“A Growing Inequality”: Not All Kinds Of Inequality Are Created Equal
In America, not all kinds of inequality are created equal.
For the past half-century, the de jure inequality of demographic groups has proven increasingly vulnerable to public pressure. From the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to last week’s Supreme Court decision striking down a key part of the Defense of Marriage Act, legal barriers against racial and sexual minorities as well as women have crumbled. Changes in the law have followed the same pattern: First, a handful of generally radical activists brought attention to the existence of a legal double standard; then, a mass movement grew in support of eliminating discriminatory laws and practices; only after this did government respond with legal remedies.
In each case as well, the movements’ success in diminishing their “otherness” — that is, establishing their full humanity — in the eyes of the majority of their fellow Americans has been key to ending legal discrimination. The shift in public opinion on same-sex marriage, for instance, follows decades when growing numbers of gay men and lesbians felt just secure enough to out themselves to their families, friends and co-workers, in the process normalizing what had been a concealed, and presumably shameful, status. The immigrant rights movement’s focus on the Dream Act kids — young people, many of whom are talented students, brought here as children and still forced to lurk in the shadows — put the most appealing human face on undocumented immigrants. That is at least partly responsible for what is now majority public support for enabling the undocumented to become citizens. (Whether that majority support carries any weight with xenophobic House Republicans, secure in their gerrymandered districts, is another question.)
Some forms of legal inequality persist in other guises. Another Supreme Court decision last week, striking down provisions of the Voting Rights Act that limited discriminatory practices in particular Southern states, will make it easier for black and Latino electoral participation to be limited. Just as those states once required voters to pass absurd tests or pay taxes to vote — measures almost always designed to apply only to blacks — now they will likely require voters to produce documents that the poor and students disproportionately lack (as, in fact, Texas did within hours of the high court’s ruling). Today’s vote supressionists are driven less by discrimination for its own sake than fear that their hold on power will weaken if minorities and the young vote in large numbers.
But while social and legal inequality has diminished over the past century, economic inequality has been on the rise since Ronald Reagan’s presidency. The public policies of the past 30 years — deregulating finance and encouraging the sector’s growth, failing to bolster workers’ declining bargaining power — are rightly understood to have reversed the more egalitarian economic policies of Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson. But the economic inegalitarianism of the past three decades also makes a mockery of Thomas Jefferson’s vision of equality, which went beyond mere equality of creation. Jefferson believed that a nation of yeoman farmers was the best defense against the inequalities of wealth and power that would threaten the republic if cities grew too populous. He also believed, of course, in the institution of slavery — the paradox that haunts his legacy and our history to this day.
The belief that diminishing economic inequality would help build a more robust economy underpinned the legislation of both the New Deal and the Great Society. Granting workers the power to bargain with their employers, the preamble to the 1935 National Labor Relations Act states, would increase their capacity to consume and give the economy a shot in the arm. So, too, the 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act, which created the national minimum wage. Social Security and Medicare, by reducing poverty among seniors, also bolstered the national economy. Repeal any one of these and the economy would crumple. Indeed, the de facto repeal of the National Labor Relations Act — as employers have learned to exploit its loopholes and deny employees bargaining power — is a major factor in the decline of wage income.
How, then, do we decrease economic inequality — the one kind of inequality that continues to expand even as other forms contract (if slowly and unevenly)? The challenge isn’t to persuade the majority to embrace a minority but, rather, to embrace itself. Americans tend to blame themselves rather than changes in economic rules and arrangements for failing to achieve financial security. But with most of the nation falling behind, the problem and the solution aren’t individual. Like Jefferson’s generation, Americans must band together to create a more egalitarian land.
By: Harol Meyerson, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, July 2, 2013
“Echos Of The Past”: Civil Rights Assaulted By Supreme Court
Last week was bittersweet for the cause of human dignity.
On one hand, the Supreme Court gave us reason for applause, striking down barriers against the full citizenship of gay men and lesbians. On the other, it gave us reason for dread, gutting the 1965 Voting Rights Act. The 5-4 decision was stunning and despicable, but not unexpected. The country has been moving in this direction for years.
The act is sometimes called the crown jewel of the Civil Rights Movement, but it was even more than that: the most important piece of legislation in the cause of African-American freedom since Reconstruction. And in shredding it, the court commits its gravest crime against that freedom since Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896.
That decision ratified segregation, capping a 30-year campaign by conservative Southern Democrats to overturn the results of the Civil War. Given that the Voting Rights Act now lies in tatters even as Republicans embrace Voter ID schemes to suppress the black vote, given that GOP star Rand Paul has questioned the constitutionality of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, one has to wonder if the results of the Civil Rights Movement do not face a similar fate.
