive to prevent changes in the existing balance of voting power.”
In less diplomatic language, existing majorities may try to fix election laws to make it far more difficult for their opponents to toss them from power in later elections. Republican legislatures around the country passed a spate of voter suppression laws disguised as efforts to guarantee electoral “integrity” for just this purpose.
Recall that when conservatives did not have a clear court majority, they railed against “judicial activism.” Now that they have the capacity to impose their will, many of the same conservatives defend extreme acts of judicial activism by claiming they involve legitimate interpretations of the true meaning of the Constitution.
It is an inconsistency that tells us all we need to know. This is not an argument about what the Constitution says. It is a battle for power. And, despite scattered liberal triumphs, it is a battle that conservatives are winning.
By: E. J. Dionne, Jr., Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, June 27, 2013
“SCOTUS Hypocrisy”: To Conservative Justices, Congress’ Wishes Only Matter When They Line Up With The Conservative Worldview
The last two days have been clarifying when it comes to the Supreme Court. In ruling successfully against the Voting Rights Act yesterday and voting unsuccessfully to uphold the Defense of Marriage Act today, the court’s conservative wing has shown that it has little interest in following Chief Justice John Roberts’ famous directive to “call balls and strikes,” but instead is fully behind judicial activism in support of the conservative cause.
Today, the court’s liberal wing, joined by Justice Anthony Kennedy, struck down the Defense of Marriage Act – which denied federal benefits to married same-sex couples – as unconstitutional on equal protection grounds in a 5-4 decision. Kennedy wrote that DOMA “is invalid, for no legitimate purpose overcomes the purpose and effect to disparage and to injure those whom the State, by its marriage laws, sought to protect in personhood and dignity.”
Basically, according to the court, DOMA discriminated against those with legitimate marriages for no real reason and is thus history. U.S. News’ Robert Schlesinger put it correctly, writing, DOMA “was a vicious and discriminatory piece of waste and our union is a little more perfect without it.”
In their dissents, the court’s conservatives – Roberts, along with Justices Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito – wrote that the majority should not have overruled Congress, which approved DOMA in 1996. Scalia even wrote that the majority’s opinion “is an assertion of judicial supremacy over the people’s Representatives in Congress and the Executive. It envisions a Supreme Court standing (or rather enthroned) at the apex of government, empowered to decide all constitutional questions, always and everywhere ‘primary’ in its role.”
But yesterday, in ruling that Section 4 of the 1965 Voting Rights Act is unconstitutional, the court’s conservatives – joined by Kennedy this time – had no such qualms about explicitly overruling Congress, which had renewed the law in 2006 by overwhelming margins: the then-Republican-controlled house voted 390-33 in favor, while the count in the Republican-controlled Senate was 98-0.
But no matter. In their opinion, written by Roberts, the conservative justices said, “Congress could have updated the [Section 4] coverage formula at that time, but did not do so. Its failure to act leaves us today with no choice but to declare [Section 4] unconstitutional.” As Scott Lemieux writes at Lawyers, Guns and Money, Roberts’ opinion includes only “astoundingly weak justifications for striking down a major act of Congress,” with nothing more than “some handwaving to obviously irrelevant provisions of the Constitution.”
So yesterday, according to the court’s conservatives, Congress had no business approving a law meant to keep states and localities from disenfranchising voters. Today, though, all due deference should be given to Congress’ awful attempt to render gay marriages nonexistent under federal law. Evidently, to those four justices, Congress’ wishes only matter when they line up with Congress’ wishes only matter when they line up with the conservative worldview. Otherwise, Congress is merely a speed bump. And that’s no way to run the highest court in the land.
By: Pat Garofalo, U. S. News and World Report, June 26, 2013
“I Want My Binky”: Justice Samuel Alito’s Middle-School Antics
The most remarkable thing about the Supreme Court’s opinions announced Monday was not what the justices wrote or said. It was what Samuel Alito did.
The associate justice, a George W. Bush appointee, read two opinions, both 5-4 decisions that split the court along its usual right-left divide. But Alito didn’t stop there. When Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg read her dissent from the bench, Alito visibly mocked his colleague.
Ginsburg, the second woman to serve on the high court, was making her argument about how the majority opinion made it easier for sexual harassment to occur in the workplace when Alito, seated immediately to Ginsburg’s left, shook his head from side to side in disagreement, rolled his eyes and looked at the ceiling.
His treatment of the 80-year-old Ginsburg, 17 years his elder and with 13 years more seniority, was a curious display of judicial temperament or, more accurately, judicial intemperance. Typically, justices state their differences in words — and Alito, as it happens, had just spoken several hundred of his own from the bench. But he frequently supplements words with middle-school gestures.
Days earlier, I watched as he demonstrated his disdain for Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor, the two other women on the court. Kagan, the newest justice, prefaced her reading of an opinion in a low-profile case by joking that it was “possibly not” the case the audience had come to hear. The audience responded with laughter, a few justices smiled — and Alito, seated at Kagan’s right elbow, glowered.
Another time, Sotomayor, reading a little-watched case about water rights, joked that “every student in the audience is going to look up the word ‘preemption’ today.” Alito rolled his eyes and shook his head.
Alito is best known for his antics at the 2010 State of the Union address, when President Obama criticized the Citizens United decision. While other justices remained expressionless, Alito adopted a sour look, shook his head “no” and appeared to mouth the words “not true.” At the various oral arguments I’ve watched over the past few years, Alito’s eye-rolling, head-shaking and other expressions of exasperation are a fairly common occurrence, most often when Sotomayor has the floor.
