Is there an "adultification bias" that "uniquely plagues Black girls"?

I'm reading "The Columbus mayor called Ma’Khia Bryant a ‘young woman.’ Here’s why people are angry. Some said it exemplified ‘adultification bias’ against the Black 16-year-old girl who was fatally shot by police" (The Lily/WaPo): 

Earlier that night, Columbus Mayor Andrew Ginther (D) took to Twitter to share news of the killing, calling Ma’Khia a “young woman.” 

Replies quickly poured in, noting that Ma’Khia was a child — not an adult. At the news conference a few hours later, Ginther acknowledged Ma’Khia was a child: “The city of Columbus lost a 15-year-old girl today,” he said. “This young 15-year-old girl will never be coming home.” 

But some still took to social media to criticize his initial characterization of Ma’Khia, calling it “adultification bias” — a form of discrimination that uniquely plagues Black girls, leading them to be perceived by adults as less innocent and more adult-like than their White peers, according to a widely covered 2017 Georgetown study. 

It may be that black kids are often regarded as older than white kids of the same age. When there's an emergency, like the one in the case of Ma’Khia Bryant, those who need to help can only judge by what they see. We've seen the video, and Bryant looks like a powerful attacker about to slaughter someone who looks utterly defenseless. 

But the question of how to talk about the dead person afterwards is different. City officials ought to be circumspect and use careful language. But what is the best way to refer to a 16-year-old female? I would have thought "young woman" is the most respectful locution and that "girl" for someone that age is questionable. 

But I understand the desire to encourage the police to see minors in a different light from adults.

They're equal, oftentimes, in size and power, and they are out in the world acting independently and capable of causing great harm, but they haven't had the chance to mature mentally, and we ought to give them special care.... if we can. Video can be deceiving, but based on the video, I'd say there was no time to give Ma’Khia Bryant special care befitting her young age. The life of the other girl/young woman was on the line. 

But The Lily goes on like this: 

To [Ijeoma Opara, an assistant professor in the school of social welfare at Stony Brook University], the shooting exemplified [the sexism black girls face], given the familiarity of the situation: kids fighting. But police aggressively responded to Ma’Khia because of sexism and racism, she argued. “Children fight all the time, regardless of race, regardless of class level,” she said. “When we think about Ma’Khia or other Black girls like her … they’re not given the chance to be in situations that could be de-escalated.”...

Ma’Khia’s mother, Paula Bryant, said she was an honor roll student and that she had a “motherly nature about her.” “She promoted peace. That’s something I want to always be remembered,” she told local TV station WBNS.

It’s those memories, Opara said, that journalists should make sure to include in coverage of the girl’s death. “Journalists need to stop for a second and reflect and think: ‘Would I talk about Ma’Khia this way if she was a White girl?’” she said. “We all really have to make a conscious effort to undo what we’ve learned in school and in the media.”

Does anyone really think that a white girl seen on video doing what Bryant did would get more respect than has been shown to Bryant? I think she'd get much less.

FROM THE EMAIL: Jim writes: 

I read your post and shortly thereafter came across a related comment from Justice Thomas in a footnote to his opinion in Jones v. Mississippi, released this morning, on p. 5 where he comments : 

The Court’s language in this line of precedents is notable. When addressing juvenile murderers, this Court has stated that “ ‘children are different’ ” and that courts must consider “a child’s lesser culpability.” Montgomery, 577 U. S., at 207–208 (emphasis added). And yet, when assessing the Court-created right of an individual of the same age to seek an abortion, Members of this Court take pains to emphasize a “young woman’s” right to choose. See, e.g., Lambert v. Wicklund, 520 U. S. 292, 301 (1997) (Stevens, J., joined by Ginsburg and BREYER, JJ., concurring in judgment) (emphasis added); Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pa. v. Casey, 505 U. S. 833, 899 (1992) (joint opinion of O’Connor, Kennedy, and Souter, JJ.); Ohio v. Akron Center for Reproductive Health, 497 U. S. 502, 532 (1990) (Blackmun, J., joined by Brennan and Marshall, JJ., dissenting). It is curious how the Court’s view of the maturity of minors ebbs and flows depending on the issue. 

I think there is a tendency to attribute adulthood/maturity to a minor when it serves another purpose of the speaker/writer.

Yes, there is a new Supreme Court case on exactly this subject. The majority opinion is by Kavanaugh, joined by Roberts, Alito, Gorsuch, and Barrett. Thomas's opinion is a concurrence. And the 3 liberal justices — Breyer, Sotomayor, and Kagan — dissent. Thomas is the only member of the Court who brings up abortion.

AND: Bill emails:

I have two comments: 

1. When I was a kid, even before puberty, it was common for authority-figure adults to call me "young man." Coaches in middle school and high school called us guys on the team "gentlemen." Depending on the context, it could feel like a reprimand or a sign of respect. It was "adultifying" in the sense that it carried with it an expectation that I would act a certain way. 

2. Apparently one must tread very, very carefully when remarking about a black person who appears to be in their late teens. Once a black person turns 18 years old, it is a terrible insult reminiscent of Jim Crow to refer to him or her as "boy" or "girl." But the day before that black person turns 18, it is "adultification" (also reminiscent of Jim Crow, probably) to refer to him or her as "young man" or "young woman."

"The investigation I am announcing today will assess whether the Minneapolis Police Department engages in a pattern or practice of using excessive force including during protests."

Said Attorney General Merrick Garland, quoted in "Attorney General Merrick Garland announces an investigation into the Minneapolis Police Department" (NYT).

So-called pattern-or-practice investigations are often the precursors to consent decrees, court-approved deals between the Justice Department and local governments that create and enforce a road map for training and operational changes.... The Obama administration had repeatedly used the tool to address police misconduct. The restoration of consent decrees was one of the Biden administration’s first significant moves to hold police forces accountable in cases where they are found to have violated federal laws. 

FROM THE EMAIL: Mattman26 writes:

Good for the Biden Administration for committing to ferreting out the racism in the Democratic Party!

The whole “City X last had a Republican mayor in [year]” thing has become kind of an all-purpose giggle line for righties (myself included).

