Andrew Sullivan's Blog, page 293

A Blow To Race-Based Admissions, Ctd

John Cassidy worries that yesterday’s SCOTUS ruling in Schuette will have widespread consequences:

Without saying so explicitly, [the ruling] appeared to give its approval to ballot initiatives designed to roll back affirmative action in other areas as well, such as hiring employees, awarding contracts—and ending racial segregation. In effect—and, in the case of the Court’s conservatives, surely in intention, too—the justices on the majority suggested that if voters in individual states want to throw out laws designed to counter America’s long history of racial discrimination, that’s fine by them, and perfectly constitutional.

Bazelon is disturbed by what she sees as Roberts’ blindness to the enduring problem of racism in America:

I still think there is a difference between a local ordinance that bans busing or fair housing, which aim for equal treatment, and a ballot initiative that takes away a preference based on race. That’s how I made my peace with the outcome today. But I had my doubts when I got to a telling exchange between Roberts and Sotomayor. It’s over the basic underlying question that is nowhere resolved in this case: Whether affirmative action—or any awareness of race—is still needed or valid. …

I can’t read this without noting that in previous cases, Roberts has expressed his preference for color-blindness. This is where the conservatives on the court lose me. Good faith or no, it is at odds with reality to imagine that race no longer matters. I hope the states that ban affirmative action continue to enroll more low-income students as they also find ways to admit black and Hispanic applicants. But we still live in a world of race and class considerations. Not either/or.

The Bloomberg editors, on the other hand, support the court in letting the public decide:

On the issue of affirmative action, the court’s reluctance to be clear may be wise. (And if it’s not reluctance but inability, then it’s welcome.) As the court dithers over whether affirmative action is allowed, the public is increasingly deciding that it’s not necessary — not just in Michigan, where the 2006 vote was not close, but in the U.S. as a whole.

The public may well be wrong about that. Affirmative-action programs still have a crucial role to play in helping public institutions reflect America’s diversity. Yet they are not the only way. Programs that focus on class instead of race can have similar benefits. And there is evidence that colleges that make a concerted effort to attract poor and minority students can achieve results. Whether affirmative action has outlived its usefulness, however, is not a constitutional issue.

However, what the public really thinks of affirmative action isn’t always clear. Allison Kopicki finds that it depends on how the question is framed (NYT):

Using the phrases “special preferences” or “preferential treatment” in a question tends to reduce support for affirmative action. Americans want life to be fair: They generally don’t mind assisting groups that need help, but they don’t like the idea of that help coming at the expense of others. A 2007 Pew Research Center survey, for instance, found that when the question included the word “help,” 60 percent of Americans favored affirmative action; in a question that used the word “preferences,” support fell by 14 percentage points.

Specifying groups that would benefit from affirmative action also tends to reduce support for the policies. When specific groups — such as women, African-Americans or gays and lesbians — were named, support for the practice of affirmative action fell significantly, for all groups but one, as a 2009 Quinnipiac University survey found.

The only exception was people with handicaps. In the question that mentioned them, support for affirmative action was higher than for any other groups, and higher than on a broader question that didn’t name any group.

Rescuing Kafka From “Kafkaesque”

In a review of Reiner Stach’s Kafka: The Decisive Years and Kafka: The Years of Insight, Cynthia Ozick rails against the term:

With its echo of “grotesque,” the ubiquitous term “Kafkaesque” has long been frozen into permanence, both in the dictionary and in the most commonplace vernacular. Comparative and allusive, it has by now escaped the body of work it is meant to evoke. To say that such-and-such a circumstance is “Kafkaesque” is to admit to the denigration of an imagination that has burned a hole in what we take to be modernism – even in what we take to be the ordinary fabric and intent of language. Nothing is like “The Hunger Artist.” Nothing is like “The Metamorphosis.”

Whoever utters “Kafkaesque” has neither fathomed nor intuited nor felt the impress of Kafka’s devisings. If there is one imperative that ought to accompany any biographical or critical approach, it is that Kafka is not to be mistaken for the Kafkaesque. The Kafkaesque is what Kafka presumably “stands for” – an unearned, even a usurping, explication. And from the very start, serious criticism has been overrun by the Kafkaesque, the lock that portends the key: homoeroticism for one maven, the father-son entanglement for another, the theological uncanny for yet another. Or else it is the slippery commotion of time; or of messianism; or of Thanatos as deliverance. The Kafkaesque, finally, is reductiveness posing as revelation.’

