http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/14/us/george-zimmerman-verdict-trayvon-martin.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

A six-woman jury accepted self-defense as justification for the death of Trayvon Martin, 17, by George Zimmerman in a Florida shooting that ignited a national debate on racial profiling and civil rights.

http://grist.org/cities/climate-change-is-making-private-heat-islands-for-people-of-color/

Climate change is making private heat islands for people of color

By Susie Cagle

As if climate change weren’t enough of a huge jerk, now we find out that it’s racist, too — or at least it’s following America’s lead.

A new study published in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives digs deep under the sidewalks and streets that are soaking up all this new heat in our cities — and finds that not all neighborhoods and racial groups are faring equally. According to the research, blacks, Asians, and Latinos are all significantly more likely to live in high-risk heat-island conditions than white people.

At first glance, this seems to make some sense: Due to a long history of racist policies and lending practices, people of color are more likely than whites to live in poor neighborhoods. Neighborhood infrastructure in poor areas is mostly made of concrete and asphalt (with some soil here and there, often tinged with heavy metals). Those “impervious surfaces” conduct heat like crazy, and turn these areas into “heat islands” surrounded by their richer, greener neighbors.

Dense tree cover in urban areas can improve local health factors and has even been associated with a decrease in crime in some cities. But cities don’t tend to invest in trees for poor neighborhoods, where residents without their own private green space aren’t in a position to invest for themselves.

But this study found something entirely new: The heat-island effect and lack of neighborhood trees is more closely correlated with race than it is with class.

The authors, a team of researchers from UC Berkeley that includes Grist board member Rachel Morello-Frosch, say this is the first study of its kind. They compared Census population data with the 2001 National Land Cover Dataset, mediating for factors such as income, home ownership, and density. Richer folks of color who own their homes are less likely to live in a heat island than the poor, but still significantly more likely than whites. The study doesn’t point to causality, but does mention past and present lending practices which have concentrated people of color in dense, urban neighborhoods that may or may not receive the same level of civic investment as other areas.

Translation: This study highlights the persistent racial segregation of urban areas more than it does a lack of trees. All told, this is just yet another amenity that people of color are losing out on. (Yes, trees are a luxury item!) “[S]egregation is crucial to understanding social drivers of environmental health disparities and, more directly, the potentially disproportionate health burdens of climate change on communities of color,” the study reads.

It’s not just a potential discomfort, but a serious health risk, when extreme heat is a factor in about one in five deaths resulting from natural hazards. The authors ultimately recommend that “urban planning to mitigate future extreme heat should proactively incorporate an environmental justice perspective and address racial/ethnic disparities in land cover characteristics.”

So yeah, cool, more trees! But these neighborhoods don’t just need a few new saplings on the block — they need a more direct challenge to the residual effects of modern residential redlining. Ultimately any significant change for these private urban heat islands will require a combination of environmental justice and social justice.

And probably some clean soil for those new root systems.

Susie Cagle writes and draws news for Grist. She also writes and draws tweets for Twitter.