But seriously here: Except for a weird one-day thing, Minneapolis has had nothing but Democratic mayors dating back to the early sixties. The City Council (per Wiki), which governs the PD, has 12 Democrats and one Green (and that’s it). The Chief (nominated by the mayor, approved by the City Council) is a Black man who has held the post since 2017, and whom you’d have to guess is not a Republican (not because he’s Black, but because he got the job). And I’d guess you’d have to go way back in time to find a Chief who wasn’t Democrat-leaning.

So who hires these cops? Who trains them? Who disciplines them? Who provides their rules of engagement? It’s Democrats all the way down.

AND: Jeffrey emails: 

I didn't watch all of the Derrick Chauvin trial, but I watched enough to know that central themes included that his actions were far outside the norm of policing, as trained or practiced in the Minneapolis Police Department. So what happens to this ex-cop, oh-so hung out to dry by his department, when it is found that the problem wasn't that he was a rogue cop, but that he was literally doing what he understood to be his job? Doesn't that go to the whole "reasonable police officer" standard at the heart of the case? Shouldn't they have been announcing this investigation just like they were announcing the 8-figure settlement the city reached with the Floyd family? I mean, if we're improperly influencing the jury, shouldn't we do so in a balanced way?

Chauvin guilty on all counts.

I'm sure that is an immense relief to many, many people

From the NYT:

Outside the building in Minneapolis where the verdict was read, there was a shout — “Guilty!” — and then an eruption of cheers. When all the counts came back guilty, the cheer changed: “All three counts!”...

At George Floyd Square, the memorial to where Floyd was killed, a woman nearly collapses in tears. When she straightens, she manages to croak out, “We matter. We matter.” 

***

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"Yes, a book claiming objectivity on abortion (if that is indeed what Barrett produces) would just be a continuation of the dishonesty of Supreme Court nominees..."

"... acting as though they haven’t really thought much about the most heavily discussed and controversial cases in the history of constitutional law. Once confirmed, most of them fall silent until they actually rule on the relevant cases. Maybe Barrett’s book deal is in fact a big advance on a tome she will write after she has helped overturn Roe — in which case, she could publish a book of recipes or something about her stamp collection and grateful anti-abortion activists would snap it up. And at that point no one would much care whether her 'personal feelings' had anything to do with the chore Trump placed her on the Court to perform as part of his transactional relationship with the Christian Right."

Writes Ed Kilgore — with over-the-top hostility — in the "Justice Barrett Gets $2 Million Deal to Tell Readers What They Don’t Want to Hear" (NY Magazine). 

"What They Don't Want to Hear" is the discussion of the role of a judge in following the law without interposing personal feelings. Kilgore assumes the people who would buy a book written by Amy Coney Barrett are simply those who believe abortion is murder and want it stopped, however it can be stopped. 

Kilgore's basis for accusation is thin. He speaks of "the chore Trump placed her on the Court to perform," but Barrett has life tenure and free of any "chores" that must be performed. And I don't think Trump is much of an abortion opponent. He many have won the votes of the "Christian Right," but now that the elections are over, he's not in a "transactional relationship" with these people. Trump had the power to appoint when he had it, and he used it to make an appointment of a person that he knew would be on her own once sworn in. Kilgore scribbles about a deal was made and remains alive, and I guess that's what he gets paid for. And isn't that's what New York Magazine subscribers pay to hear?

***

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"All that transpired played a role in his condition," said the medical examiner, in the case of Officer Brian D. Sicknick, who died after the January 6th breaching of the Capitol.

"His office said that it attributes death to natural causes when it can be ascribed to disease alone and that 'if death is hastened by an injury, the manner of death is not considered natural.'" Yet the medical examiner, Francisco J. Diaz, determined that Sicknick died of "natural causes."

I'm reading "Officer Attacked in Capitol Riot Died of Strokes, Medical Examiner Rules The determination is likely to complicate efforts to prosecute anyone in the death of the officer, Brian Sicknick" (NYT).

"The determination is likely to complicate the Justice Department’s efforts to prosecute anyone in the death of Officer Sicknick, 42; two men have been charged with assaulting him by spraying an unknown chemical on him outside the Capitol. But an autopsy found no evidence that Officer Sicknick had an allergic reaction to chemicals or any internal or external injuries.... Two men were charged last month with assaulting Officer Sicknick, but prosecutors have avoided linking the attack to his death...."

That's written confusingly. If "prosecutors have avoided linking the attack to his death," then what are the "efforts to prosecute anyone in the death of Officer Sicknick"? The assault is an assault regardless of whether it caused a death that happened to occur soon afterward. But there's also that discrepancy between what the medical examiner said — "All that transpired played a role in his condition" — and the assertion that the finding of death by "natural causes" excludes the idea that death "was hastened by an injury."

Not discussed in the New York Times article is the way the media ran with the notion that the Capitol protesters had killed a cop. That's the legend they created, and I bet that legend will live.

FROM THE EMAIL: I'm getting a lot of email, much of it expanding what I've already said in that last paragraph. I get the sense many readers need that to be said more elongatedly, more emphatically. But let me give you this emailed comment, from James. It's short and pithy, and it kicks things up with an observation that I didn't make — speculation that there was deliberate delay to give life to the legend:

Maybe the reason prosecutors have not tried to link anyone to Officer Sicknick’s death or charge anyone with homicide is that they have known for months that he died of natural causes and there was no homicide. The powers that be just did not bother to let the rest of us know this until after the “they killed a cop” narrative was firmly rooted in the public mind.

ALSO: Glenn Greenwald is especially outraged for the way other journalists treated him: 

Because of its centrality to the media narrative and agenda, anyone who tried to point out the serious factual deficiencies in this story — in other words, people trying to be journalists — were smeared by Democratic Party loyalists who pretend to be journalists as "Sicknick Truthers,” white nationalist sympathizers, and supporters of insurrection.

For the crime of trying to determine the factual truth of what happened, my character was constantly impugned by these propagandistic worms, as was anyone else's who tried to tell the truth about Sicknick's tragic death. Because one of the first people to highlight the journalistic truth here was former Trump official Darren Beattie of Revolver News and one of the few people on television willing to host doubts about the official story was Tucker Carlson, any doubts about the false Sicknick story — no matter how well-grounded in truth, facts, reason and evidence — were cast as fascism and white supremacy, and those raising questions smeared as "truthers”: the usual dreary liberal insults for trying to coerce people into submitting to their lies....