Sherpas On Strike

After threatening a work stoppage over unfair pay and grueling work conditions, the Nepalese mountaineers who clear the way for recreational climbers on Mount Everest have voted to leave the mountain and cancel the 2014 climbing season entirely out of respect for the 16 sherpas who died in an avalanche last Friday – the worst climbing accident in Everest’s history. Svati Kirsten Narula looks into how much more dangerous the mountain is for sherpas than for the climbers they serve:

There has always been a divide between Sherpas and Western summit-seekers, but these tensions have increased in recent years as Everest has become more accessible to unskilled-but-well-heeled climbers. The world’s tallest mountain has become much safer for the average Joe than ever before. For the people who live in its shadow, though, and must return to it again and again to earn a living, the risks haven’t declined in the same way. …

Western expedition leaders are acutely aware of this sobering reality [that being a Sherpa is more dangerous than being an American soldier during the Iraqi insurgency], and many have established funds for the families of fallen Sherpas. It’s difficult, though, to assuage the guilt of leaving the mountain with fewer people than you brought there. Melissa Arnot, the Eddie Bauer-sponsored American mountaineer who has summitted Everest five times, had a Sherpa die on an expedition of hers in 2010. Reflecting on this in 2013, she told Schaffer: “My passion created an industry that fosters people dying. It supports humans as disposable, as usable, and that is the hardest thing to come to terms with.”

Jon Krakauer, author of Into Thin Air: A Personal Account of the Mt. Everest Disaster, elaborates on what makes the job so dangerous:

Sherpas aren’t provided with nearly as much bottled oxygen, because it is so expensive to buy and to stock on the upper mountain, and they tend to be much better acclimatized than Westerners. Sherpas are almost never given dexamethasone prophylactically, because they don’t have personal physicians in their villages who will prescribe the drug on request.

And perhaps most significant, sherpas do all the heavy lifting on Everest, literally and figuratively. The mostly foreign-owned guiding companies assign the most dangerous and physically demanding jobs to their sherpa staff, thereby mitigating the risk to their Western guides and members, whose backpacks seldom hold much more than a water bottle, a camera, an extra jacket, and lunch. The work sherpas are paid to do—carrying loads, installing the aluminum ladders, stringing and anchoring thousands of feet of rope—requires them to spend vastly more time on the most dangerous parts of the mountain, particularly in the Khumbu Icefall—the shattered, creaking, ever-shifting expanse of glacier that extends from just above base camp, at seventeen thousand six hundred feet, to the nineteen-thousand-five-hundred-foot elevation. The fact that members and Western guides now suck down a lot more bottled oxygen is wonderful for them, but it means the sherpas have to carry those additional oxygen bottles through the Icefall for the Westerners to use.

Although the sherpas say their decision to sit out the season is about mourning their colleagues, Bryce Covert examines the labor dispute:

Somewhere between 350 to 450 Sherpas work above Everest’s base camp during the season, which lasts two months. Despite the fact that climbers each pay a $10,000 peak fee to Nepal’s Ministry of Tourism and tens of thousands to commercial climbing guide companies, Sherpas usually get about $125 per climb for each legal load, although some take on more to earn more. They usually haul about $3,000 to $5,000 a season, although given that the average yearly salary in Nepal is about $700, many are drawn to the pay. But Western guides can make $50,000 to $100,000. …

The demands include an immediate payment of 40,000 rupees, or about $400, to the families of the victims, covering the costs of treatment for the injured, and a payment of 10 million rupees, or about $100,000, to those who won’t be able to continue working on the mountain due to their injuries. It also calls for allowing expedition teams to call off the season’s climbing and refusing to fix ropes and ladders this season, plus perks and salaries paid to the Sherpas if climbing is suspended. They have called for the creation of a relief fund through 30 percent of the royalties from issuing permits, something guides and Sherpas have called for for many years, as well as doubling their current life insurance policy payments from the current million rupees, or $10,000, to two million rupees, or $20,000.