San Diego Union-Tribune (July 7, 2013)
STATE PROGRAM RANKS POLLUTION HOT SPOTS
Barrio Logan, National City among most environmentally vulnerable communities
By Deborah Sullivan Brennan
Barrio Logan, a port community at the intersection of freeways and industry, is the crossroads of pollution risk for San Diego County, according to CalEnviroscreen, a new state program that ranks communities by their environmental health.
The California Environmental Protection Agency recently rolled out the program to highlight areas most affected by pollution. Also high on the list for this county are parts of Escondido, Chula Vista, National City and El Cajon.
The program is something that various public-health and environmental groups have long sought: a way of analyzing the combined effects of multiple pollutants along with residents’ susceptibility to their risks. But reducing pollution at the worst sites will require state funding — at the expense of other needs competing for the same money.
The report measures air and water pollution, diesel exhaust, toxins and other factors to calculate pollution burdens of communities at the ZIP code level. It also evaluates socioeconomic and health factors such as asthma rates, poverty and ethnicity to determine the population’s vulnerability to pollution.
The final ranking is the product of the pollution and population scores, with the highest scores highlighting the most environmentally impaired communities. Those areas are entitled to funding for environmental cleanup or sustainable development through the state’s greenhouse gas cap-and-trade program.
“From our perspective as environmental justice folks, this is something we’ve wanted for many, many years,” said Joy Williams, research director for the Environmental Health Coalition, which works intensively in Barrio Logan and closely tracked development of CalEnviroscreen. “We’ve always been frustrated that they didn’t look at whole communities.”
In Barrio Logan, multiple neighborhoods show the hazards of mixed-land uses and dense urban development, said Georgette Gomez, associate director of the Environmental Health Coalition.
Light industry abuts multi-family housing, along with a school, homeless shelter and youth recreation center. A gas distribution facility and a biodiesel center lie next to homes.
That hodgepodge of housing and industry has been prohibited in most communities for decades, but lingers in urban areas such as Barrio Logan.
The consequence can be seen in emergency room records showing that the neighborhood has three times the rate of asthma hospitalizations as the county as a whole, Gomez said. CalEnviroscreen data rank it among the 92nd percentile statewide for asthma rates.
Asthma patients are more vulnerable to air pollution than other people, the report states. And Barrio Logan also falls in the 91st percentile for diesel particulates — a combination that may create a vicious spiral of breathing problems for residents. High rates of poverty and low rates of education and English fluency also place its residents at risk, according to the screening tool.
In Escondido, a similar combination of housing and industry may conspire to make part of the city a pollution hot spot, Councilwoman Olga Diaz said.
“The ZIP code (ranked as high risk) includes the industrial portion of our city,” home to operations such as an asphalt plant and transit center, Diaz said. “We have some uses that are not exactly green industries that are operating here. That’s possibly because Escondido is a 125-year-old city, and the rules that now regulate pollutants are stricter. So the industrial parts of the city have been this way for a long time, and that cannot be changed easily.”
On further reflection, however, she noticed that the hot spot also includes Kit Carson Park, the city’s vast, 285-acre recreation and nature area, along with the Vineyard Golf Course and agricultural fields.
“The ZIP code that includes the industrial park also includes some more affluent communities,” Diaz said. “So there may be sub areas within that ZIP code that shouldn’t be classified as high-risk areas.”
Those wouldn’t likely produce industrial pollution, she noted, but could be a source of pesticide exposure, another factor in the screening. Those distinctions, she said, aren’t apparent at the ZIP-code level.
It’s a drawback that state officials acknowledge. Much of the data they used was only available by ZIP code, said Sam Delson, a deputy director for the Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment, the CalEPA department that prepared the report. He pointed out that the report is titled CalEnviroscreen 1.0, in a nod to expected future editions.
Subsequent versions of the report, which cost about half a million dollars to produce, would be whittled down to the census tract level, providing a more refined view of environmental health.
Diaz said she’s excited about the screening program, but looks forward to more precise information that could pinpoint local sources of pollution.
“So the census tract data may be the more useful tool,” she said. “But my gosh, it’s great that we have any data.”
The screening program was developed not only to point out pollution, but to prioritize cleanup. Last fall the state began auctions through its greenhouse gas cap-and-trade program, a function of the 2006 Global Warming Solutions Act. Mindful that plants buying credits to relieve their responsibility for cutting greenhouse gases may also emit high levels of other pollutants, the act required that some of the some of the program’s fees be used to offset its impacts on disadvantaged communities.
A quarter of the cap-and-trade fees were earmarked for programs that benefit disadvantaged communities — defined at the top 10 percent of polluted areas identified by the screening program, according to the state Department of Finance. Ten percent of fees must be spent directly within those communities.
As the fees began to accumulate, however, the state decided to loan $500 million from the Greenhouse Gas Reduction fund to the state general fund, the finance department stated. It has pledged to repay that half-billion dollars with interest, but the loan delays the start of local programs by several years.
Despite the funding delay, Delson said the program represents an effort to address collective effects of pollution.
“Instead of looking at each problem in isolation, whether it’s air quality or water quality, this is an attempt to look at the combined effects and the combined burdens of all these problems, and to take a comprehensive approach to addressing multiple types of pollution simultaneously,” he said.
© Copyright 2013 The San Diego Union-Tribune, LLC. An MLIM LLC Company. All rights reserved.
Source: http://www.utsandiego.com/news/2013/jul/08/tp-state-program-ranks-pollution-hot-spots/

http://feeds.feedblitz.com/~/43168781/0/alternet~Last-Week-in-Poverty-The-Unfinished-March-on-Washington-for-Jobs-and-Freedom

A new report offers a compelling look at the economic vision that was laid out during the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom and how it has since been forgotten.

“[African-Americans] must march from the rat-infested, overcrowded ghettos to decent, wholesome, unrestricted residential areas disbursed throughout our cities…. They must march from the play areas in crowded and unsafe streets to the newly opened areas in the parks and recreational centers,” said Whitney Young Jr., executive director of the National Urban League.