"I wish elected officials would stop talking about this case, especially in a manner that is disrespectful to the rule of law and to the judicial branch and our function."

"I think if they want to give their opinions, they should do so in a respectful and in a manner that is consistent with their oath to the Constitution to respect a coequal branch of government. Their failure to do so I think is abhorrent, but I don't think it has prejudiced us with additional material that would prejudice this jury." 

Said Hennepin County District Judge Peter Cahill, the judge in the Derek Chauvin case, quoted in "Jury ends first day of deliberating with no verdicts in Derek Chauvin murder trial/With the dismissals of the alternates, the jury of 12 is now half white and half people of color" (Star Tribune). 

It's a hopeless wish. People are going to talk. And disrespect is part of human expression. An important part. The rule of law is one of the all-time great ideals, but the way the law plays out in real life deserves — and benefits from — the expression of disrespect. It's fine for the judge to wish for respect, but it's up to him to do what earns respect. 

His main point here is to deny that there has been a mistrial because of what's been said out there in public, particularly what Rep. Maxine Waters said — that protesters need to get "more confrontational" if there is no guilty verdict. It's horrible to think that all the hard work of conducting a trial could be squandered by one wild-talking politician. Of course Cahill denied the motion.

But does the threat of riots unfairly prejudice the jury — and does Waters's one inflammatory statement make all the difference? What does "more confrontational mean"? It could just mean bigger, louder, more passionate demonstrations. But perhaps we're supposed to know that she meant destruction and violence — just like the way the supporters of the last impeachment were sure that when Trump urged people in the street to "fight like hell," everyone was supposed to know he advocated criminal disorder.

***

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"Any law is only as good as the people that are enforcing it. Does it make sense we took away the gun because he’s too dangerous to have one, but we didn’t take the step to prevent him from going out and buying one the next day?"

Said Brad Banks, a former prosecutor in Marion County (location of Indianapolis), quoted in "In Indianapolis Shooting, a Red Flag That Never Flew/Red flag laws are supposed to keep guns away from people who should not have them. That did not happen with the gunman who killed eight people in Indianapolis." 

The headline is obfuscatory. Why can't they say it straight, in a way that challenges the people who cry out for more laws? The Indianapolis Shooter Was Legally Barred From Purchasing a Gun, But the Seller Sold One to Him Anyway. 

But is my proposed clear headline correct? I had to comb through the article trying to find the answer. It wasn't easy!

In March 2020, Mr. Hole’s mother approached officers at a Police Department roll call and told them she believed that her son was having suicidal thoughts and might even try to commit “suicide by cop,” the chief of the Indianapolis Metropolitan Police, Randal Taylor, said on Sunday....

When the police arrived at the house, Mr. Hole’s mother “asked him to come down,” the chief said. “When he does, they’d already felt they had enough information to do the needed detention.” Mr. Hole, who was 18 at the time, was taken to a hospital on a “mental health temporary hold,” according to Paul Keenan, the special agent in charge of the F.B.I.’s Indianapolis office.

Having been told about a shotgun that Mr. Hole had recently purchased, an officer at the house went upstairs to take it, the chief said, and saw on the young man’s computer “some stuff about some white supremacy ideations and those kind of things.”

Federal investigators would interview Mr. Hole about those discoveries the next month, though they would conclude that he did not harbor an ideology of “racially motivated violent extremism.”...

I'm trying to cut the text down as much as possible as I try to focus on why the gun law didn't work in this case, but I'm leaving in the white supremacy material because it's such a big topic, and it feels as thought the reader is getting detoured into the subject of controlling not guns but hateful thoughts. But I'm more than halfway into the article, and I still don't know why the existing gun law did not work.

The seizure of weapons under red flag laws is often temporary. In Indiana, once a weapon is taken by the police, prosecutors have 14 days to justify the seizure to a judge. If such a determination is not made, the firearms are immediately returned.

But the shotgun seized from Hole was never returned, so this does not yet address the lapse that led to Hole's having a gun.

But if the judge decides the person in question is so unstable that he or she should not be permitted to have guns, the police hold onto the seized weapons, and the person is barred from possessing any guns for at least six months. The permanent seizure of Mr. Hole’s shotgun would therefore suggest that prosecutors had sought and obtained a red flag determination. But this apparently did not happen....

So where was the lapse?

Ryan Mears, the Marion County prosecutor, said in an interview at a vigil on Saturday that he did not know what had happened in this case. But he suggested, posing a hypothetical, that the authorities might have taken the gun in response to pleas from concerned family members, and considered the crisis resolved. “What could have occurred,” Mr. Mears said, “is the point was: ‘Let’s get the gun out of there, make sure the gun is not returned,’ if that was the agreement that was made. And I’m not saying that it is the case. But there’s no reason to go in front of the judge at that point in time, because the point is we want to take the weapon away.”

What "point in time" is he talking about? Why isn't Mears informed about this particular case? Something obviously went wrong. The people had their important gun control law. Hole's mother did what she could, and so did the police. Why is Mears talking about "mak[ing] sure the gun is not returned" when the question here is why was this dangerous young man allowed to buy a gun when, under the red flag law, he should have been barred from purchasing a gun?

[W]ithout a red flag restriction, Mr. Hole would go on to buy two powerful firearms within the next six or seven months. For those who have studied the evolution of red flag laws, Mr. Hole may turn out to be a tragic example of their shortcomings.

The NYT never tells us that the Indiana statute has a provision not only for seizing guns but for barring the future purchase of guns! It speaks of the "evolution of red flag laws" and "their shortcomings" as if the problem is in the text of the law. But the problem was in using the provisions of the law! Here's how the article ends: 

In practice, experts say containing more chronic threats like Mr. Hole might be beyond the laws’ reaches, in their current forms. “Maybe it prevented something for a year, or six months,” [said Aaron J. Kivisto, a psychology professor at the University of Indianapolis]. “And then it wasn’t enough.”

But what wasn't enough? The text of the law or the actions of those with the responsibility to enforce it? Instead of mushing up this article with the "maybe" musings of the psychology professor, the NYT should shine a harsh light on the prosecutors. Why did these killings happen? The young man was apparently quite obviously mentally ill and dangerous, and his poor mother did what she could. So did the police, it seems. The legislation was on the books. 