The View From Your Window

Bamako, Mali, 7.30 am. “I hope the bird doesn’t violate the ‘no animals’ rule. He stayed there forever.”

Over The Hill At 24, Ctd

A reader doesn’t quite buy the notion that cognitive performance peaks in one’s mid-20s:

Yeah, bite me. Gabriel Garcia Marquez was 40 when he published his most popular and most seminal work, One Hundred Years of Solitude. You hear that? One hundred years. What, are the next 76 going to be in spent in obsolescence? His characters lived a hell of a lot longer than 24, and they were lively and smart to the very end. In the real world – Newton, Dickens, Springsteen. Sure, you can say “But they’re geniuses,” but billions of regular folk get sharper and better with age.

These kinds of studies just reinforce the concept of life as a rat race – a minute-by-minute, day-by-day competition to win at the game of life instead of lose. That’s not healthy. Life is amazing, as Carl Sagan said. It’s not a battle. There are no winners and losers. What makes true happiness? I would posit an answer of living a content life, free from anxiety and worry – including the worries about studies that say you’re over the hill when you’re still young enough to be carded at restaurants.

A 27-year-old reader:

I’ve got to question the reasoning behind seeing a lag in “seeing and doing” between a 24-year-old and a 39-year-old. Can we not chalk that up to a penchant for slightly more forethought and planning as we age? No doubt there is a bit of pruning that goes on following adolescence. (I know because the Dish told me so.) Brains shrink. Synapses slow. In the context of judgment calls, I would argue the ability to plot strategy – chess vs. checkers – increases over time.

Mostly though, I know I’m on the downhill slide. Don’t rub it in.

But maybe he isn’t; another reader points to a recent article in New Scientist in which computational linguists Michael Ramscar and Harald Baayen argue that “our brains work better with age”:

Contrary to popular belief, neuronal loss does not play a significant role in age-related changes in brain structure. Rather, consistent with our findings, most of the changes that occur as healthy brains age are difficult to distinguish from those that occur as we learn. Thus, understanding the costs and benefits of learning is critical if we are to establish the facts of cognitive aging.

For example, memory experiments show that, as we age, we “encode” less contextual information, such as what we were wearing when we learned a new fact. This makes the fact harder to recall, and is seen as a sign of cognitive decline. Yet everything we know about the way our brains learn indicates that people must inevitably become insensitive to many background details as life experience grows. This is simply because detuning our attention to irrelevant information is integral to the process we call “learning”. …

We are not arguing that the functionality of our brains stays the same as we grow older, or that cognitive decline never happens, even in healthy aging. What we do know is the changes in performance seen on tests such as the PAL task are not evidence of cognitive or physiological decline in aging brains. Instead, they are evidence of continued learning and increased knowledge. This point is critical when it comes to older people’s beliefs about their cognitive abilities. People who believe their abilities can improve with work have been shown to learn far better than those who believe abilities are fixed.

The aforementioned reader adds, “I know I would rather have a 24-year-old as a fighter pilot, but a 50-year-old as an airline pilot.” He’s not the only one: a historically-minded reader notes that “in the Second World War, the Royal Air Force limited fighter combat to pilots who were younger than 26. Their estimate was that the reflexes began to slow enough to make it a fatal risk.”

A Latta Discrimination

Latta South Carolina Mayor Fires Town’s First Female Police Chief, Crystal Moore, Because She’s Gay.. pic.twitter.com/JXcn3N7War

— Neil Standish (@NeilStandish) April 20, 2014

A reader writes:

I know you’re not the biggest fan of pushes for laws such as ENDA, but thought I would share this with you anyway. Crystal Moore has been with the police force of sleepy Latta, South Carolina for more than 20 years, capping her career serving as the town’s police chief. She’s an out lesbian. On April 15, she was fired by the mayor, her pristine service record being marred by the SEVEN disciplinary letters he handed to her that very afternoon. After refusing to sign without having an attorney check them out, he dismissed her. These letters were the result of the police chief investigating a recent hire of the mayor’s for whom the mayor did not do his due diligence, and who was supposedly driving a city vehicle with a suspended license. Now, all of a sudden he’s not answering questions regarding the firing but was recorded in conversation with a fellow council member saying the following (audio here):

I would much rather have.. and I will say this to anybody’s face… somebody who drank and drank too much taking care of my child than I had somebody whose lifestyle is questionable around children.