When I read those words this week, I thought it sounded like a good recommendation for residents of my hometown, Washington, DC, which has in essence been two separate and unequal cities since my great grandparents came here in the 1920s—and it remains so today.

But Young said this at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in 1963, exactly fifty years ago on August 28. A new report from the Economic Policy Institute, “The Unfinished March—An Overview,” offers a compelling look at the economic vision that was laid out on that day and has since been forgotten. It also examines the continuing struggle to achieve that vision.

Most Americans associate the March with the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I have a Dream” speech and celebrate the victories of the civil rights movement that followed. But report author Algernon Austin, director of EPI’s Program on Race, Ethnicity and the Economy (PREE), writes that there were “nine other speeches that day” and that the march organizers called for “decent housing, adequate and integrated education, a federal jobs program for full employment, and a national minimum wage of over $13.00 an hour in today’s dollars. ”Where do we stand today in meeting those goals?

There are still ghettos of poverty that lack decent housing—where poor minority children don’t have the same access to resource-rich, middle-class communities as poor white children do. Nearly half of poor African-American children live in neighborhoods with concentrated poverty, defined as areas where 30 percent of the census tract population lives below the federal poverty threshold (on less than $18,000 for a family of three). In contrast, only 12 percent of poor white children live in neighborhoods with concentrated poverty. (Thirty-nine percent of poor American Indian children live in areas of concentrated poverty, as do 35 percent of poor Hispanic children and 21 percent of poor Asian and Pacific Islander children.)

Austin describes how concentrated poverty is correlated “with a host of social and economic challenges,” including: higher crime rates, higher exposure to lead, higher prevalence of alcohol and fast food outlets and fewer opportunities to be physically active due to crime and limited green space. All of these factors make the struggle to rise from poverty significantly harder.

Relatedly, Austin points to the call by speakers at the March “for black children to gain access to adequate and integrated education.”

“[We] must march from the congested ill-equipped schools, which breed dropouts, and which smother motivation, to the well-equipped integrated facilities throughout the cities,” argued Young at the March.

But today we have public schools that are essentially separate and unequal. 74 percent of African-Americans still attend majority nonwhite schools, compared to just over 76 percent in the late 1960s. That number had dropped down to 63 percent by the early 1980s, but Austin suggests that progress reversed due to a “lack of commitment by the federal government and multiple decisions by the Supreme Court.” The share of black children in schools that are 90 to 100 percent nonwhite has also stagnated at around 38 percent since the early 2000s.

Why are these numbers so significant?

“Now as a half century ago—segregated schools are unequal schools,” writes Austin. A 10 percent increase in a school’s nonwhite students is associated with a $75 decrease in per student spending. Furthermore, “the average school with 90 percent or more non-white students has $443,000 less to spend on students during the school year.” (Italics added.)

With this kind of stark difference in educational opportunities and resources, it’s hardly a surprise that — absent a full employment program that the March speakers called for — we have seen the black unemployment rate remain two to two and a half times higher than the white unemployment rate from 1963 to 2012.

“Indeed, black America is nearly always facing an employment situation that would be labeled a particularly severe recession if it characterized the entire labor force,” notes Austin.

When the economy was booming in 2000, and the white unemployment rate was 3.1 percent, the black unemployment rate was still a recession-like 7.6 percent. In the aftermath of the recent Great Recession, when white unemployment peaked at 8 percent, black unemployment stood at a Depression-like 15.9 percent. (The average national unemployment rate from 1929 to 1939 was 13.1 percent.)

“If we can have full employment and full production for the negative ends of war then why can’t we have a job for every American in the pursuit of peace?” asked Walter Reuther, president of the United Automobile Workers of America, speaking at the March in 1963.

Austin asserts that unless we commit to a full employment policy that brings down the minority unemployment rates, “it will be impossible for blacks to have low poverty rates.” Indeed in 2011, the black poverty rate was 27.6 percent — nearly three times the white poverty rate of 9.8 percent that year, according to the most recent US Census Bureau figures.

For African-Americans who do find work, a disproportionate number are paid low wages. In 2006, 36 percent didn’t earn hourly wages sufficient to lift a family of four out of poverty (above approximately $23,000 annually); the same holds true for more than 43 percent of Hispanics, and nearly 25 percent of whites. In 2011, a worker needed to earn $11.06 an hour to lift a family of four out of poverty.

“We march today for jobs and freedom, but we have nothing to be proud of, for hundreds and thousands of our brothers are not here — for they are receiving starvation wages or no wages at all,” said John Lewis in 1963, then the national chairman for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and now a US Congressman.