My proposed clear headline is wrong, I believe. I think that there was some failure, the fault of the prosecution or the court, that caused there not to be a bar on Hole's purchasing of a gun. I don't think the seller was at fault. Correct  me if I'm wrong. 

Must I answer that question I asked above: "Why can't [the NYT] say it straight, in a way that challenges the people who cry out for more laws?" The answer seems obvious: The NYT prefers to heat up the demand for more gun laws. 

FROM THE EMAIL: Ozymandias writes:

Chief Taylor is first reported to be baffled by the absence of a judicial detention order: 

The permanent seizure of Mr. Hole’s shotgun would therefore suggest that prosecutors had sought and obtained a red flag determination. But this apparently did not happen. “For whatever reason,” Chief Taylor said, “that never made it to the court.” 

But later in the piece, there’s this: 

Still, this would not explain how the authorities legally held on to the shotgun after the 14 days. But the chief said Mr. Hole called at one point and said that “he didn’t want the weapons back.” 

“It’s not uncommon,” the chief said. “People realize, you know, ‘Maybe I shouldn’t have it.’  

[Emphasis added.] 

It seems no judicial order was sought because Hole agreed to the seizure after the gun was taken, and perhaps before the 14-day deadline for a red-flag order had expired. There was no order on record, Hole was apparently free to buy more guns. 

Such flaccid, meandering writing. Looks like the Times needed another article on the shooting, so they published one before they had figured out a clear story. Quote in the fifth paragraph even lacks closing parentheses.

Yes, that is incredibly garbled. I could be more compassionate toward the NYT. My assumption was they used a template: We need more gun legislation. Your idea is: They rushed to publish a story that they didn't even understand. Either way, it's defective journalism.

AND: Amadeus 48 writes:

This problem (possession of guns by deranged persons) is perhaps one of these things in life to which there is no solution. But the bright and ambitious people who populate our various governments never want to have THAT discussion. In a country where there are already hundreds of millions of guns, we are never really going to be able to corral even a significant fraction of them. Plus, citizens do have the right to defend themselves. We may have to live with this problem, as we have done. And, as this article hints, we don’t enforce the gun laws we have.

When we were in the thrall of the last mayoral election in Chicago, the leading candidates all came serially to a forum of which I am a member. As we all know, the south and west sides of the city have become a shooting range. I asked each candidate what they proposed to do about the surging violence. Each of them said, “Pass tighter gun laws.” When I pointed out that the prosecutors and courts weren’t enforcing the gun laws we have, which are quite strict, they blamed Indiana and Wisconsin in a non-sequitur. Each of them did this, without knowing what the others said. My conclusion was that they didn’t know what to do, so they default to “pass more gun laws” and attempt to change the subject.

ALSO: Another reader emails: "Ryan Mears is a Democrat. There will be no examination of the failures of his office. Reading the article triggered my 'name that party' sense."

Bob Ross, resurrected to paint a Mountain Dew ad, is welcome even as it obstructs the "Repo Man" clip I wanted to find.

For once, I am not annoyed — I am the opposite of annoyed — by the ad YouTube served up in front of the video I wanted to watch: 

 

Well, that's just great. Good to know the beloved dead man is refreshed. 

There is a Bible verse about tending to the thirst of a dead man: "And he cried and said, 'Father Abraham, have mercy on me, and send Lazarus that he may dip the tip of his finger in water and cool my tongue; for I am tormented in this flame.'" 

Yet no one pictures Bob Ross in hell. It is more likely that you would picture him in a Heaven that resembles his paintings, and I'm sure that picture has abundant water features, with painterly tree reflections. Still, you weren't picturing Paradise with soda, were you? Maybe you were! There's that song about Paradise with cigarette trees and a soda water fountain.

Now to the serious business of this post, the "Repo Man" clip: 

 

That's the pine-tree-shaped air freshener that the repo man will find in every repossessed car. I needed to look up that clip because I was about to read the NYT article, "Why Police Can Stop Motorists With Air Fresheners Hanging in Their Cars/A majority of states have laws making it illegal to hang anything from a rearview mirror that obscures a driver’s view. But critics say the laws are often used as pretexts." 

I haven't read the article yet, but I'd say that hanging something from the rearview mirror is an activity associated with the lower class. There's a bit of a safety issue, but it's easy to suspect that these laws justify traffic stops of people the police might want to intrude upon. And we have a recent incident in which a young man was shot to death, apparently by accident, after he was stopped, we were originally told, for having an air freshener hanging from his rearview mirror.

Now, I've read the article. I'd summarize it like this. There's a legitimate, though fairly small, safety issue, but not every car with something hanging from the rearview mirror is stopped, so there is room for racial animus to play a role in who is stopped and how that person is treated after they are stopped.

The article ends with an anecdote about a woman who, at 35 years of age, still feels traumatized by a traffic stop over an air freshener that happened when she was in high school:

“He kept asking me questions like he wanted to trip me up,” said Ms. Mixon, who is Black....

“If I get in a car with somebody and they have something hanging from their mirror, I’m like, ‘Can you take that down?’” Ms. Mixon said. “Being a Black passenger might trigger something in a racist cop, so let’s just remove that altogether from the situation.”

***

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"Madison residents sue over college financial aid program limited to certain students of color."

The Wisconsin State Journal reports: 

A law firm representing conservative interests, the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty, filed the action against the Higher Educational Aids Board in Jefferson County Circuit Court.... The board administers the Minority Undergraduate Retention Grant program, which provides students of color with up to $2,500 per year to offset the cost of college....  State law restricts program eligibility to African American, American Indian, Hispanic and some Southeast Asian students.

WILL argues the program criteria amounts to racial discrimination — which is prohibited by the state constitution — because students who are Thai, Chinese, Japanese, Indian, North African, Native Hawaiian, Pacific Islander, or white don't qualify....

The program has been around since the 1980s.

WILL has taken a recent interest in reviewing laws and programs through a lens of racial equality.... Those include minority business grants or preferences, loan forgiveness programs and a racial quota for the city of Madison's Police Civilian Oversight Board....

You might think that these programs would all have been challenged when they were first adopted and that there should already be a judicial answer to the question — which is glaringly obvious — whether this is illegal race discrimination. I think the only new item on that list is the racial quota for the city of Madison's Police Civilian Oversight Board. 

