I have to admit, between the summer weather and eight days of no internet connectivity, its been hard to keep up with the blog, but, let me try to hit on a some stories that passed by during these past four weeks. Just a word or two…
JENA 6 – You may have missed it but five of the Jena 6 plead no contest to their charges towards the end of June. The boys admitted that the white victim, Barker, had never uttered racial slurs before or during the fight. You remember the Jena 6, from Louisiana? Every one got riled up and said they were being charged cause the town and police were racist. I said then, that everyone was focusing on the wrong issue. It wasn’t whether the boys should have been charged. Any time a group of people beat one person, well..that’s not good. The issue was then, as it is now, whether the police and the prosecutor treated them the same as they would have treated white boys arrested for the same thing. In the hulabaloo of the protests, this issue was never fully resolved and it was a missed opportunity to determine whether black defendants in that part of Louisiana are being treated in a racially biased way. Please people, we have to get more sophisticated about our racial analysis and how we protest. This same kind of shallow treatment is what helped put Clarence Thomas on the Supreme Court. We have to do better.
Strip Searching in School – The Supreme Court decided the strip search of a middle school student by school administrators looking for ibuprofen that the girl was alleged to have, was unreasonable and violated her fourth amendment rights. Her bag had already been searched with no success when the administrator decided the school nurse should look in her panties for the two pain killers! Well if they were in there, who was going to want them after that! Needless to say, no drugs were found. The student, now 19, says the experience scared her. Attention parents! You can send your kids to school now and they probably won’t be strip searched. Oh, guess who was the one justice who voted against finding the search unreasonable? You got it…your black justice…
Connecticut Firefighters – The Supreme Court ruled in favor of the Connecticut fire fighters. Nothing surprising here. The affirmative action rulings by the Supreme Court have aggressively been dismantling the notion since Rehnquist was Chief Justice. If any of you are expecting the Supreme Court to come out with an affirmative action decision that supports the rights of folks of color, then you are on some serious drugs…. For those who are interested, Professor Ian Haney Lopez has done some of the best writing on how white men have transformed themselves into a minority and used anti-discrimination laws to uphold their own privilege. Check out, “A Nation of Minorities: Race, Ethnicity, and Reactionary Colorblindness,” 59 Stanford L. Rev. 985 (2007).
Sotomayor Hearings – Went well. It was the unusual political grand standing, a general lack of serious substantive discussion of the law or the Constitution. In other words, a regular modern confirmation hearing. That is bad for us as citizens but hey, its the way it is, and it has nothing to do with the candidate’s merits.
Steve McNair – That deserves its own entry!!!
All right…..that’s it, quick and dirty….
…just some things I was thinking about…