Remembering Bakke
Commentary by Black Kos Editor Denise Oliver Velez
The Bakke Decision was handed down by the Supreme Court 38 years ago today.
The Supreme Court's decision in Bakke was announced on June 28, 1978. The justices penned six opinions; none of them, in full, had the support of a majority of the court. In a plurality opinion,[a] Justice Powell delivered the judgment of the court. Four justices (Burger, Stewart, Rehnquist, and Stevens) joined with him to strike down the minority admissions program and admit Bakke. The other four justices (Brennan, White, Marshall, and Blackmun) dissented from that portion of the decision, but joined with Powell to find affirmative action permissible under some circumstances, though subject to an intermediate scrutiny standard of analysis. They also joined with Powell to reverse that portion of the judgment of the California Supreme Court that forbade the university to consider race in the admissions process
Given that we have just won a victory in Fisher vs. University of Texas II it is important that we consider, yet again, how important SCOTUS is, and no matter what activism takes place in the streets — which is a good thing, ultimately the fate of generations will be tied to decisions made in the Courts.
Too often I hear affirmative action described as anti-white, and reverse racism — even from some people on the left who should know better.
TPM had a good article on conservative reasons for killing it and one would hope that those of us on the left would not parrot those same r-wing talking points.
I think we need to continue the discussion of what white privilege is, and what affirmative action is — and not assume because people say they are progressive that they embrace the concepts.
I teach students of color who have gotten into college via various affirmative action routes. I also have to deal with other students who look down on them, as if — somehow that assistance dubs them as less worthy — and stupid.
It makes me both angry and sad.
We still have a lot of educating to do.
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News round up by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
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As the anniversary of one of the most important Supreme Court rulings of our time nears, many voters are without critical protections at a point when they are perhaps most needed. The Root: 3 Years Later, the Ghosts of Shelby Still Haunt Us.
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Three years ago, the Supreme Court handed down a crushing ruling in the landmark case Shelby v. Holder (pdf). For reasons still mostly unclear to me (Chief Justice John Roberts partially opined that key provisions of the Voting Rights Act were “extraordinary measures” no longer needed because America’s legacy on race “had changed”), Section 5 of the VRA was essentially gutted, leaving voters in many states with the most sordid history of voter disenfranchisement vulnerable to further abuses without any protection.
In the 12 months following Shelby, the threat that loomed from the decision had already become actualized.
Almost before the ink on the decision had fully dried, Texas instituted strict voter-ID laws that had been previously blocked by Section 5 because of the disparate impact such laws had with regard to race.
Both Alabama and Mississippi also began enforcing strict and prohibitive voter-ID restrictions that would have required preclearance review under Section 5. Similarly, North Carolina—another state that was subject to pre-Shelby protections under Section 5—also passed voter-ID laws as well as reduced voter-registration periods and early voting.
The issue, however, isn’t just these laws on their own, but how they act in tandem with other legislation and policy initiatives (purging voter rolls, for example) that are most disastrous.
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Today, the Supreme Court decided that the University of Texas’ affirmative action program is constitutional. This much anticipated decision in Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin is the second time the Court reviewed this particular program. In Fisher I, the liberal and conservative wings of the Court struck an unusual compromise, sending the case back to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit and delaying a final decision that would ultimately decide its fate.
Today’s alignment of votes for Fisher II was not surprising. Justice Kennedy declared in Fisher I that the basic rationale for affirmative action was not in question. But he felt that its methods of implementation at the University of Texas had not been sufficiently reviewed by the lower court. Several liberal justices joined him on this point because it put off a final decision—as did several conservatives, albeit for different reasons.
The Texas case was unique because the university had two separate—but related—methods for increasing the enrollment of students of color. The Top Ten Percent Plan (TTPP) was created by the legislature in 1997, after a federal district court decision overturned affirmative action in the state. The TTPP requires the university to accept the top ten percent of students graduating from every Texas high school as a way to increase the chances of enrolling people of color. Although there was no reference to race in the plan, the demographics of Texas high schools all but guaranteed a certain percentage of students of all backgrounds would be admitted to the flagship campus at Austin.
But university officials decided that this wasn’t enough. Working from the premise established in Grutter v. Bollinger in 2003 that all students benefit from a diverse student body, they set out to augment the TTPP with a more traditional affirmative action admission program. This system recognized student ability beyond test scores and GPAs, and admitted students who declared an interest in schools and majors that were broader than those that the TTPP students typically enrolled in. The goal was simple: Spread the benefits of a diverse student body as broadly across the many different schools and disciplines on the campus as possible.
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A South African court has thrown out Jacob Zuma’s attempt to appeal against a ruling that he should face almost 800 corruption charges, piling pressure on the embattled president.
Zuma had tried to overturn a court order in April that the National Prosecuting Authority (NPA) should reinstate the charges that were dropped in 2009 shortly before he came to power.
The charges relate to alleged corruption, racketeering, fraud and money laundering over a multibillion-dollar arms deal.
The president has battled several corruption scandals while in office, as well as enduring growing criticism focused on South Africa’s record unemployment and poor growth rate.
“We seriously considered whether the appeal would have reasonable prospects of success and came to the conclusion that there are no merits in the arguments,” Judge Aubrey Ledwaba told the high court in Pretoria.
“The applications for leave to appeal ... are dismissed.”