The marchers wanted the minimum wage to be lifted from $1.15 to $2 an hour — the equivalent of more than $13 an hour today. But it now stands at $7.25, and its inflation-adjusted value is about $2 less than it was in 1968. (The tipped minimum wage has been stuck at $2.13 an hour since 1991.) If it had kept pace with inflation, the minimum wage would be $10.59 today — $18.72 if it had kept pace with productivity gains. But Congress has raised the minimum wage just three times in the past thirty years.

“Because too many Americans’ expectations about what the US economy can deliver to them have been battered in recent decades, many would see this [$13] minimum-wage demand as unrealistically high,” writes Austin. “But [it] is still lower than what the minimum wage would be if it had merely risen in step with gains in economy-wide productivity — a reasonable benchmark for wage increases.”

In these times, when so many dismiss institutional discrimination against people of color by simply pointing to President Obama and saying, “End of discussion,” Austin has done a real service with his examination of the data that reveals the unfinished — and widely forgotten — business of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.

But what also excites me about the Unfinished March project are EPI’s plans for next steps. I spoke with Christian Dorsey, EPI’s director of external and governmental affairs, who has a strong background in community organizing for children’s literacy, prejudice reduction and affordable housing.

Dorsey said that a symposium in August will explore “history, current policy options, and our prospects for actually achieving what needs to be done,” including through nonviolent, direct action.“

That’s one of the great successes we can learn from the civil rights movement,” said Dorsey. “Nonviolent active resistance forced people to confront these issues very visibly, demonstrably, and not necessarily always politely. It forced people who would otherwise want to pretend these issues don’t exist to acknowledge what’s going on.”

Dorsey said that EPI will offer more resources and opportunities in the fall to inspire and support this kind of action. Stay tuned and get involved—help finish the March.

Cars, trucks, off-road vehicles dump ozone into the atmosphere, the key ingredient in state’s smothering smog

http://www.nationinstitute.org/featuredwork/fellows/3350/john_lewis%27s_long_fight_for_voting_rights/

Nearly five decades after Bloody Sunday, he’s in the fight for his life, as the Supreme Court overturns his signature achievement.

http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/racismreview/nYnz/~3/IMWxA_az5mM/

Professor Tricia Rose of Brown University has an interesting and savvy op-ed piece on the Paula Deen racism scandal. She makes this key set of points:

With each heartfelt tearful statement, Deen seems completely uninterested in the broader contexts of her comments, missing ample opportunities to address the reality of racism today both in the form of cultural and social interactions, but even more powerfully by policies and actions.

I heard her speak very little about the extraordinary injuries and injustices black people face, I have not heard her show alliance with those who fight racism nor show solidarity with or compassion for black people based on the profound impact racism has on their lives.

I grew up in similar circumstances to those of Deen, the assertively and comprehensively Jim Crow South. That is a central part of that “broader context” of her comments. Virtually all white southerners (and most in the North too) then grew up with, and had drilled into them, a very aggressive version of the white racist framing of society—replete with many thousands (and I do mean thousands, empirically speaking) of references by older whites, parents and others, to black southerners of all ages and conditions as N-words. Virtually all young white southerners used that word, as they unreflectively mimicked parents and peers. And a dozen other antiblack words.

The even more important point missed in almost all discussion I have seen of Deen is that the overtly and brutally racist language of the southern (and northern) white racial frame was not isolated, for it was (and still is) connected to many dozens of antiblack and other racist stereotypes, ideas, narratives, images, interpretations, and inclinations to discriminate. It has been now for nearly four centuries.

The real issue is this white racial frame, this white worldview, not just one major racist word, or two. As a white person drilled in the white racial frame, you do not just give up using one word (and often just in public, too) and, suddenly, become a virtuous non-racist. You have to work constantly and aggressively to deframe and reframe away from that dominant white racial frame in the antiracist direction–and that takes much effort. And that effort is never finished over any white lifetime.

So, where is the public discussion of this broad and deep white way of looking at society, a framing that in some version is the backbone perspective for most white Americans today–and most especially in many of the racist performances of a great many prominent and not-so-prominent white conservatives today.

Central to the common white defensiveness on these issues is the heart of that centuries-old white racial frame – the sense that white people are the most virtuous, civilized, and intelligent Americans. Yet these “virtuous” whites created systems of racial oppression in the form of 246 years of slavery and nearly 100 years of Jim Crow that rival the worst systems of oppression created over long centuries of world history. And widespread contemporary racial discrimination as well.

In her piece Professor Rose raises a very good question about why Deen does not just come out and take an anti-racist stand. In my view that would be one that accents and condemns the current discriminatory treatment African Americans and other people of color still receive in this country–and emphasizes the need for this country’s white leadership to aggressively confront their own racism and that imbedded across the institutions of this still racist society.

