Atlantic Monthly Contributors's Blog, page 162

No Right to a Speedy Sentence

The constitutional right to a speedy trial doesn’t apply to the sentencing phase after a guilty verdict, the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously ruled Thursday.

The case, Betterman v. Montana, was brought by Brandon Betterman, who pled guilty to bail-jumping in April 2012 after failing to appear in court on domestic-assault charges.

After pleading guilty, Betterman waited 14 months in a county jail before receiving his sentence in June 2013. He then challenged the sentence under the Sixth Amendment, arguing his right to a speedy trial had been violated by the lengthy delay. Multiple state supreme courts and most of the federal appellate courts have held or assumed that the Sixth Amendment’s protections apply during the sentencing phase.

But the Montana Supreme Court disagreed, ruling against Betterman and drawing a distinction between the trial itself and the sentencing phase that follows it. The U.S. Supreme Court had not explicitly ruled on the issue before.

In an 11-page opinion Wednesday, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg upheld the Montana Supreme Court’s interpretation. Her analysis, citing medieval English precedents, drew the same crucial distinction.

The course of a criminal prosecution is composed of discrete segments. During the segment between accusation and conviction, the Sixth Amendment’s Speedy Trial Clause protects the presumptively innocent from long enduring unresolved criminal charges. The Sixth Amendment speedy trial right, however, does not extend beyond conviction, which terminates the presumption of innocence.

Betterman did not challenge his post-plea delay under the Due Process Clauses of the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments, so the Court refused to rule on whether those constitutional rights had been violated by his 14-month jailing.

But in a concurring opinion, Justice Sonia Sotomayor signaled that the clauses could provide defendants with the ability to challenge lengthy delays between conviction and sentencing.

The Fierceness of ‘Femme, Fat, and Asian’

Few RuPaul’s Drag Race fans could have been surprised Monday night when the show crowned as champion the 29-year-old New Yorker who goes by the name Bob the Drag Queen. Over the course of Logo’s cult-beloved competition’s eighth season, the personable and funny Bob so skillfully met the expectations for what a Drag Race winner should be that, during the finale, RuPaul asked her just how much she’d studied the show before joining it.

But the most memorable moments of the night belonged to a runner-up, Kim Chi, as had many of the most memorable moments of the season. A 28-year-old Chicagoan and first-generation Korean American, Kim Chi’s fantastical outfits had frequently impressed the judges even while her physical clumsiness had become a running joke.

In the finale, Kim Chi’s original song, “Fat, Femme, and Asian,” performed partially in Korean, took direct aim at three labels frequently treated as undesirable in the gay male mainstream. Breaking with a typical narrative of the show—“Drag Race: bringing families together,” RuPaul likes to say—Kim Chi revealed she still hadn’t told her mom she does drag and doesn’t plan on doing so. And when asked about which of the chiseled male models in the show’s “Pit Crew” she’d like to lose her virginity to, she deadpanned, “I’m not trying to catch anything, so I’m going to say none of them,” sending the theater into shocked laughter. Moments like these contributed to the sense that Kim Chi was doing something novel on Drag Race, even though the show has long been concerned with self-love, non-conformity, and playing with stereotypes.

Interested in the wider context of Kim Chi’s performance, I spoke with C. Winter Han, an associate professor of sociology at Middlebury College. His book Geisha of a Different Kind: Race and Sexuality in Gaysian America features a chapter about Asian American drag queens, including past RuPaul contestants Manila Luzon and Jujubee. While Han hadn’t watched Season 8 in its entirety, he had kept up on Kim Chi.

This interview has been edited and condensed.

Spencer Kornhaber: What did you make of Kim Chi?

C. Winter Han: My previous thoughts on the show were actually pretty critical of the way it presented the Asian contestants. Particularly it was problematic in the sense that Asian men in general are presented in the gay community as being more feminine in order to present white men as being more normative and acceptable to the mainstream audience.