Because that ain’t the damn way it’s supposed to be. You know.. you got people out there – I’m telling you buddy – I don’t agree with some of the lifestyles that I see portrayed and I don’t say anything because that is the way they want to live, but I am not going to let my child be around. I’m not going to let two women stand up there and hold hands and let my child be aware of it. And I’m not going to see them do it with two men neither. I’m not going to do it. Because that ain’t the way the world works.

Now, all these people showering down and saying “Oh it’s a different lifestyle they can have it.” Ok, fine and dandy, but I don’t have to look at it and I don’t want my child around it.

Pure bigotry. Disgusting. But the silver lining to this is the amount of outcry from within the small, rural community of all ages and races have been rallying to her cause. She was a good, competent police chief. She was well regarded in the community, and they see what Mayor Bullard did and recognize it for exactly what it is – animus. Local reports have said that in excess of 100 people filled council chambers and out into the hallways, despite the mayor’s best efforts to quash debate, even going so far as to forbid entry to the public meeting to nonresidents of the town (illegal).

I’m from this region of South Carolina, and I couldn’t be more proud of all the folks for standing up for what’s right. I’m hoping the council is able to reinstate Chief Moore. Unfortunately in SC, by law there’s no way to impeach a mayor; only the governor can remove them from office for committing crimes. I have my doubts that Gov. Haley will remove the mayor despite what may prove to be several illegal actions by the mayor.

Update from a reader:

I finally know enough about something to write in because am originally from the tiny town of Latta and personally know many of the people involved.

One aspect of the case that the previous reader left out is that prior to Ms. Moore’s firing, the town’s recreation department head, who also happens to be openly gay, abruptly resigned and took another job in a nearby town shortly after the town’s new mayor took over last December. She was also a well-respected member of the community and by all accounts had also done a fantastic job in running her department. So we have two high-profile gay citizens with exemplary records and many years on the job who are both now gone (one resigned, one terminated) within a few months of an unabashedly anti-gay mayor coming into office. On the surface, it appears to be an open and shut case of discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation.

The problem here is that quite often in small towns, it is very difficult to get to the truth in matters such as this. Although I have been very proud to see a community that is very conservative and Christian rising up to support the former police chief, the charges of anti-gay animus have somewhat overwhelmed the facts in the case – namely, the seven reprimands that the mayor drew up in short order against Ms. Moore. Very few people know exactly what has transpired in the police department, yet the protesting citizens of the town have decided that they know the real reason for the firing and are out to reconcile the situation via public pressure.

We will most likely see this play out in the courts. I do hope that that process reveals the truth in the case. In the meantime, my tiny hometown will have to serve as a flashpoint in the very complicated arena of equal rights.

A Blow To Race-Based Admissions

This morning the Supreme Court issued a 6-2 ruling (pdf) upholding a Michigan referendum banning affirmative action in college admissions, reversing a 6th Circuit decision:

Justice Kennedy penned the plurality opinion for the court, joined by Justices Alito and Chief Justice Roberts, arguing that neither the Constitution nor previous court precedent gives the courts the authority to overturn a voter-approved prohibition on race-conscious admissions policies. Justices Breyer, Scalia, and Thomas filed concurring opinions, while Sotomayor wrote the dissenting opinion. Justice Ginsburg joined in the dissent, while Justice Kagan was recused from the case and did not vote.

“It is important to note what this case is not about,” Kennedy wrote in his opinion. “It is not about the constitutionality, or the merits, of race-conscious admissions policies in higher education.” The Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action had challenged the state ban on constitutional grounds, arguing that the voter ban violated the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.

Nora Caplan-Bricker explains the likely repercussions of the ruling:

[I]ts most immediate impact will be in the six other states that, like Michigan, have passed ballot initiatives banning affirmative action: Arizona, Florida, Nebraska, New Hampshire, Oklahoma and Washington.