I note that the law suit was filed in state court and the claim is based on state constitutional law. 

(To comment, you can email me here.)

"Congressional Democrats will introduce legislation Thursday to expand the Supreme Court from nine to 13 justices..."

NBC News reports.

The Democratic bill is led by Sen. Ed Markey of Massachusetts and Rep. Jerry Nadler of New York, the chair of the House Judiciary Committee. It is co-sponsored by Reps. Hank Johnson of Georgia and Mondaire Jones of New York. The Supreme Court can be expanded by an act of Congress, but the legislation is highly unlikely to become law in the near future given Democrats' slim majorities, which include scores of lawmakers who are not on board with the idea. President Joe Biden has said he is 'not a fan' of packing the court....

Last week, Biden announced the formation of a commission of liberals and conservatives to study the structure of the Supreme Court, including the number of justices and the length of their service.

"To study the structure" ≈ to quietly kill the idea. So Markey and Nadler are stepping on their President's subtle manipulation. Another way of putting that is they could see what Biden was doing, so now is precisely the time to get out in front of him.

ADDED: I'm strongly opposed to enlarging the Court. I'm just saying I can see Markey and Nadler's motivation.

FROM THE EMAIL: Rob writes:

Based on the flood of Republican emails in my inbox today, I wouldn’t discount fundraising as a significant motivation for the Markey/Nadler Court-packing bill. (I assume a mirror image of that deluge has hit every D or progressive inbox today.) As with abortion, both sides can raise prodigious amounts of money off the threat of Court-packing. The fact that decisive action is always “just another election cycle away” is a feature, not a bug.

"Azaria, who is White..."

Is he?

I'm trying to read the WaPo article, "Hank Azaria apologizes for playing Apu on ‘The Simpsons’ for three decades." 

I've already blogged about this apology, so I'm not rehashing that. I just want to focus on the unsupported assertion that Azaria "is White." 

If Azaria is White, maybe Apu is also White. 

The question whether people from India are white has been litigated in the United States. From Wikipedia's article "Racial classification of Indian Americans": 

Throughout much of the early 20th century, it was necessary for immigrants to be considered white in order to receive U.S. citizenship. U.S. courts classified Indians as both white and non-white through a number of cases. In 1909, Bhicaji Balsara became the first Indian to gain U.S. citizenship. As a Parsi, he was ruled to be "the purest of Aryan type" and "as distinct from Hindus as are the English who dwell in India”....

In 1923, the Supreme Court decided in United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind that while Indians were classified as Caucasians by anthropologists, people of Indian descent were not white by common American definition, and thus not eligible to citizenship. The court conceded that, while Thind was a high caste Hindu born in the northern Punjab region and classified by certain scientific authorities as of the Aryan race, he was not "White" since the word Aryan "has to do with linguistic and not necessarily with physical characteristics" and since "the average man knows perfectly well that there are unmistakable and profound differences" between Indians and white Americans....

Much more at the link. It's complicated, but there is an argument that people of Indian ancestry are white.

In 1989, the East–West Center published a research paper about Indian Americans that said that the term, "Asian Indian," one of the fourteen "Races" in the 1980 US Census, is an "artificial census category and not a meaningful racial, ethnic, or ancestral designation."...

The 1990 U.S. Census classified write-in responses of "Aryan" as white even though write-in responses of "Indo-Aryan" were counted as Asian, and the 1990 US Census classified write-in responses of "Parsi" under Iranian American, who are classified as White along with Arab Americans and other Middle Eastern Americans.

Maybe there's a "Simpsons" episode where Apu fills out the census form. If he checks "White" or writes in "Aryan," would it be okay for Hank Azaria to do the voice, or are accents always wrong? When British actors do America accents, are we offended? If not, maybe it's offensive to make a different case out of an American doing an Indian accent. Or is it the comic exaggeration that's wrong? Would it be wrong for a British actor to comically exaggerate an American accent?

Now, back to my original question. Is Hank Azaria white (or "White," to put it in WaPo's format)? He is not a very light-skinned person and his name seems Spanish. I feel rather disgusting investigating a person's race, but I feel forced into it by WaPo's bland, blank assertion. I'm skeptical when I see a closed door like that. 

I check Wikipedia:

Henry Albert Azaria was born in the Queens borough of New York City on April 25, 1964, the son of Sephardic Jewish parents Ruth Altcheck and Albert Azaria. His grandparents on both sides were Jews from Thessaloniki [Greece], whose ancestors had been expelled from Spain following the Alhambra Decree. His family's spoken language at home was Ladino, also known as Judaeo-Spanish, which he described as "a strange, antiquated Spanish dialect written in Hebrew characters."

Are Sephardic Jews white/White? Read about the Sephardic Jews here. I'll just say that the history of human beings is too complex, nuanced, and tragic to write "Azaria, who is White...."  

FROM THE EMAIL: Leora writes:

My mother did pro bono work for the ACLU getting restrictive covenants removed in Tompkins County. Restrictive covenants in upstate NY commonly excluded Negroes, Armenians, Gypsies and Jews. I don’t recall Hindus or Chinese ever coming up. I always put Human when asked for my race.

And Two-Eyed Jack writes:

I would argue that the white/nonwhite issue in Thind is, at its heart, a question of intermarriage and concern that it would fail. The concern in the US was with the potential of creating a population of people who would not be assimilated into the broader population through intermarriage. This lay behind much of the anti-Chinese feeling and, I would say, the real reason for excluding Indians. This is what the decision actually says about the limits of “whiteness”:

The children of English, French, German, Italian, Scandinavian, and other European parentage, quickly merge into the mass of our population and lose the distincitive hallmarks of their European origin. On the other hand, it cannot be doubted that the children born in this country of Hindu parents would retain indefinitely the clear evidence of their ancestry. It is very far from our thought to suggest the slightest question of racial superiority or inferiority. What we suggest is merely racial difference, and it is of such character and extent that the great body of our people instinctively recognize it and reject the thought of assimilation.

"Mr. Jacobs’s parody of the Great American Songbook prompted Irving Berlin and a group of song publishers representing the work of Cole Porter, Rodgers and Hammerstein and others to sue..."