Now the whole purpose of RuPaul’s Drag Race, of course, is present yourself as more feminized; it’s a little difficult to say, “Well, the Asian contestants are being more feminized than others.” But until this season, the Asian characters were heavily racialized in ways that the other contestants weren’t, and more importantly, the show rewarded the Asian contestants the more they Orientalized themselves, particularly with [Season 3’s] Manila Luzon.

In that season, all the contestants were told to be newscasters for a challenge, and Manila Luzon did this incredibly racist performance where she spoke with a really thick stereotypically Asian accent and suggested that the guest star for that show should marry her brother because her brother needed a green card. She won that challenge. And when [the contestants] had to make over a straight jock, Manila Luzon put chopsticks in the jock’s hair and had them walk with a little tiny shuffle steps, like this bad version of the Mikado. And the judges again rewarded her for that.

Embedded in that is the trope of the East being feminized, which has a long history. Part of it is this larger narrative of what we think about when we think about Asian men in general. Details magazine used to have a column that said “gay or something else.” Usually it was like, “gay or firefighter,” “gay or socialite husband,” “gay or boy-band member.” They had one where it was “gay or Asian.” Asians were the only group that were ever marked racially as easily mistaken for being gay.

“She’s not ‘rising above’ being fat or femme or Asian. She’s saying, ‘fat, femme, and Asian is attractive.’”

The joke of it is that it’s a dichotomy where you’re either gay or Asian—you’re not both, even though you are easily mistaken for both. So it’s not surprising that gay Asian men are not just marginalized in the gay community but in the Asian community. The drag queens that I talked to for my book were actively challenging that notion, making sure that they were embedding themselves in both Asian America and gay America. They were marking what it meant to be gay and marking what it meant to be Asian as not being peripheral to their identities, but essential to them.

That’s what Kim Chi does. The show does follow a larger racial trope of this quiet Asian guy who also happens to be a virgin who also has a lisp. It’s almost an immigrant story that unfolds in this 10-episode arc where she goes from being this very quiet, insecure, relatively submissive person into clawing her way to the top without complaint. But she does it in this way that she doesn’t marginalize herself.

Instead of relying on orientalist tropes, like the previous contestants who would wear cheongsams and have these red fans and mark themselves as being foreign, she takes these cultural cues that are contemporarily popular in Asia and then fuses it into the gay community. She uses a lot of Anime, and she uses a lot of K-pop references. The dress she wore in the finale is this contemporary version of a Hanbok, which is a traditional Korean costume. I remember thinking I could totally see some sort of self-described avant-garde designer in Korea putting that on their runway.

More importantly, she confronts these very political things. In the presidential commercial [challenge], all the other drag queens are presenting things like “I’m going to give everybody Botox injections” or “I’m going to share makeup for everyone.” And Kim Chi is the only one who actually, a roundabout way, confronts a problem with the way that people are racialized in the gay community. And not only racialized: marginalized along issues of gender, around issues of body.

I was really impressed in the finale when she takes that theme and turns it on its head. Something that is seen as being a deficient within the gay community—being fat, femme, and Asian—becomes just the thing she uses in order to propel herself forward. Some of the comments I’ve read online say they respect her because she takes a weakness and then overcomes that. But that’s really a misinterpretation of what she’s doing. She’s not “rising above” being fat or femme or Asian. She’s saying, “fat, femme, and Asian is in fact attractive. I’m going to prove to you that it’s attractive because I’m going to perform and all of you are going to love it. And in loving it you have to question what is it means when we go into the gay world and mark these things as unattractive—when clearly someone has demonstrated to you that it is something that you actually love.”

Kornhaber: You mentioned the trope of the immigrant story. There was a lot of discussion of how Kim Chi hasn’t come out to her mother because her mother is a Korean immigrant. It seemed like RuPaul thought that it was holding Kim Chi back to have not come out. What do you make of that?