Any attempt to challenge those bans is now “futile,” Robert M. O’Neil of The University of Virginia School of Law wrote in an e-mail. The ruling could also inspire other states to hold ballot initiatives—or could spur out-of state activists to look for places propose them, said Michael A. Olivas of the University of Houston Law Center.

The opening for activists could stretch beyond racial preference in admissions. Barbara A. Lee, an attorney who teaches at Rutgers’ School of Management and Labor Relations, predicted the ruling would “encourage those who oppose any form of preference (possibly even those related to social class, income, geography, etc.) to organize a grassroots movement to eradicate by ballot initiative the policies that educators have developed to broaden the scope of educational opportunity for groups traditionally excluded from access to public higher education, either by law or by poverty.”

When the Supremes took up the case last year, Bazelon called it “a case that liberals will lose, and probably deserve to lose”:

It’s about whether states may ban schools from using affirmative action. That’s what Michigan did by passing a ballot initiative in 2003 called Proposal 2. I wouldn’t have voted for it. But should the Supreme Court say that when voters decide to restrict the use of affirmative action, they have violated the Constitution? There is no way that the conservative majority of the Supreme Court will answer yes. And that is probably the correct outcome in terms of policy. To say so deviates from the usual liberal line on affirmative action, laid out today in a New York Times editorial.

And yet: The current huge fairness problem in university admissions isn’t race-based. It’s class-based. And it is at the schools of the 10 states across the country that have banned affirmative action where the most interesting socioeconomic alternatives are unfolding. The Supreme Court won’t stand in the way of those experiments. And it shouldn’t.

Mental Health Break

A downpour of delicious food:

David Plouffe On Becker’s Book: “Decidedly Inaccurate”

The account Jo Becker gives of the Obama administration’s response to the issue of marriage equality is one of the few parts of the book that has not been demolished since it was published. Since her account did not square with my own memory, I asked David Plouffe to address some of the claims in the book and he was eager to do so. Plouffe ran Obama’s 2008 campaign and during the time in question was Senior Adviser To The President.

Below is a Q and A I had with Plouffe today on the events Becker purports to report. My questions are in italics. Plouffe’s answers follow:

AS:  Becker’s book argues that the president’s position seemed stalled on marriage equality in 2011 and 2012 and that he likely did not intend to evolve any further on marriage before his second term. Do you agree?

DP: Absolutely not. The President made a decision that he was ready to “fully evolve” and announce his support for marriage equality. As he put it, “If I get asked if I was still a state legislator in Illinois would I vote to recognize same sex marriages as New York State did, the answer will be yes.” So the only question was when and how to announce in 2012 he would be the first President to support marriage equality, not whether to.

AS: What were the major and minor influences that caused the president to embrace marriage equality when he did?

DP: His evolution was not contrived as some suggest, but real. He spoke powerfully to some of his reasons in the Robin Roberts interview, but also the decision not to defend DOMA was instrumental, as well as the increasing number of states that were recognizing marriage. However, his family and friends and the discussions they had were likely the single greatest influence. His ultimate support for marriage equality was arrived at in a way that while public, was not too dissimilar to the journey many of us in the country took. Also, the President believed his support for marriage equality could change the opinions of some in his electoral coalition – witness the striking change in support in the African-American community which was illustrated in the Maryland ballot initiative results in 2012.

Given the Democratic convention and the Debates, where this issue was sure to come up, and that he had personally decided to support marriage equality, the plan was to make sure the announcement was made by June.

AS: Did Biden force your hand on substance? Or just the timing? What was the president’s personal response to Biden’s public statement?

DP: Not even the timing really. We were planning to do so within a week or two. So it might have sped it up by a matter of days, if that. He was very calm about it. He understood that this would be a historic moment and years from now, if not months (which turned out to be the case for most) all that mattered would be the words he spoke, not the process to get there. I will confess to being exercised because this was a historic moment and I wanted that to be the focus, not why we were doing it or how the timing was forced. He was right, I was wrong.

AS: David Brooks argues today that judging from Becker’s book, this was a decision dominated by elite political strategists. Is that your recollection?

DP: Not all all.