In 2009, state prosecutors justified dropping the 783 charges by saying that tapped phone calls between officials in then president Thabo Mbeki’s administration showed undue interference in the case.
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Every year, about 275,000 people tour the Jack Daniel’s distillery here, and as they stroll through its brick buildings nestled in a tree-shaded hollow, they hear a story like this: Sometime in the 1850s, when Daniel was a boy, he went to work for a preacher, grocer and distiller named Dan Call. The preacher was a busy man, and when he saw promise in young Jack, he taught him how to run his whiskey still — and the rest is history.
This year is the 150th anniversary of Jack Daniel’s, and the distillery, home to one of the world’s best-selling whiskeys, is using the occasion to tell a different, more complicated tale. Daniel, the company now says, didn’t learn distilling from Dan Call, but from a man named Nearis Green — one of Call’s slaves.
This version of the story was never a secret, but it is one that the distillery has only recently begun to embrace, tentatively, in some of its tours, and in a social media and marketing campaign this summer.
“It’s taken something like the anniversary for us to start to talk about ourselves,” said Nelson Eddy, Jack Daniel’s in-house historian.
Frontier history is a gauzy and unreliable pursuit, and Nearis Green’s story — built on oral history and the thinnest of archival trails — may never be definitively proved. Still, the decision to tell it resonates far beyond this small city.
For years, the prevailing history of American whiskey has been framed as a lily-white affair, centered on German and Scots-Irish settlers who distilled their surplus grains into whiskey and sent it to far-off markets, eventually creating a $2.9 billion industry and a product equally beloved by Kentucky colonels and Brooklyn hipsters.
Left out of that account were men like Nearis Green. Slavery and whiskey, far from being two separate strands of Southern history, were inextricably entwined. Enslaved men not only made up the bulk of the distilling labor force, but they often played crucial skilled roles in the whiskey-making process. In the same way that white cookbook authors often appropriated recipes from their black cooks, white distillery owners took credit for the whiskey
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Voices and Soul
by
Justice Putnam
Black Kos Poetry Editor
("A Florida jury on Monday found a former Chilean army officer liable for the 1973 torture and murder of the folk singer and political activist Victor Jara, awarding $28m in damages to his widow and daughters in one of the biggest and most significant legal human rights victories against a foreign war criminal in a US courtroom." -- The Guardian 27 June 2016)
After the Chilean military dumped the body of Victor Jara on the streets of a slum in Santiago on 17 September 1973, local residents found the 'Poet of Love and The Peasant' with forty-four bullet wounds from a machine gun. Both his hands and his jaw had been broken; and later, it was discovered every rib was broken as well.
Those who were there in the bowels of the National Sports Stadium, either observing the torture or waiting to be tortured, reported that with both hands broken and part of his chest caved in from rifle butts, his tormentors handed him his guitar and demand he play and sing. He was unable to play, but he summoned enough strength to sing a song popular with the peasants who marched in the streets campaigning for Allende's Presidency.
That was when they dragged him off for the final beating and riddling him with forty-four bullets from a machine gun.
Modern-day forensics would note the extreme amount of brutality, the over-kill of forty-four bullets, every rib broken, both hands that played the guitar so beautifully, crushed into mere sacks of jelly, even the public display of the body. CSI's would note that the killing was not a dispassionate affair, but a murder of sheer, unadulterated hate.
Victor Jara sang of how love would level class divisions and preclude military violence. The CIA-trained Pinochet apparatus made sure Jara's brutal murder sent a different message.
In a time and a nation that forgets or doesn't know who Nixon's first vice-President was, Victor Jara isn't even a footnote in a history book never read. In a time and nation when public personalities like DJ Megatron could be gunned down in the street a few years ago, and it barely merited a mention on the evening news, it's important that the art and murder of Victor Jara from so long ago not be forgotten.
So that none of these brutal murders and the lives lost, will ever be forgotten.
The Last Poem of Victor Jara
There are five thousand of us here in this small part of the city. We are five thousand.
I wonder how many we are in all
in the cities and in the whole country?
Here alone
are ten thousand hands which plant seeds
and make the factories run.
How much humanity
exposed to hunger, cold, panic, pain,
moral pressure, terror and insanity?
Six of us were lost
as if into starry space.
One dead, another beaten as I could never have believed
a human being could be beaten.
The other four wanted to end their terror
one jumping into nothingness,
another beating his head against a wall,
but all with the fixed stare of death.
What horror the face of fascism creates!
They carry out their plans with knife-like precision.
Nothing matters to them.
To them, blood equals medals,
slaughter is an act of heroism.
Oh God, is this the world that you created,
for this your seven days of wonder and work?
Within these four walls only a number exists
which does not progress,
which slowly will wish more and more for death.
But suddenly my conscience awakes
and I see that this tide has no heartbeat,
only the pulse of machines
and the military showing their midwives' faces
full of sweetness.
Let Mexico, Cuba and the world
cry out against this atrocity!
We are ten thousand hands
which can produce nothing.
How many of us in the whole country?
The blood of our President, our compañero, will strike with more strength than bombs and machine guns! So will our fist strike again!
How hard it is to sing when I must sing of horror. Horror which I am living,
horror which I am dying.
To see myself among so much
and so many moments of infinity
in which silence and screams
are the end of my song.
What I see, I have never seen What I have felt and what I feel Will give birth to the moment…
-- Victor Jara
Estadio Chile
September 1973
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