Han: A long time ago I wrote an article that was published in a book called First Person Queer where I noted that we needed to rethink this idea of [everyone] coming out in the way that Westerners come out. That there are multiple ways of being gay and proclaiming ourselves to be gay. I’ve never had that conversation with my mother either; I’ve never sat my mom down and said, “Guess what, mom: I’m gay.” But she knows I’m gay. Everybody in my family knows I’m gay. And yet no one talks about it.

I remember one newspaper review of the book specifically pointed out my chapter and saying I was advocating for people to stay in the closet. What that review told me is that there’s a large idea of what it means to be gay in our country, and that idea is largely based on gay white male experiences and all other experiences are invalid.

A study looked at gay white men and Latino men and found that Latino men who come out in the traditional way that white people come out actually become less happy. They’re happier when they come out in much more subtle ways like bringing a boyfriend to family events, where nobody publicly says “I’m gay,” and no one says “this is my partner,” but that’s the implication.

I would be really surprised if Kim Chi’s mother didn’t know. But you have to understand that in Asian American culture, it’s a very interesting relationship with sexuality. It would be one thing if Asian parents had discussions about sex and love with their straight kids, but not talking about sexuality, whether you’re straight or gay, is an entirely common thing for Asian families. Asian kids don’t normally go around telling their parents, “Oh, I went on this date and this is how it’s going.” It’s more subtle. I think about my siblings and how they introduced their boyfriends and girlfriends to my mother. It wasn’t like they said, “Mom, I’m dating this person.” The person just one day showed up.

“We need to rethink this idea of [everyone] coming out in the way that Westerners come out.”

So I don’t think it’s fair to say Kim Chi is not living an authentic life if she hasn’t told her mother, because for the most part I think that she is living a very authentic life as the child of an Asian immigrant.

Kornhaber: It might not be tied to race, but I’d be interested in your thoughts on the virginity issue. She doesn’t seem particularly ashamed of being a virgin, and then the best moment of the finale was her turning down the Pit Crew.

Han: I think people will interpret that as being related to her being Asian. Because there are these stereotypes of Asian people being sexually naïve, sexually repressed. Someone once said to me, a long time ago when we were talking about HIV prevention efforts and the funding that wasn’t coming to gay Asian men, “Asian people don’t have sex.” I was really taken aback and made some really snotty comment, like, “You know, there are a billion Chinese people who disagree.”

So I don’t think [Kim Chi’s virginity] has as much to do with her being Asian per se as it does with her having internalized things about what it means to be Asian, what it means to be fat, what it means to be femme. When you’re constantly bombarded with personal ads and Grindr profiles specifically saying “no Asians,” it is a big hit to your sense of worth.

One drag queen told me that drag is like an armor, where she can go from being an ugly Asian boy to being a beautiful Asian woman. When marginalized groups look for social status and power they look at the areas that are open to them. And the stereotypes of Asian men being feminine work to their advantage in drag. But more importantly, they know it works to their advantage. They realize that this is one way that they can translate what is seen as negative into a positive in the same way that Kim Chi has done.

I think that’s a very common theme among Asian drag queens that the show hadn’t captured before. Drag becomes a very political space where gay Asian men can claim their senses of worth. And they use the stereotypes that already exist to their advantage.

Kornhaber: Do you have any favorite looks for Kim Chi?

Han: My favorite one, which I think if you asked my friends they would say that it shouldn’t have been, was the one that she did with the little person. That was the most, quote, “Orientalized” look she had this season, but I think for that particular challenge it was very empowering. She takes what is seen as being submissive and controllable and uses that to reinterpret what power and control means. I think that’s what a lot of people of color do, not just in the gay community or in the drag community.

