- Law professor Richard Thomson looks at the recent debate over who is an “African American” and very sensibly asks, who cares? Via Ms. Musings.
- Ms Musings is also one of several bloggers to point out the first American Time-Use Survey (and it’s about time – the Canadians have been doing a survey like this for years). The unsurprising results: Men spend more time at paid work than women, but not to the extent that women spend more time in unpaid housecleaning and caretaking than men.
- What kind of freaky mother are you? A quiz for alt-mommies, which I’m not, but I’m posting it here so my friend Kim will see it. Via Feministe, punk-rock mommy.
- Mousewords presents a round-up of some Republican dirty tricks.
- Southwest Airlines is arbitrarily enforcing its “buy two seats if you’re fat” policy even on fat people who can fit in the seat with the armrests down and the belt buckled. So what is the point of this policy, exactly? To generate lawsuits against Southwest, perhaps – two lawsuits in the last couple of weeks. There’s also some suspicion that Southwest’s “fatsos pay double” policy is enforced more often against women and people of course. Big Fat Blog has the story, here and here.
- You know, when Bigfatblog linked to an organization called “Fat is the New Black,” I figured it would be an analysis along the lines of fat suits being the new blackface. It turns out I was mistaken – it’s a fashion statement. Cool.
- The GOP wants single women to stay home; TAPPED reports.
…a D.C. Republican operative tells me that this election will come down to the votes of single women. But don’t take that to mean the GOP is going to be competing for the Planned Parenthood supporter vote any time soon. Single women, in particular, hate negative campaigning, he says, which is one reason the Bush campaign hasn’t hesitated to go negative this season. Every woman who is repelled from politics by doubts about John Kerry and disgust with George W. Bush — the “pox on both your houses” outcome — is effectively another vote for Bush.
I’ve always found attempts to keep the other side’s voters home to be particularly disgusting; it seems to indicate a fundimental contempt for the idea of democracy. Via Diotima.
- Three posts about three arguments: Positive Liberty discusses the three styles of poliitcal argument Americans use: the argument from democracy, the argument from pluralism, and the argument from justice. Very interesting stuff. Here’s part one, here’s part two (my favorite – plus, lots of stuff about gay marriage), and here’s part three.
- Ricka points out the oddness of an administration which bases its theory of government on their ability to understand what 200-years-dead men meant, claiming that it’s impossible to know what someone who died 10 years ago meant.
- The scariness of “concience clauses,” which allows doctors and hospitals to opt out of providing abortions – even in cases of rape, or a threat to the mother’s health. Good quote: “Yes, we need to respect individual freedom of religion. But at what point does it cross the line of not providing essential medical care? At what point is it malpractice? If someone’s beliefs interfere with practicing their profession, perhaps they should do something else.”
- From the UN Population Fund’s “State of World Population 2004”: “Poverty dramatically increases a woman’s chances of dying. The lifetime risk of a woman dying in pregnancy or childbirth in West Africa is 1 in 12. In developed regions, the comparable risk is 1 in 4,000.” Bush v. Choice has more on the report, including the unsurprising news that Bush’s defunding of the UN Pop fund has contributed to countless preventable abortions – and maternal deaths – in poor nations. That’s what “pro-life” means, I guess.
- The Log Cabin Republians have officially decided not to endorse Bush in the 2004 election. Meanwhile, Kerry gets the endorsement of virtually every liberal gay-rights organization – although he’s done absolutely nothing to earn it.
- Eugene Volokh comments on a same-sex marriage opponent who is afraid that if same-sexers marry, that’ll lead down a slippery slope to people who practice S/M being allowed to marry.
No, really. Check out the follow-up, as well.
- Also on Volokh: it turns out that the CIA unit on Bin Laden is desparately understaffed – and in fact they’re assigned fewer experienced officers now than they had before 9/11. The incompetance continues to stun.
- I am too sickened by the “my penis is bigger and more macho” presidential campaign to comment on it, much. Happily, Ms Musings and Katha Pollitt have stronger stomachs than I do.