DP: Once he made the decisions, it was a settled debate. All we did was help think thru the timing and some of the questions that would arise from his statement. I understand the Becker book may give people that sense. It is decidedly inaccurate. I sat beside him from his decision not to defend DOMA in early 2011 to his embrace of marriage equality on May 9, 2012. It was his call. And from my unique perch at the time, I can assure you there were no guarantees this would not cost us votes in some of the battleground states. It was one of my favorite days in the whole Obama experience. Doing something historic and right that had risk associated with it – I’m certain that’s how history will capture it, not some of the BS out there now.

AS: Was the president’s reluctance to embrace a federal right to marry a function of his caution or of his understanding that civil marriage has been a state issue in the US?

DP: The latter, exactly. Though I think he believes that ultimately the Courts and the states will move almost universally in the right direction and we certainly have seen progress on both fronts since his announcement. There really hasn’t been an issue at least in modern times that has seen this rapid support growth, and given support levels for marriage equality across the ideological spectrum of those under 35, the path is clear.

AS: Over the first term, the administration had successively endorsed the notion of heightened scrutiny for gay rights cases, had bowed out of defending DOMA in the courts and had ended DADT. How did these events change the debate about marriage equality within the administration? Or were they irrelevant?

DP: I believe that while you had to look at each individually and make decisions based on the unique core facts at hand – and any administration must – there is no doubt that each was a barrier that was overcome and the result of each pointed in the same direction towards progress. Surely some will disagree with this this, but I think the gradual progression on the issues you mention in the first three years leading up to his marriage equality statement helped ultimately build support broadly for the equality case. Some may get frustrated by this, but the President has always had a very good sense of timing, even when it seems slow or not how they would do it on The West Wing TV show. I think in this case, we will look back and understand that each chapter unfolding as it did was the right path for the overall cause.

AS: Was there a sell-by date by which time the administration believed it had to endorse marriage equality before the election?

DP: Yes – our internal clock was June. There was platform language for the convention that had to be agreed to and the debates looming and he would start doing a lot of local interviews as well as national. It would be impossible to imagine not getting the question – directly  (Are you still evolving?) or hypothetically (would you vote for it in the Illinois legislature?) We were actively working thru dates and options in the very near term when the VP made his statements on MTP.

When you read the book, you get the impression that Chad Griffin did almost all of this himself. Think about that claim for a moment. And what it says about his vision of the marriage equality movement and its hundreds of thousands of participants, gay and straight, over the last two and a half decades.

“The Original Cubicle Was About Liberation”

So says Nikil Saval, author of the new book, Cubed: A Secret History of the Workplace:

The original designs for the cubicle came out of a very 1960s moment; the intention was to free office workers from uninspired, even domineering workplace settings. The designer, Robert Propst, was a kind of manically inventive figure – really brilliant in many ways – with no particular training in design, but an intense interest in how people work. His original concept was called the Action Office, and it was meant to be a flexible three-walled structure that could accommodate a variety of ways of working – his idea was that people were increasingly performing “knowledge work” (a new term in the 1960s), and that they needed autonomy and independence in order to perform it. In other words, the original cubicle was about liberation.

His concept proved enormously successful, and resulted in several copies – chiefly because businesses found it incredibly useful for cramming people into smaller spaces, while upper-level management still enjoyed windowed offices on the perimeter of the building. In that sense, the design was intended to increase the power of ordinary workers; in practice it came to do something quite different, or at least that’s how it felt to many people.

Juliet Lapidos calls the book an “impressive debut”:

Saval is of course aware that he’s telling the story of the office at a moment when it’s in flux. Personal computing and the Internet have made telecommuting feasible and the freelance economy is growing, so that many people who would have labored in a cubicle a generation ago now do their jobs at home or in coffee shops. Careful not to glorify contract labor, Saval concedes that many freelancers have not chosen to leave the permanent workforce: They’ve been pushed out. They don’t have benefits and may struggle for cash.

Still he accepts the precarious life of the freelancer as preferable to that of the old-fashioned cube-dweller. He criticizes “organizations that insist on hierarchy” and praises “the willingness of workers to discard status privileges like desks and offices.”

Previous Dish on office space here, here, here, and here.