Kim Chi is incredibly insightful about race and sexuality and gender, and yet she comes off as this sort of naïve person. I think of the episode with the throwing-the-shade competition. And even [in the finale] where she’s asked which [Pit Crew member] would you take—it’s a very important moment. We expect her to jump up and down and say, “I would love to have one of these Pit Crew members.” Yet even in that small tiny moment, she makes it political, saying, “Clearly someone like me is supposed to be lusting after someone like that. But I’m going to not just reject it, but I’m also going to throw some shade at it. And I’m going to redefine what it means to be desirable because I’m the one up here with all the attention. I’m the one that they should want.”

Kornhaber: Throughout this conversation, you’ve referred to the idea of white gay standards. I think some people reading this will say, well, “RuPaul’s black, the winner is black, the contestants are very diverse.” But you’re referring more to the culture that Drag Race exists in, right?

Han: I think it’s a mistake that when we say “whiteness,” we equate it with just white people. Those two things are not the same. We’ve made this investment in a stereotype of what one should be that, to be quite frank, most white people also don’t meet. This type of a body that’s attractive, these types of physical features that are attractive.

When people of color are considered desirable, they’re only considered desirable because they meet that image of whiteness. We see this narrative all the time, even with Prince: Everybody said they loved him because he transcended race. When was the last time a white artist died and people said they loved him because he transcended race? Blackness and Asian-ness and Latino-ness only become acceptable if they leave those things behind.

William Hung sang with this heavy accent and he was an engineering student from Berkley and American Idol made him into a big joke. And Asian people [were] upset because this is a stereotype. Well, what we’re saying is that that image is not only unacceptable to white people but it’s unacceptable to us as well, and in the process we’re throwing people under the bus so that we can be more like white people. William Hung is a real person who speaks that way, as a significant percent of our population does. We’re only ashamed of them because somebody else told us we should be.

Even this notion of Kim Chi lisping—every time someone comments on that it irritates me a little bit. We need to think, “Well, why is this a problem?” It’s only a problem because we consider it a problem. Kim Chi doesn’t hide these things, she doesn’t overcome these things, she uses these things. And that makes her an incredibly powerful performer and someone pushing the dialogue in a more positive direction than it’s been before.

What’s Next for the Rescued Chibok Schoolgirl?

The Nigerian woman rescued this week after two years in Boko Haram captivity has been flown to Nigeria’s capital to meet with the president.

The woman, carrying her four-month-old baby, arrived in Abuja Thursday for a meeting with President Muhammadu Buhari. She was 17 years old when she and 218 girls were abducted in 2014 from a school in the town of Chibok by Boko Haram, the Islamist militant group. The Nigerian government and Bring Back Our Girls, the group that represents the families of the abducted girls, have identified her as Amina Ali Nkeki.

Earlier this week, a Nigerian Army-backed volunteer group that is fighting the terrorist group found Nkeki, now 19, wandering in the Sambisa Forest, located in northeastern Nigeria near the border with Cameroon.

Buhari said in a statement Thursday that government doctors examined Nkeki for about five hours Wednesday and that she met with UNICEF staff.

“Although we cannot do anything to reverse the horrors of her past, federal government can and will do everything possible to ensure that the rest of her life takes a completely different course,” Buhari said. “We will ensure that she gets the best medical, psychological, emotional and whatever other care she requires to make a full recovery and be reintegrated fully into society.”

Nkeki has been reunited with her mother, who accompanied her to Abuja Thursday, the AP reported. Aid workers criticized the meeting, telling the AP Nkeki should be receiving medical care and not visiting political leaders so soon after she was found.

Buhari said Nkeki would return to school. “No girl in Nigeria should be put through the brutality of forced marriage,” he said. “Every girl has the right to an education and a life choice.”

Relatives of the missing 218 schoolgirls and other demonstrators hold regular protests in Abuja calling for the government to increase its efforts to find them. A total of 276 girls were taken when Boko Haram raided the school’s dormitories in April 2014, but more than 50 managed to escape within hours as militants drove the students away on trucks.

Boko Haram adheres to strict Sharia law and opposes Western-style education. It has carried out bombing attacks in public places since 2009. Last year, Boko Haram aligned itself with the Islamic State, calling itself the group’s “West African province.”