"... Mad’s parent company, E.C. Publications, for copyright infringement. At issue was 'Sing Along With Mad,' a pullout section published in 1961 that consisted entirely of song parodies by Mr. Jacobs and Larry Siegel. Among them were 'Louella Schwartz Describes Her Malady' (a lampoon of Berlin’s 'A Pretty Girl Is Like a Melody') and 'The First Time I Saw Maris' (a spoof of Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II’s 'The Last Time I Saw Paris'), about the commercialization of the Yankee slugger Roger Maris during the season he hit a record-breaking 61 home runs.... In his opinion, [2d Circuit] Judge Irving R. Kaufman (most famous for presiding over Julius and Ethel Rosenberg’s espionage trial) wrote, 'The fact that defendants’ parodies were written in the same meter as plaintiffs’ compositions would seem inevitable if the original was to be recognized, but such a justification is not even necessary; we doubt that even so eminent a composer as plaintiff Irving Berlin should be permitted to claim a property interest in iambic pentameter.'"

From "Frank Jacobs, Mad Magazine Writer With a Lyrical Touch, Dies at 91/He deftly mocked pop culture, politics and more for 57 years/He also wrote new lyrics for familiar songs, which led to a lawsuit from Irving Berlin and others" (NYT).

1961 — I think that's about when I discovered Mad. I was 10! It was the first thing I ever subscribed to. The writings of Frank Jacobs played such an important role in the development of my young mind.

(To comment, you need to email me — here.)

FROM THE EMAIL: Retail Lawyer:

I started reading Mad around 1961 as well! I was 10 years old. I think I may have been a bit “culturally deprived” because I think I often heard the Mad parody of songs before I heard the actual songs.

Ha ha. Me too.

And the parodies made a greater impression. “He tousled his hair so carefully, that now he the leader of the whole country.” From Pirates of Penzance. About JFK. I believe it came out while the country was mourning his assassination. Now I believe that Gavin Newsom is my governor because he tousled his hair so carefully.

AND: Craig wrote: 

I have a 10-year-old son who could benefit from a subscription to Mad Magazine, the way it used to be. I want my kids to grow up questioning everything. He does read the newspaper comics every day, which I think is great for him, but in general there are too many sacred cows these days. As you say, it's the era of "That's Not Funny". I wonder how the erasure of subversive comedy from mainstream culture will affect the developing minds of the next generation.

Kay writes: 

I believe The Simpsons may have played the same role for kids of my generation that Mad Magazine did for kids of yours. But my dad introduced me to the magazine when I was pretty young, and I loved it immediately. In the 80’s a lot of Mad (in magazine and also paperback form) had reprints of the classic Mads from the 60’s and 70’s. It taught me a lot about American pop culture and history in general. Love Sergio Argones, Antonio Prohías, Duck Edwing, Al Jaffee. The parodies, the illustrations, the fold-outs. Yes!

The fold-out era is after my time.

Or is it fold-in? Yeah, Wikipedia says "fold-in."

Mad publisher Bill Gaines joked that he was a fan of the Fold-In because he knew that serious collectors valued pristine, unfolded copies, and would therefore be inspired to purchase two copies of each issue: one to fold and another to preserve intact.

The oldest fold-ins were from 1964. I was 13 and had moved on to fashion magazines and music magazines.)

ALSO: Ozymandias writes: 

Mad’s humor—which in 1961 ran from the utterly silly to razor-sharp satire to something nearly absurdist—provided us pre-adolescents with much laughter and delight, but its broader and subtler effect was to lift kids out of the daily slog of home, school, TV, etc., and introduce them to possibilities of more critical perspectives of the culture in which they lived.

Mad’s pages were packed with a sophisticated range of contrasting references, familiar and the foreign, drawn from high and low culture. (I remember one piece that had Maria Callas appearing on Dick Clark’s American Bandstand with the in-studio teen audience obliviously boogying to Callas’s aria).

Mad seldom played down to its readers. One had to expand one’s field of learning and information to “get” the humor. One parody of the Cold War, “East Side Story,” portrayed numerous early ’60’s world leaders as members of opposing “gangs” in “rumbles” at the UN (Krushchev in leather jacket and jeans!). One of the parody songs included a reference to Krishna Menon, even then a somewhat obscure Indian Communist leader.

Mad’s nonchalant sardonicism was thus something of a model and incubator for kid’s nascent critical thinking skills. The humor was never mean, but an implicit aspect of Mad’s “takes” on mid-century life in America was that, by sabotaging sacred cows and shibboleths, humor could also serve to clear the field of much of nonsense in favor of whatever better things might remain.

"The danger in presenting a defense case, especially in a prosecution that is so video-dependent, is that it allows the prosecutor..."

"... through leading questions on cross-examination, to walk witnesses through the video, explaining to the jury moment-by-moment exactly what the prosecution’s theory of the case is. If he does this skillfully, the prosecutor turns his 'questioning' into the equivalent of a summation.... In addition to stressing Chauvin’s patent awareness that Floyd was in pain, the prosecutor had the witness concede that the defendant had been told by his fellow officers that Floyd had lost consciousness, ought to be rolled over on his side (to facilitate breathing), and had no pulse. While defense attorney Eric Nelson had made much of the crowd presence and the possibility that it could pose a threat to the police, Schleicher had Brodd conceding that the crowd was small and posed no threat to the police.... The foundation of Chauvin’s defense is that he had reason to fear that Floyd would regain consciousness and begin resisting arrest again. Schleicher elicited from Brodd the explanation that there is a difference between a threat and a risk: Police may use force to counter a threat they perceive based on some affirmative act by a detainee; but they may not use force based on a mere risk that a detainee might pose a threat at some future point."

From "Chauvin Defense Expert Destroyed on the Stand" by Andrew McCarthy (at National Review). 

FROM THE EMAIL: Omaha1 writes:

I agree that things are not looking good for Chauvin at this point. But the defense part of the trial is just starting. Legal Insurrection has been covering the Chauvin trial and there many defects in the prosecution's case, which are not being covered in the mainstream media. My prediction is that Chauvin will be convicted of manslaughter. The jurors will be afraid to acquit him entirely, fearing that an acquittal could fuel further violent, nationwide riots, for which they might be held responsible. Of course for the media more riots would be beneficial, more clicks, more exciting footage of burning and looting. So in my humble opinion the media is trying to make it seem like some kind of murder conviction is inevitable, and if this does not happen it is evidence of racist jurors or unfairness in the judicial system.