Or, as Georgia Rep. John Lewis put it when I spoke with him Monday, “Can history repeat itself?”
Lewis was the great hero of the battle for voting rights, a then-25-year-old activist who had his skull broken by Alabama state troopers on Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, AL while leading a march against the use of poll taxes, literacy tests, morals tests, economic intimidation, clubs, guns and bombs to deny black people the ballot. The law he helped enact required states and counties with histories of voting discrimination to seek federal approval before changing their voting procedures. (Those that behaved themselves for a decade could be released from that requirement.)
The court struck down the formula the law uses to determine where discrimination lives (and therefore, which jurisdictions should be covered), saying the dates are too old to be reliable. As Chief Justice John Roberts noted in writing for the majority, the country has changed dramatically since that era. African-American electoral participation is at levels undreamt of in 1965.
And so it is. Because. The Act. Worked.
Using that success as an excuse to cripple it, noted Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg in her dissent, is like “throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet.” Indeed, had the nation not changed dramatically since 1965, would that not have been cited as evidence of the Act’s failure? Damned if you do, damned if you don’t, then: The Voting Rights Act never had a chance.
This court, said Lewis, “plunged a dagger in the heart” of the freedom movement. Nor is it lost on him that the majority which struck down this bedrock of black freedom included a black jurist: Clarence Thomas. “The brother on the court,” said Lewis, “I think he’s lost his way.”
So what now? Lewis says we must push Congress for legislation to “put teeth back in the Voting Rights Act.” Given that this Congress is notorious for its adamantine uselessness, that seems farfetched, but Lewis insists bipartisan discussion is already under way.
Fine. Let us demand that bickering, dysfunctional body do what is needed. But let us — African-Americans and all believers in freedom — also serve notice that, whatever lawmakers do, we will not stand placidly by as history repeats and citizenship is repealed, but that we will energetically resist by every moral means.
Saying that, I hear the ghostly echo of those who, once upon a generation, marched into Southern jails, singing “Ain’t gonna let nobody turn me around.” It is an ancient song of defiance that feels freshly — sadly — relevant to our times.
By: Leonard Pitts, Jr., The National Memo, July 3, 2013
“The Myth Of Absence”: How America’s Original Affirmative Action Is Still Going Strong
George W. Bush used to joke about it, his mediocre record at Yale, his less-than-diligent efforts throughout his educational career. So many laughed along at every bit of the persona he played into – the incurious certainty, the attempts to pronounce “nuclear” and the confident attitude throughout it all. But few questioned his right to take that place at Yale, another at Harvard and the privileged path that led to the White House.
That is how America has always worked, with the rich and the ones with the last names that matter usually stepping to the front of the line. It’s a system that has overwhelmingly benefited whites and males and, to look at the boards of Fortune 500 companies, still does.
Yet, you don’t see the righteous indignation or a spate of lawsuits to rid higher education of the curse of legacies. Voices are rarely raised to demand that elite colleges and universities take the thumb off the scale for families with a fat checkbook or a name on a campus building. There is not a suggestion that “they” don’t belong.
When Abigail Fisher was refused admittance at the University of Texas, she didn’t think that because she didn’t earn her way into the top 10 percent of her high school class — a bar that in Texas would have gained her automatic admission – that just maybe she should have studied harder. She refused the school’s offer to attend another Texas university, earn good grades and transfer in.
She didn’t consider the university’s logical explanation that it, like every other school, takes a “holistic” approach when putting together a class – using musical talent, community service, athletic ability, SAT scores, disadvantages overcome and yes, family legacy, among a long list of qualifications.
She did not consider the facts, as Pro Publica pointed out in a breakdown of the case, that UT offered provisional admission to 42 white students with lower test scores and grades, and that 168 black and Latino students with grades as good as or better than Fisher’s were also denied entry.
What Abigail Fisher did was assert that she was discriminated against because she is white. She has expressed her disappointment in not being accepted to a school she had dreamed of going to, one her family members had attended. But she has never acknowledged that a dream her family members could dream for generations could only be shared by African Americans starting in 1956, when they were first admitted there. (It wasn’t until 1964 – fewer than 50 years ago – that blacks integrated the residence halls.)
If life is a zero-sum game – what someone else gets takes away from me – then recruiting minorities for a diverse student body at UT, using race and its legacy as a consideration among many when choosing a freshman class, takes away Fisher’s rightful place.