The Plight of the Vaquita Porpoise

A species of porpoise only found in the Gulf of California in Mexico may become extinct by 2022 if harmful fishing practices continue, scientists say.

The vaquita, the smallest of the seven species of porpoise, is considered the most endangered marine mammal in the world. Only about 60 vaquita porpoises remain, according to a team of international scientists created by the Mexican government. The porpoises are often caught and drowned in nets set by fisherman for other marine creatures, particularly the totoaba fish. The swim bladders of totoaba, another endangered species, can sell for thousands of dollars in China, where they are used as an ingredient in soup.

“We are watching this precious native species disappear before our eyes,” said Lorenzo Rojas-Bracho, the chair of the International Committee for the Recovery of the Vaquita, last week.

In 2015, Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto imposed a two-year ban on the use of gillnets— nets hung vertically in water to entangle fish by their gills—in the northern Gulf of California. The Mexican Navy also patrols the area to clear the nets. Conservationists say outlawing gillnets permanently is crucial for the vaquita’s recovery and survival.

Vessel surveys and acoustic monitoring of vaquita sonar clicks shows the mammals’ population has decreased drastically in the last two decades. In 1997, about 567 vaquita swam the waters of the Gulf of California. By 2008, the population had shrunk to 245.

Barbara Taylor, a conservation biologist with NOAA’s Southwest Fisheries Science Center in California, said the Mexican government began to consider seriously the vaquita’s potential extinction in 2006, after the Chinese river dolphin was declared extinct when Taylor and a group of scientists could not find a single dolphin in the Yangtze River. Mexico suddenly became home to the world’s most endangered marine mammal, she said in a NOAA podcast in March.

Taylor said the vaquita population could recover with proper government intervention and enforcement. She cited the success story of the northern elephant seal: in 1922, the Mexican government designated Guadalupe Island as a protected area, allowing the population of less than 100 elephant seals there to grow to tens of thousands.

“Marine mammals show an amazing capacity to recover if you just stop killing them,” Taylor said.

Remembering Morley Safer

Morley Safer, the longtime CBS correspondent who was a presence on 60 Minutes for more than four decades, died Thursday, the network announced. He was 84 and the network said he’d been in declining health.

Safer had retired last week from 60 Minutes, and the show was planning an hourlong retrospective of his life and career.

Jeff Fager, the executive producer of 60 Minutes anda friend of Safer’s, said:

This is a very sad day for all of us at 60 Minutes and CBS News. Morley was a fixture, one of our pillars, and an inspiration in many ways. He was a master storyteller, a gentleman and a wonderful friend. We will miss him very much.

Before he joined CBS News in 1964, Canadian-born Safer worked for CBC, the Canadian broadcast network. He made his name showing American GIs burning villages in 1965 during the Vietnam War, was the first American network correspondent to film inside China, covered artists, and musicians, and in one of his most famous recent interviews asked Ruth Madoff how, in the words of CBS News, “she could not have known her husband Bernard was running a billion-dollar Ponzi scheme.”  Safer’s last story, which aired March 13, was about Bjarke Ingels, the architect.

What's Wrong With the Police Department in Calexico, California?

The U.S. Department of Justice released a review Wednesday that found Calexico, California, a small California border town often used by criminals as a drug corridor has a police department that is broken in almost every way.

The Justice Department’s investigation into the Calexico Police Department started a year ago, after a complaint alleging police officers kidnapped and beat a citizen. Last week Michael Bostic, the former police chief, filed a federal whistleblower lawsuit describing a department that often lost seized guns and money, and, alleging city workers were involved in drug trafficking.

Of the review, the Associated Press wrote:

The Justice Department unit launched its review at Bostic's request, as it has in Baltimore; Philadelphia; St. Louis County, Missouri; and several other jurisdictions that have asked for advice. It comes at a time of growing scrutiny of police practices nationwide.