"Cambodia’s Ministry of Culture and Fine Arts has said that an Ireland-based photo restoration artist broke the country’s archive law after he digitally colourised and added smiles..."

"... to images of genocide victims. VICE has removed an article showcasing Matt Loughrey’s work, whilst a petition demanding an apology gained traction on Sunday evening.... ... Cambodia’s Ministry of Culture and Fine Arts said on Sunday that the photos 'are in violation of the dignity of Cambodian Genocide victims and of the rights of the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum… We urge researchers, artists and the public not to manipulate any historical source to respect the victims.'... The project received a widespread backlash on social media with many calling it 'tasteless,' 'racist' and 'tone-deaf.'... Cambodia-based photojournalist John Vink was among the critics on Twitter: 'Matt Loughrey in Vice is not colourising S21 photographs. He is falsifying history,' he tweeted."  

Hong Kong Free Press reports. 

I can't imagine that Loughrey thought he was doing something that was anything other than uplifting and kindly, making a nice image of a real person from a photograph captured under horrific circumstances. I don't think what he did was racist, but it was poor judgment — by Loughrey and by VICE. There shouldn't be laws against artistic poor judgment, and I would think the intense disapproval is enough. But Cambodia has its own laws.

FROM THE EMAIL: Colin writes:

The people sent to this prison were tortured and then executed, usually in the most brutal and horrific fashion. After a few months of operation, essentially everyone in Cambodia knew that NO ONE got out from Tuol Sleng Prison. These people in the photos were all facing terror and death with no hope of reprieve or escape. 20,000 people passed into this place, there were just 12 known survivors. Putting smiles on these people’s faces is an abomination. It makes a mockery of what they were facing.

I agree it's bad, but I am nearly certain Loughrey meant well. It's an example of embarrassingly bad judgment, not any sort of evil. It's a shame VICE saw fit to highlight his work. 

AND: The reader Tina emails:

It’s easier to understand VICE’s motive for whitewashing the horror of communist concentration camp victim photos if you first understand that VICE is just a hip iteration of old-school anti-America demoralization agitprop for disaffected truthers types of both political flavors, funded by the usual suspects, as are Al Jazeera, RT, Unz Review, Alex Jones, Voltaire Network, Nation Magazine, etc. Also, of course, they get a permanent pass for concentration camp whitewash stuff because they courageously cancelled Gavin McInnes.

AND: Laura writes: 

Thank you for this post. It prompted me to think remember the work of French artist Christian Boltanski, specifically this piece, Gymnasium Chases from 1991. 

Boltanski has taken school photos of Jewish teenagers from the 1930s and recreated them so that they are out of focus and distorted. It turns the smiling young people’s faces into death’s heads. This is a class looking forward to a future of unfathomable horror - only they don’t know it. It’s a moving piece of art: a memoriam to a time, place and people extinguished by the Holocaust. It reminds us of the fragility of what we take for granted and the plans we make. It’s not beautiful; it hits us in the gut. 

The photos from Tuol Sleng Prison are a kind of class photo too, although of course these “students” know they’re staring into the abyss. To distort their expressions into happy school kid smiles dishonors the dead and the horror they faced. It’s bad art too. It invites you to scroll by this powerful and moving archive they same way you would an uninteresting series of Instagram posts, just another set of images to see and forget. It doesn’t have a power to shift you so you see the world differently, in my mind the test of whether work of conceptual art really is art. 

Thank you for the blog. I’ve been a reader for a long time - since 2005 I think. Never commented before now - so I have to say I like the new format. It’s appropriate for the moment we are in now.

Thanks, Laura.

Here's Boltanski's work:

ALSO: Tina writes again: 

In the early 90's I was responsible for Hmong and Cambodian community outreach for the CDC programs in Atlanta. And I got to know a lot of them, nonverbally.

By nonverbally, I mean that they were so traumatized and detached from knowing written language that they communicated entirely through physical contact. I entirely believe the story that they didn't know what cameras were when subjected to those photographs, and so it is especially cruel to manipulate those shocked and shocking images. In addition, their religious beliefs included baseline ideas about stealing a soul through physical images, and I cannot believe the VICE crew nor the "colorizer" knew nothing of this. It's the first thing you learn about this community, for eff's sake.

Both Cambodian men and women held my hand without any sense of discomfort, and I learned to love that about them. I placed several of the men in work at the Georgia World Congress Center, where the Vietnamese and Chinese men I knew were instructed to not screw with them -- on threat of consequences.

I was the consequence. I was already quite aware of the abuses of these people by the more powerful Vietnamese and Chinese cabals. And they were cabals. There were Mexican cabals, black cabals, white cabals, Vietnamese cabals and Chinese cabals. Plus union cabals, anti-union cabals, Atlanta political cabals, Georgia legislature cabals, and Ted Turner, a cabal unto himself -- and a bozo of equal bozosity to his former wife, Jane Fonda. Idiots.

Since then, I've met many Cambodians through the Catholic Church. To a person, they are broken, traumatized, nonverbal, yet physically affectionate in ways Westerners may not understand. If you meet a Cambodian, gently hold his or her hand, say nothing, and you will be rewarded by a glimpse of the unending universe of their pain and survival.

But do not take pictures of them.

"If a government agent has knowledge that a minor under its care or supervision has exhibited symptoms of gender dysphoria, gender nonconformity, or otherwise demonstrates a desire to be treated in a manner incongruent with the minor’s sex..."

"... the government agent or entity with knowledge of that circumstance shall immediately notify, in writing, each of the minor’s parents, guardians, or custodians. The notice shall describe all of the relevant circumstances with reasonable specificity."

That's a proposed law in North Carolina (S.B. 514). It's quoted and mocked in "I am trying to report gender infractions in my kindergarten but don’t know what counts!" by Alexandra Petri (in WaPo).

What does it mean for a school kid to "desire to be treated in a manner incongruent with the minor’s sex." The school shouldn't be treating their children differently based on their sex in the first place. The child's desire should be meaningless. There should be only one kind of treatment. Unless you're talking about the bathrooms....

Petri writes: 

Who is the person in this state who understands gender well enough to feel that this was something worth enshrining in law and not just arbitrary and hurtful and a sledgehammer looking for a nail?... 