Does she know or care about the history of the University of Texas, where minority students didn’t even get the chance to compete for so long, giving unfair advantages to every white hopeful? Does she know or care about the ways she as a woman has benefited from the tactics and gains of the civil rights movement, from the lessons pioneering feminists learned from the protesters who changed a segregated nation?
Would Fisher ever acknowledge that her family history at the university gave her an advantage and she still could not cut it?
The Supreme Court compromised in its ruling on Fisher’s case against the University of Texas last week, sending it back to lower courts for review but telling the courts to carefully scrutinize any consideration of race in programs to promote diversity.
Not every childhood finger-painted creation on the refrigerator door is a masterpiece, no matter what mom and dad say, and not every student is going to get first choice on the college list. But after this Supreme Court ruling, expect more legal challenges from students who get the skinny college envelopes in the mail.
And you know the lawsuits won’t examine the SAT scores of millionaires, or ask if too many oboe players made the cut. In America, where a man with degrees from Columbia and Harvard is blithely referred to as a “food stamp” president by opponents, any perceived gain by a minority is too often seen as a loss for the way things should be rather than a step toward equality and inclusion that’s valuable for all.
The lack of respect for black achievement is nothing new.
What’s truly missing in American education is a comprehensive history class, one that clearly states what African Americans have contributed, as a counter to a characterization that has taken hold of many minorities as undeserving takers. It was a belief on full display when privileged presidential candidate Mitt Romney – wealthy son of a governor – complained about the 47 percent who expect to be given things such as food and health care. There was outrage but also support for his statements, especially from the high rollers in the room who ignored the minimum wage workers serving them and the guy mixing drinks and making the tape.
In Charlotte, N.C., where I live, an exhibit that should be required viewing for every American fills in some of that history. The Kinsey Collection: Where Art and History Intersect has opened at the Harvey B. Gantt Center for African-American Arts + Culture, named for a former Charlotte mayor and honored architect who had to sue his home state of South Carolina for the right to attend Clemson University. Bernard and Shirley Kinsey’s amazing collection of art and historical artifacts and documents, one amassed during more than 40 years of marriage and shared goals, is American history, no hyphen required.
It includes a Currier and Ives lithograph of “The First Colored Senator and Representatives in the 41st and 42nd US Congress,” from 1872, a portrait of seven distinguished men elected after the Civil War — when black soldiers suffered a mortality rate 35 percent greater than other troops. After post-Reconstruction disenfranchisement of black voters in the South for much of the 20th century, such officials vanished until the Voting Rights Act of 1965, weakened last week by the U.S. Supreme Court.
The contributions of African Americans to this country have not been noted, but “we’ve got the documentation,” Bernard Kinsey told me as we walked slowly among the proud portraits, the books written and overwhelming evidence of the sacrifices made during a preview of the exhibit last week. He called it “the myth of absence.”
Despite the privilege that would assert otherwise, the descendants of these history makers aren’t stealing anyone’s seat. They are merely taking their rightful place.
By: Mary C. Curtis, She The People, The Washington Post, July 1, 2013
“Supreme Conflicts”: The Peaks And Valleys That Illustrate Our Country’s Worse Divisions
Like most families, my brood is a complex configuration of souls, so I greeted this week’s flurry of Supreme Court decisions with a conflicted heart.
This is true for most anyone who paid attention to the court rulings, I imagine. This latest round reflects parts of our culture we either want to embrace or want to reject. No middle ground here. It’s all peaks and valleys, the perfect graphic to illustrate our country’s divisions these days.
Initially, I was overjoyed to hear that the court had struck down the federal Defense of Marriage Act — a ridiculously named law that did nothing but harm to innocent people and their families for 17 years. Finally, the U.S. government must recognize the legal marriages of same-sex couples, and the earth didn’t tremble, not even a little bit.
Immediately, my mind was flooded with the faces of so many gay men and women who populate our daily lives — good people, crazy loyal and with a patience no one has the right to ask of them.
My mood was quickly tempered by the wake-up jolt of reality. Thirty-nine states still treat their gay citizens like modern-day lepers, passing bills and referenda as redundant as they are hateful. The DOMA decision does nothing to stop states from continuing to discriminate against men and women whose only crime is to be different from the people who fear them for reasons they can’t explain, even to themselves.
A lot of people who oppose marriage equality like to blame God for their bigotry. In my version of heaven, I get to watch them try to explain themselves.
Meanwhile, down here on earth, every time I hear someone talk about how God hates homosexuality — that whole “love the sinner, hate the sin” malarkey — I think of my late mother, whose faith survived countless trials in her 62 years.