The federal review found a general lack of supervision and accountability, absence of community policing, poorly functioning internal affairs department, no analysis of crime data or sharing of information internally or externally, and lack of commonly used tools to detect problem officers.

Calexico is a city of 40,000 people, 120 miles east of San Diego. It’s location on the border, and out of the way of a major city, has made it a well-trafficked route for criminals smuggling drugs into the U.S.

The Justice Department investigation was a voluntary, non-binding review meant to suggest changes a department should make to improve itself. The report did not detail specific allegations of corruption with officers, but it essentially recommended major changes in every way the Calexico Police Department operates.  

In response, the town’s mayor, Joong S. Kim, emailed the AP, saying he thought the review was “more of an opinion report without many facts.”

Bostic hadn’t been on the job a full month, when in October 2014 the FBI raided the police department. The FBI hasn’t said what it found or seized, but Bostic’s whistleblower lawsuit made it clear he thought there was rampant corruption in the force, and with city officials. Last November, with a change of city council, Bostic was fired. Another complainant in the whistleblower lawsuit is a former lieutenant in the department, who’d reported to FBI in 2013 that he believed officers were trafficking drugs.

What Trump's Reaction to EgyptAir 804 Reveals

Disasters serve as the crucibles in which leaders are tested, and the disappearance of EgyptAir 804—though less than 24 hours old—is already serving that purpose in the presidential race.

Early Thursday morning, before Egyptian authorities (or anyone else) had made any statements about possible causes for the airplane’s disappearance over the Mediterranean, Trump tweeted this:

Looks like yet another terrorist attack. Airplane departed from Paris. When will we get tough, smart and vigilant? Great hate and sickness!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 19, 2016

Trump’s tweet is at once totally irresponsible and politically wily. Speculating on the cause of a crash that killed 66 people, in the absence of any particular information—and Trump makes no claim to have inside information—is bad practice. A president shooting from the hip this way could have catastrophic consequences in international diplomacy or management of the economy. (See, for example, Trump’s apparently unconsidered assertion that he’d meet with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un without preconditions, which rattled foreign-policy hands and which even Trump’s closest allies struggled to defend.)

On the other hand, it’s easy to imagine that Trump’s speculation will help him. Since he tweeted, Egyptian officials have said that they can’t rule anything out, but that terrorism is one plausible explanation for the crash. If that turns out to be the case, Trump will look both tough-talking and clairvoyant—willing to offer uncomfortable truths while others were reticent to speak out. And if it’s a simple mechanical failure? For one thing, many voters may be so desensitized to Trump’s antics that they will just shrug. Besides, Trump is essentially a media creature, and has grasped what pundits realized years ago: Successful predictions earn prestige, and unsuccessful ones carry almost no penalty. Obama may have spoken (clumsily) in the language of gambling, but Trump really is a gambler, which is why he’s made a lot of money and also lost tremendous amounts of it in his business career. Now he’s gambling on international terrorism. This doesn’t even touch on the fact that Trump’s proposed solutions to terrorism involve blatantly unconstitutional bans on Muslims and policies that even he can’t differentiate from Nazism.

Meanwhile, Hillary Clinton, who has real expertise in the Middle East and international relations—her national-security background is one of her major talking points—has been prudently silent. That won’t help her much in political terms, though; she’ll appear tentative and cautious, confirming all the standard critiques. Trump gets to dominate another news cycle, which is presumably his goal.

However unwise speculation is from a leader, the general election looks like a good test of whether Trump’s theory of politics—that all publicity is good publicity—works in a general election, or if it was only good enough for the Republican primary. On the one hand, there’s a sheaf of quantitative structural explanations for why Trump is a serious underdog. On the other hand, there’s a new Fox News poll putting Trump slightly ahead of Clinton. Can this strategy still work for him? At this stage, it'd be irresponsible to speculate.

EgyptAir's Missing Flight

Updated at 1:42 a.m. on May 19

EgyptAir Flight MS804 from Paris to Cairo “disappeared from radar” on early Thursday morning, the airline said.