Barry’s BlueSky- Untitled May 2, 2024I love that Caterpillar boots were among the returned items, and in this photo an Amazon worker took, you can clearly see the "CAT" logo near the cat. Cat climbed into Amazon return box, found alive 630 miles away wapo.st/3JJ3vqT
- Untitled May 1, 2024A new cartoon for May Day! This has been an incredible year for unions in the USA - may next year be even better. Unions Have Always Done The Impossible! #PoliCartoon #Union #LaborDay2024 #MayDay2024 #May1st #UBI #LivingWage
- Untitled April 30, 2024People on reddit are fighting about a cartoon I did about why the US health care system sucks and I am enjoying this too too much. https://www.reddit.com/r/comics/comments/1ch0l0r/why_us_health_care_is_such_a_terrible_system/?sort=old
- Untitled April 30, 2024I just posted a new cartoon! It's patreon supporters only for now, but in a week or so I'll make it public. :-) https://www.patreon.com/posts/deus-ex-machina-103359912?utm_medium=clipboard_copy&utm_source=copyLink&utm_campaign=postshare_creator&utm_content=join_link
- Untitled April 30, 2024Nothing against Brian, who of course needs and should make a living. But I'm increasingly frustrated by the Substackization of blogging/news writing. To read Brian's work I have to subscribe, which at the lowest price level is $75 a year. [contains quote post or other embedded content]
- Untitled May 2, 2024
Eugene Volokh comments on a same-sex marriage opponent who is afraid that if same-sexers marry, that’ll lead down a slippery slope to people who practice S/M being allowed to marry
Silly person. People who practice S/M can already do all the marrying they want, as long as they’re a heterosexual couple. Maybe, if the man was the top and the woman the bottom, they’d even be extra traditional and leave the “obey” in the vows ;)
If you are sickened by the penis measurement race, you probably want to avoid George Will on this topic. He sees the recent developments as victory over the dreadful ‘feminization’ of politics. Which seems to mean anything over ten percent of women in politics.
Silly person. People who practice S/M can already do all the marrying they want, as long as they’re a heterosexual couple
That is, in fact, Volokh’s point! They can, and it’s always been legal.
It’s not quite true that Kerry hasn’t done anything to earn the GLBT endorsements – he has been against a constitutional amendment.
It’s sad that it’s all it takes to be the best of the two candidates.
It’s one of the major issues where I disagree with Kerry, but where I also can say that he will be much better than Bush.
to paraphrase our snake goddess Echidne, if you are sickened by the penis measurement race……get the internal email addresses of the campaigns, and sic the spammers on them. Lord knows I get about 6 offers a day to enlarge a part I don’t own.
These politicians aren’t Christians, they are Frey-worshippers. Frey was the male half of a pair of fertility god and goddess (female half named Freya) of the ancient Norse. Frey’s sacrificial offering was a horse penis, clearly larger by an order of magnitude than that of either presidential contender.
Personally, I think if they are going to hint around the big penis contest, they should just abandon the bull altogether and whip it out in front of an impartial judge with a ruler.
Law professor Richard Thomson looks at the recent debate over who is an “African American” and very sensibly asks, who cares?
What a bizarre article. It begins by saying that it doesn’t matter who is “African American” and then goes on at length about the number of ways (discrimination lawsuits, affirmative action) in which is does matter very much.
If you are a black American descended from black slaves, and have fought all of your life for affirmative action, and now you see all of the affirmative action slots in your school being given to children of recent immigrants and mixed marriages like Barack Obama and Colin Powell, who qualifies as “black” matters very much.
The article talks about the dangers of defining race. What about the dangers of assuming that black people are all the same? Apparently there’s no problem with ignoring the historical problems of race in America and just starting over with a fresh crop of Negroes. When the new group that we didn’t spend generations screwing over starts outnumbering the old one, we can just pretend that that whole slavery/Jim Crow thing never happened.
So who cares what “African American” means? Better to not identify it so we can keep expanding the group until we find a subset that we like.
link check: the link for ‘Also on Volokh” points to the same place as the previous “follow-up” . . .
Richard, from my perspective, AA is about figting both historic AND ongoing discrimination. The idea that recent black immigrants aren’t discriminated against, and therefore it is unjust that they benefit from affrimative action, strikes me as dubious.
Can you document a case of “all” of a school’s AA slots going exclusively to children of at least one white parent and/or second-generation Americans? If so, then I’ll agree that there’s a probelm of insufficient help going to longtime American black families. However, I haven’t seen that claim documented, and it seems a little bit too extreme to be likely to be true.
Finally, could you clarify if you’re making this argument because you want AA to be better focused and more effective at helping african-americans, or becuase you’re against AA?
ACM: Thanks! I’ve fixed the link.