Alito’s latest irritability came, ironically, on a day when the main headline about the court was comity: Justice Anthony Kennedy read an unexpectedly modest decision on affirmative action that left some racial preferences intact and commanded a 7-1 majority. Many in the audience expected bigger decisions, on same-sex marriage and voting rights (former justices John Paul Stevens and Alito’s predecessor, Sandra Day O’Connor, were both in the house), but those contentious issues were held for another day.
Beyond the broad agreement on affirmative action, though, were three 5-4 decisions Monday, two read by Alito with a dry and clinical delivery. In the first, he announced that the court was rejecting a jury award for a woman who was disfigured and disabled by a drug that didn’t come with adequate warnings. Despite the “dreadful injuries,” Alito argued, siding with the drugmaker and throwing out an appellate-court ruling, “sympathy for respondent does not relieve us of the responsibility of following the law.”
The second case Alito read, one of two cases Monday limiting claims of workplace discrimination, rejected an African American woman’s complaints of a racially hostile work environment. Alito argued that the employer was not liable because, under Alito’s narrowed definition, the person doing the harassing did not qualify as the employee’s supervisor.
Other conservative justices share Alito’s views but aren’t quite so dour in expression. Antonin Scalia is caustic and even incendiary, but often funny. Chief Justice John Roberts can be droll. On the other side, Kagan has tried to make the court more accessible to a lay audience by giving chatty lectures from the bench rather than reading from her written opinions, which also have been playful. In an opinion she wrote this month on a transportation case, she made reference to the 1980s song “867-5309/Jenny” by Tommy Tutone.
Even Ginsburg, no comedienne, can be colloquial and accessible. In her dissents Monday, she noted that an employee can avoid a harassing co-worker by telling him to “buzz off.” She also invoked the self-deprecating quotation defining a legal mind as one that “can think about a thing inextricably attached to something else without thinking about the thing which it is attached to.”
Ginsburg was tart, even acidic — but she confined her objections to words. That kind of judicial restraint would benefit her junior colleague.
By: Dana Milbank, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, June 24, 2013
“Suspicionless Search And Seizure”: The Supreme Court Rules That DNA Is Like A Fingerprint Or Mugshot
In a 5-4 decision, the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that police have the right to gather DNA evidence without a search warrant after an arrest and before the arrestee has been convicted of a crime. The majority ruled that a cheek swab is no different from taking a fingerprint or a photograph.
Already 26 states collect DNA samples from suspects, a fact that had gone mostly unnoticed until 26-year-old Alonzo King was arrested in Maryland for second-degree assault in 2009. Maryland authorities took a DNA swab from King while he was in custody, and after running it through the state’s and the FBI’s databases, they found that it matched DNA from an unsolved rape committed in 2003.
The U.S. Supreme Court’s decision on Monday reversed a 2012 Court of Appeals decision in which Maryland’s highest court ruled in King’s favor, stating that the DNA swab was used for investigative purposes after his arrest—this was in direct violation of his Fourth Amendment rights, as he had not been convicted of any crime and was still presumed innocent.
Groups including DNA Saves have been advocating for the DNA swabbing of arrestees as a means to close unsolved cases, citing statistics that most crimes are committed by repeat offenders.
Justice Anthony Kennedy was among the five Justices who voted to reverse Maryland’s decision. “DNA identification of arrestees is a reasonable search that can be considered part of a routine booking procedure,” Kennedy wrote. “Taking and analyzing a cheek swab of the arrestee’s DNA is, like fingerprinting and photographing, a legitimate police booking procedure that is reasonable under the Fourth Amendment.”
Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Sonia Sotomayor, and Elena Kagan joined Justice Antonin Scalia in his written opposition to the court’s decision. His dissent began, “The Fourth Amendment forbids searching a person for evidence of a crime when there is no basis for believing the person is guilty of the crime or is in possession of incriminating evidence. That prohibition is categorical and without exception; it lies at the very heart of the Fourth Amendment.”
Scalia’s defense of the Fourth Amendment continued in his scathing dissent: “Solving unsolved crimes is a noble objective, but it occupies a lower place in the American pantheon of noble objectives than the protection of our people from suspicionless law-enforcement searches.”
The dissenting Justices warned of likening DNA sampling to fingerprinting and taking photographs. They aimed to differentiate between methods of identifying and investigating an individual after their arrest and before a trial.
New technologies are increasingly presenting privacy challenges that complicate the typical conservative/liberal alliances on the Court.
USA Today reports, “Last year, they held that police could not attach a GPS tracking device to a car in order to monitor a suspect’s movements. This year, they ruled that using a drug-sniffing dog with reasonable suspicion was OK — but not at the door of a private home. And they decided that executing a search warrant after a suspect had left his home was out of bounds.”
Of course the major difference between last year’s decisions and the one the Supreme Court reached today is that DNA swabs may be used by authorities to implicate an arrestee in crimes for which they have no warrant or reasonable suspicion. In this way, the majority found, a DNA swab is similar to the procedural tasks of taking a fingerprint or a mugshot.
The minority warned of the broader implications of the decision.
“Make no mistake about it: Because of today’s decision, your DNA can be taken and entered into a national database if you are ever arrested, rightly or wrongly, and for whatever reason,” Scalia wrote in his dissent. “This will solve some extra crimes, to be sure. But so would taking your DNA whenever you fly on an airplane.”
By: Allison Brito, June 3, 2013
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