An informed source at EGYPTAIR stated that Flight no MS804,which departed Paris at 23:09 (CEST),heading to Cairo has disappeared from radar.

— EGYPTAIR (@EGYPTAIR) May 19, 2016

56 passengers, seven crew members, and three EgyptAir security personnel were aboard the Airbus A320 airliner when it vanished from radar, according to the airline. Among the passengers are a child and two infants.

Flight MS804 departed Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris late Wednesday night at 11:09 p.m. local time and was scheduled to land at Cairo International Airport at 3:05 a.m. local time.

According to EgyptAir, the flight disappeared from radar about 10 miles inside Egyptian airspace at about 2:45 a.m. Cairo time. The airline said the plane was flying at 37,000 feet when contact was lost.

FlightAware, a website that tracks aircraft radar signals, showed Flight MS804’s last position about midway between the Turkish and Egyptian coasts over the eastern Mediterranean Sea.

According to the manifest, the passengers included 30 Egyptians, 15 French nationals, 2 Iraqis, and one citizen each from Algeria, Canada, Chad, Kuwait, Portugal, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, and the United Kingdom.

The Egyptian Navy has deployed search-and-rescue teams towards the flight’s last known position, EgyptAir said.

We’ll update this story with additional details when they become available.

Canada's Long-Awaited Apology

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau formally apologized in the House of Commons on Wednesday for his country’s role in the Komagata Maru incident more than a century earlier, calling it “a great injustice.”

No words can fully erase the suffering of Komagata Maru victims. Today, we apologize and recommit to doing better. pic.twitter.com/NsryzhUbp1

— Justin Trudeau (@JustinTrudeau) May 18, 2016

For many Canadians, the Komagata Maru’s voyage symbolized the country’s racially exclusive immigration laws in the early 20th century. The converted coal freighter sailed from Hong Kong to Vancouver with 376 South Asian immigrants, many of whom were Sikh inhabitants of other British colonies, to challenge Canada’s immigration laws. The Washington Post has more:

In a challenge to the rules, the Komagata Maru, chartered by a Sikh businessman with ties to an influential Sikh political party in the Americas, steamed across the Pacific. Its arrival in Canada was anticipated by doom-mongering local headlines, which warned of an impending “Hindu invasion.”

Sir Richard McBride, then the Conservative premier of British Columbia, made clear the explicit racism of Canada’s policies on the night the Komagata Maru reached Vancouver.

“To admit Orientals in large numbers would mean the end, the extinction of the white people,” he said. “And we always have in mind the necessity of keeping this a white man’s country.”

After an almost two-month standoff, which also involved feisty demonstrations by ethnic Indians on Vancouver’s shores, the ship was eventually turned away. When it reached Calcutta, now Kolkata, in India, British colonial authorities attempted to seize suspected Sikh radicals on board. The semi-riot that ensued saw security forces kill at least 19 passengers and arrest many others.

“I apologize, first and foremost, to the victims of the incident,” Trudeau said in his remarks. “No words can fully erase the pain and suffering they experienced. Regrettably, the passage of time means that none are alive to hear our apology today. Still, we offer it, fully and sincerely.”

After Trudeau spoke, the leaders of Canada’s other major political parties echoed his sentiments and expressed their regrets. His predecessor Stephen Harper previously apologized for the incident during a 2008 speech in British Columbia, but leaders of Canada’s Sikh community rejected it because the apology had not been made in Parliament.

Although often symbolic, a prime minister’s apology from the floor of Parliament can be a powerful event. In 1988, Brian Mulroney apologized for the internment of Japanese Canadians during World War II and passed a reparations bill similar to the U.S. law for Japanese Americans. In 2006, Harper apologized for the country’s exorbitant “head tax” on early 20th century Chinese immigrants after decades of activist pressure, offering compensation to survivors and their spouses.