ADDED: Here's the whole text of the bill. The quoted subsection — truly puzzling taken out of context — fits under the heading "Protection of parental rights." The idea is that parents have a right to make decisions about their child's mental health care and about any gender treatments that might be offered to a child with gender dysphoria. 

A reader named Robert emails:

Take just the first notice-required circumstance: observed gender dysphoria.

Can anyone make the case that a school should NOT notify the parents? This is a mental 'condition' (I'm avoiding "illness" or "disorder" as labels) that appears to have a high correlation to suicidal ideation, so it would appear obvious to me that a school would be obliged, statute or no statute, to make the parents aware of that.

'Gender nonconfomity' or gender incongruent behavior may or may not have roots in gender dysphoria, but it would also very likely be linked with being bullied, social rejection and other childhood travails. Shouldn't the parents be aware of that, too?

What the law is attempting to address, I believe, is the perception that some teachers might be aligning themselves with their gender-troubled students as 'us-against-them,' meaning we enlightened trans-supporters versus parents with more traditional attitudes. Whatever you think about the whole transgender thing, there is no place for a school keeping secrets from parents, about their kids. They are the parents' kids, after all.

And Ozymandias emails: 

Except that the bill is written in the standard form of mandatory-reporting-of-child abuse/neglect statutes, one might almost mistake SB 514 for legislation designed to identify “nonconforming” children for purposes of referral to sex/gender transition clinics—an impression supported, if only superficially, by the detail that the bill’s requirements are initially imposed upon “a government agent . . . having knowledge” who is then referenced using the non-gender-conforming, anti-patriarchal, third-person impersonal possessive pronoun “its.”

Who says the NC legislature isn’t semi-woke?

AND: Jeff writes:

The folks who are telling us "gender is just a social construct" and is 100% NOT connected with biology exhibit remarkable confidence about just what it means to be of a particular gender, don't they? If gender is purely subjective, how can being what us oldies would call "feminine" be incongruent with a male gender identity? Gender has nothing to do with sex!

"I feel like it’s fucked up they have so much power they can get shoes cancelled. Freedom of expression gone out the window."

Said Lil Nas X, quoted in "Lil Nas X Satan Shoes will be recalled as part of settlement with Nike/Nike sued MSCHF Product Studio for trademark infringement over the black-and-red, devil-themed sneakers" (The Guardian). 

Can't you make shoes out of shoes — decorate them, bedazzle them — and then sell them? We won't get an official legal answer, because Lil Nas settled the case. Nike retains the threat of litigation over anyone who tries to use their shoes as a foundation for a fashion/art project. 

Lil Nas loses nothing other than the opportunity to fund litigation to establish the principle he speaks as though he cares about. But the shoes that were made — all 666 pairs of them — were sold in the first minute, and anyone who bought the shoes can now get a refund of the purchase price — $1018 — but no one will do that, because they're notorious, and they are clearly more valuable now that they've become so famous.  I see on eBay that a pair recently sold for $5,000, so only an ignoramus would participate in the recall.

Did anyone ever really believe that devil-themed sneakers were outrageous? Kids wear devil costumes at Halloween. The devil is not a big enough villain to make anything edgy in 2021... or in 1951. 

But Big Sneaker put its foot down, and ooh!, it's almost illicit to possess these things.

***

There is no comments section anymore, but you can email me here. Unless you say otherwise, I will presume you'd enjoy an update to this post with a quote from your email.

Justice Stephen G. Breyer said something very obvious about Supreme Court authority.

But he's authoritative, and he's pushing back liberal politicos, and he said it in a speech at Harvard Law School, so it's news, reported here, at "Justice Breyer says expanding the Supreme Court could erode trust" (WaPo). 

In remarks prepared for a speech at Harvard Law School, Breyer wrote that the court’s authority depends on “a trust that the court is guided by legal principle, not politics.”

He added: “Structural alteration motivated by the perception of political influence can only feed that perception, further eroding that trust.”

Some Democrats and liberal activists say that adding seats to the court is the only way to blunt the court’s conservative majority. They contend it is a proper and logical response to what they say was a form of court-packing by Senate Republicans....

In other words, "some Democrats" have made it clear that they want to use the Court as a political tool, and that's exactly why it would undermine the Court's authority. These Democrats are not the counterweight to Breyer's point. They are the foundation!  

“If the public sees judges as ‘politicians in robes,’ its confidence in the courts, and in the rule of law itself, can only diminish, diminishing the court’s power, including its power to act as a ‘check’ on the other branches,” he said.... “The court’s decision in the 2000 presidential election case, Bush v. Gore, is often referred to as an example of its favoritism of conservative causes,” Breyer said. “But the court did not hear or decide cases that affected the political disagreements arising out of the 2020 Trump v. Biden election.... It did uphold the constitutionality of Obamacare, the health care program favored by liberals. It did re-affirm precedents that favored a woman’s right to an abortion. It did find unlawful certain immigration, census, and other orders, rules, or regulations, favored by a conservative president.... These considerations convince me that it is wrong to think of the court as another political institution.” 

That suggests he would favor Court-packing if the Court became too predictably conservative. Court-packing is a threat, and it works to check the Court's power, but it's best to keep it as a threat, and — look! — the threat is working. If Congress carries out the threat, it will end the delicate game. You'll get your liberal Court, but everyone will see it as a bunch of political hacks, and everything it does will seem like undemocratic, elitist activism. 

But surely "some Democrats" will respond: It already is a bunch of political hacks and undemocratic, elitist activism. Maybe there was a Q&A at the Harvard session, and if there was, I'll bet somebody challenged Breyer with an assertion like that. I'd like to hear how he'd put his answer into words because I've long been a big fan of Breyer's way of thinking out loud. His written speech looks perfectly banal, but when he strings his real-time thoughts together, he's magnificent.

So I can only imagine how he would answer, and I can't quite figure out how to imitate his impromptu speech pattern. I supposed he'd have to subtly acknowledge that people do already think that the Court is political, but they don't think it that much, they still maintain some belief that it is principled, and if you throw that away, the liberal majority you wanted so badly will not have the clout to do all the good things you were hoping for. Best to play the long, long game and fill the openings as they arise in the general operation of the forces of nature. Then add a chuckle-worthy remark about how he's 83 and getting nudged toward oblivion.