Finally, could you clarify if you’re making this argument because you want AA to be better focused and more effective at helping african-americans, or becuase you’re against AA?
To the extent my fleshed out views on AA reflect on the merits of my argument:
I am in favor of affirmative action for descendants of United States slaves and pre-1970 residents of the U.S. South. They were the victims of virulent institutional legal discrimination incommensurable with other forms of discrimination in America’s history.
I am against affirmative action for other minority groups, because I am not convinced that the specific harms imposed on them are any greater, or at least not out of line with, those imposed on the short, ugly, fat, disabled, or poor of any race.
I am certainly against affirmative action for non-U.S. residents, who have not suffered American discrimination at all.
If I were against all AA, it really wouldn’t matter that the “wrong” people are getting it. It is only because I favor it in some circumstances that I am concerned that America’s historical black underclass is being given the shaft again by a policy that they supported, and is now being used to help — in a large and growing degree — an entirely different group of people.
Can you document a case of “all” of a school’s AA slots going exclusively to children of at least one white parent and/or second-generation Americans?
“All” was certainly hyperbolic, but a more applicable phrase in some places — like Harvard — may be “half and growing.”
From the article: “Harvard professors have publicly worried that over half of Harvard’s “black” students did not descend from American slaves but are, rather, immigrants or the children of immigrants from Africa or the Caribbean.”
And from this NYT article, which is part of what the Slate article is responding to:
In the 1990’s, the number of blacks with recent roots in sub-Saharan Africa nearly tripled while the number of blacks with origins in the Caribbean grew by more than 60 percent, according to demographers at the State University of New York at Albany. By 2000, foreign-born blacks constituted 30 percent of the blacks in New York City, 28 percent of the blacks in Boston and about a quarter here in Montgomery County, Md., an analysis of census data conducted at Queens College shows.
This is essentially a new problem, because immigration from those areas has been increasing recently. “Black” used to be a good proxy for “slave descendant”. Now it is not — or at least is becoming less so. If the issue has “snuck up” in the past 15 years, what will it look like 15 years from now? My gut reaction is that if the pool of non-slave-descended blacks doubles again, we’ll be a lot closer to “all” than the current “over half”.
This debate, however, is not over whether there is a problem, but merely the extent of it. If you agree that there would be a problem if “All” the slots were going to other blacks, then one would have to conclude that there was a problem (if a lesser one) if it were merely a disproportionately high percentage.
Richard, from my perspective, AA is about figting both historic AND ongoing discrimination.
Certainly there is widespread ongoing discrimination against blacks in America. What is dubious to me is that it is on nearly the same scale as the historic kind. (e.g., Short men earn 13% less than tall men; black men earn 15% less than white men).
When the law says, “Even if you are well-educated, you cannot work at a good job,” education gets devalued. Recent voluntary immigrants (like almost all voluntary immigrants in American history), on the other hand, tend to be a self-selecting group of more industrious (and lucky) members of whatever group they come from. How can you put the two groups in the same pool, and expect the more established Americans to compete?
The facts appear to bear this out, to some degree. The “questionable” African Americans are getting elite placements disproportionate to their numbers. As immigration continues and populations grow, it is likely that today’s trends will continue.
If this trend (an ever increasing % of AA slots going to Nigerians and Jamaicans) strikes us as untenable, then the solution is either to limit AA, or to carve out another group.
If the pro-AA forces don’t resolve the issue among themselves, the issue will be decided for them by the anti-AA forces when a growing number of people (black, white, and other) start to notice that their college slot or job is going to someone who they never considered historically underprivileged, and anther leg of the AA stool gets kicked out from under it.
To elaborate a little more on my reasoning: I used to think that being for affirmative action was easy; I was merely supporting the transfer of white privilege onto racial minorities. I was for that. But then, I saw the facts didn’t bear it out.
The statistics show that when affirmative action programs are eliminated, as they were in Texas and California, white enrollment didn’t change. Instead Black and Hispanic enrollment dropped and Asian enrollment increased.
The lesson is clear. Affirmative action transfers places from Asian-Americans to African-Americans and Latinos. Yet both supporters and detractors cast the debate as black vs. white. The true issue is whether we want or need a policy that systematically restricts the places for Asian-Americans in our elite universities.
So, the question for me is, “What group, if any, has been so victimized by discrimination, that I am willing to take away from other ethnic groups to help them?” Once I get past former slaves, the list pretty much stops.
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