Perhaps the most famous apology came in 2008 when Harper apologized for Canada’s residential-schools system, a government program that took indigenous children away from their communities and placed them into government-run and church-run schools for assimilation. Many of the children encountered abusive or traumatic environments in the schools, and at least 6,000 of them died between 1874 and the late 20th century.

The Trump Court

What would the U.S. Supreme Court look like after President Donald Trump?

The presumptive Republican nominee released the names of 11 judges he would consider appointing to the high court on Wednesday, an unprecedented move in American presidential politics aimed at quelling conservative fears about his potential imprint on the federal judiciary.

Among the names are six federal appeals judges: Thomas Hardiman of the Third Circuit, Raymond Kethledge of the Sixth Circuit, Diane Sykes of the Seventh Circuit, Steven Colloton and Raymond Gruender of the Eighth Circuit, and William Pryor of the Eleventh Circuit.

Trump also named five state supreme-court judges: Allison Eid of Colorado, Joan Larsen of Michigan, Thomas Lee of Utah, David Stras of Minnesota, and Don Willett of Texas. Nominating a state judge would break with a recent bipartisan preference for the federal bench. All of the current Supreme Court justices except Elena Kagan served on a federal appeals court before joining the Court.

Collectively, the list underscores some of the more homogenous aspects of the current Court. None of Trump’s nominees hail from the Northeast; five of the current justices grew up in either New York or New Jersey. None of them obtained their law degrees from Ivy League schools; all of the current justices received theirs from Harvard or Yale. Thomas Lee, whose brother Mike represents Utah in the U.S. Senate, would also be the first Mormon justice.

But the list is also, in other ways, less reflective of the country than the eight justices already serving on the Court. Only two of Trump’s potential nominees are women, for example. All of them are white.

Releasing the shortlist is an unprecedented move by an unprecedented candidate. Trump previously described himself as pro-choice and supported gun-control measures. He also had a habit of defying conservative orthodoxy during the primaries. As his nomination gathered strength, conservative legal thinkers feared his judicial nominees would follow a similar trend.

The death of Justice Antonin Scalia in February—and the possibility of five liberal justices if Obama or Clinton chose his successor—also placed the Supreme Court’s future at the front of the presidential race. President Obama nominated Chief Judge Merrick Garland of the D.C. Circuit to fill the vacancy, while Senate Republicans vowed to block any nomination until the next president is elected.

Hours after Scalia’s death was announced, Trump mentioned Pryor and Sykes as potential nominees to fill his seat on the Court during a Republican debate. In a nod to conservative fears, Trump also said in March he would release a full shortlist after consulting with conservative think-tanks on possible nominees. In March, the Heritage Foundation, one of the organizations Trump cited, listed eight “highly qualified, principled individuals” to replace Scalia. Five of them—Pryor, Sykes, Colloton, Gruender, and Willet—were on Trump’s list today.

Even a cursory glance at the list should put Republican fears of a moderate or liberal Trump nominee at ease. All of the federal judges are George W. Bush nominees, and most of the state judges appear to have conservative legal histories. Some have even attracted criticism from Democrats and liberal groups in the past, including Pryor, who once called Roe v. Wade “the worst abomination of constitutional law in our history.”

Willett is perhaps the most well known of the potential nominees, thanks to his popular and unusual Twitter presence. In a June 2015 tweet, Willett appeared to mock the idea of Trump nominating the next Supreme Court justice.

Donald Trump haiku—



Who would the Donald

Name to #SCOTUS? The mind reels.

*weeps—can't finish tweet* pic.twitter.com/a326AP0mN1

— Justice Don Willett (@JusticeWillett) 16 de junio de 2015

Also noteworthy are some of Trump’s omissions. Paul Clement, a former solicitor general under George W. Bush who still frequently argues before the Court, and D.C. Circuit Judge Brett Kavanaugh were widely thought to be top prospects for the next Republican president. But neither of their names appeared on Wednesday’s list.