“Being a Christian means fixing yourself and helping others,” she used to say, “not the other way around.” That’s a lifetime of work summed up right there.
Nine years ago, my husband and I were married by a minister who still cannot wed her longtime partner simply because they live in Ohio instead of Massachusetts, say, or any other state in New England where same-sex marriage is legal.
To this day, friends and family who attended our wedding want to talk about how moved they were by Pastor Kate’s sermon at our service. To this minute, Pastor Kate cannot legally claim Jackie — beloved to all of us — as her spouse, even as she works for the United Church of Christ every single day.
God’s will, you understand.
Uh-huh.
Also this week, the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act by ruling that Section 4 of the 1965 law is now unconstitutional. This particular section provides a formula to determine which jurisdictions are subject to federal government clearance before they can change their voting laws.
Historically, the voters targeted by these attempts to reduce their numbers are people of color. Also historically, Republicans are behind these changes, but they pinky-swear that it has nothing to do with how few people of color vote for them.
I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve written about these Republican stunts to suppress the vote. I can’t think of anything more patriotic than helping every eligible voter cast a ballot.
As I age, however, and our children grow up and marry, my patriotic fervor has become to-the-bone personal.
Our 5-year-old grandson bears his mother’s family name, which is Puerto Rican. Our future son-in-law emigrated with his family from El Salvador when he was a child. Republicans are not, shall we say, big fans.
As Columbia University professor Rodolfo O. de la Garza explained in an op-ed in February for The New York Times, America’s Latinos are increasingly the new Republican target for all things sinister.
“The nation does not acknowledge the discrimination Latinos have undergone,” he wrote. “Today, many public officials from states across the nation seem to feel free to treat Latinos as unwelcome newcomers and view Latino voters with suspicion. Republicans are especially leery of Latino voters who are perceived to be noncitizens or, even worse, Democrats.
“Without the law’s threat of federal intervention, I fear that the promise of Latino political equality will stagnate.”
That’s my family he’s talking about.
Fortunately, by 2043, that will be most American families in this country, as the U.S. Census Bureau estimates that that’s the year the white majority will be history.
This white granny’s going to eat a really healthful diet between now and then, because I want to live to see that day.
By: Connie Schultz, The National Memo, June 27, 2013
“The Consequences Of One Vote Majorities”: In 2016, Remember This Week At The Supreme Court
It’s been a week of mixed emotions for those of us who care about civil rights. There was the elation today when the Supreme Court overturned the so-called Defense of Marriage Act — the discriminatory law that has hurt so many Americans in its nearly 17 years of existence — and let marriage equality return to California. There was the anger when the Court twisted the law to make it harder for workers and consumers to take on big corporations. And there was the disbelief and outrage when the Court declared that a key part of the Voting Rights Act that was so important and had worked so well was now somehow no longer constitutional.
But throughout the week, I have been reminded of one thing: how grateful I am that Mitt Romney will not be picking the next Supreme Court justice.
It remains true that this Supreme Court is one of the most right-leaning in American history. The majority’s head-in-the-sand decision on the Voting Rights Act — declaring that the VRA isn’t needed anymore because it’s working so well — was a stark reminder of why we need to elect presidents who will nominate Supreme Court justices who understand both the text and history of the Constitution and the way it affects real people’s lives.
We were reminded of this again today when all the conservative justices except for Anthony Kennedy stood behind the clearly unconstitutional DOMA. Justice Antonin Scalia — no stranger to anti-gay rhetoric — wrote an apoplectic rant of a dissent denying the Court’s clear role in preserving equal protection. If there had been one more far-right justice on the court, Scalia’s dissent could have been the majority opinion.
Just think of how different this week would have been if Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan were not on the court and if John McCain had picked two justices instead. We almost certainly wouldn’t have a strong affirmation of LGBT equality. Efforts to strip people of color of their voting rights would likely have stood with fewer justices in dissent. And the rights of workers and consumers could be in even greater peril.
As the Republican party moves further and further to the right, it is trying to take the courts with it. This week, we saw what that means in practice. As we move forward to urge Congress to fix the Voting Rights Act and reinforce protections for workers and consumers, and work to make sure that marriage equality is recognized in all states, we must always remember the courts. Elections have real consequences. These Supreme Court decisions had less to do with evolving legal theory than with who appointed the justices. Whether historically good or disastrous, all these decisions were decided by just one vote. In 2016, let’s not forget what happened this week.
By: Michael B. Keegan, The Huffington Post, June 26, 2013
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