That seems an elementary response, at least looking from outside the dominant white racial frame critically–for example, from the perspective of those people of color oppressed by it for so long.

http://truth-out.org/news/item/17204-ku-klux-kourt-kills-kings-dream-law-replaces-voting-rights-act-with-katherine-harris-acts

By Greg Palast

Dream Law, Replaces Voting Rights Act With Katherine Harris Acts
Protestors gather outside of the U.S. Supreme Court in support of Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, in Washington, Feb. 27, 2013. The Supreme Court on Tuesday morning, June 25, 2013, announced a vote of 5 to 4 in the Shelby County, Ala. v. Holder case, striking down part of the act. (Photo: Christopher Gregory / The New York Times)

They might as well have burned a cross on Dr. King’s grave. The Jim Crow majority on the Supreme Court just took away the vote of millions of Hispanic and African-American voters by wiping away Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

When I say "millions" of voters of color will lose their ballots, I’m not kidding. Let’s add it up.

Last year, the GOP Secretary of State of Florida Ken Detzner tried to purge 180,000 Americans, mostly Hispanic Democrats, from the voter rolls. He was attempting to break Katherine Harris’ record.

Detzner claimed that all these brown folk were illegal "aliens."

But Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act requires that 16 states with a bad history of blocking black and brown voters must "pre-clear" with the US Justice Department any messing around with voter rolls or voting rules. And so Section 4 stopped Detzner from the racist brown-out.

I’ll admit there were illegal aliens on Florida voter rolls – two of them. Let me repeat that: TWO aliens – one a US Marine serving in Iraq (not yet a citizen); the other an Austrian who registered as a Republican.

We can go from state to state in Dixie and see variations of the Florida purge game.

Yet the 5-to-4 Supreme Court majority ruled, against all evidence, that, "Blatantly discriminatory evasions [of minority voting rights] are rare." As there’s no more racially bent voting games played in states including Florida, Georgia, Arizona and Alaska (yes, pre-clearance goes WAY north of the Confederacy), then, the justices said, there’s no more reason for pre-clearance.

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Whom do they think they’re fooling? The court itself, just last week, ruled that Arizona’s law requiring the showing of citizenship papers was an unconstitutional attack on Hispanic voters. Well, Arizona’s a Section 4 state.

You’ll love this line from the Ku Klux Kourt majority. They wrote that the "coverage" of Section 4 applies to states where racially bent voting systems are now "eradicated practices."

"Eradicated?" I assume they didn’t see the lines of black folk in Florida last November. That was the result of the deliberate reduction in the number of polling places and early voting hours in minority areas. Indeed, if the Justice Department, wielding Section 4, didn’t block Florida from half its ballot-box trickery, Obama would have lost that state’s electoral votes.

And that’s really what’s going on here: the problem is not that the court majority is racist. They’re worse: they’re Republicans.

We’ve had Republicans, like the great Earl Warren, who put on the robes and take off their party buttons.

But this crew, beginning with Bush v. Gore, is viciously partisan. They note that "minority candidates hold office at unprecedented levels." And the Republican Supremes mean to put an end to that. See "Obama" and "Florida" above.

And when they say "minority," they mean "Democrat."

Because that’s the difference between 1965 and today. When the law was first enacted – based on the personal pleas of Martin Luther King – African-Americans were blocked by politicians who did not like the color of their skin.

But today, it’s the color of minority voters’ ballots – overwhelmingly Democratic blue – which is the issue.

In California – one of the "Old South" states that is singled out for pre-clearance – an astonishing 40 percent of voter registration forms were rejected by the Republican Secretary of State on cockamamie clerical grounds. When civil rights attorney Robert F. Kennedy and I investigated, we learned that the reject pile was overwhelmingly Chicano and Asian – and overwhelmingly Democratic.

How? Jim Crow ain’t gone; he’s moved into cyberspace. The new trick is lynching by laptop: removing voters, as was done in Florida and Arizona (and a dozen other states) by using poisoned databases to pick out "illegal" and "felon" and "inactive" voters – who all happen to be of the Hispanic or African-American persuasion. The GOP, for all the tears of its consultants, knows it can’t rock these votes, so they block these votes.

Despite the racial stench of today’s viciously antidemocratic ruling, the GOP majority knew they were handicapping the next presidential run by a good 6 million votes. (That’s the calculation that RFK and I came up with for racially bent vote loss in 2004 – and the GOP will pick up at least that in the next run.)

And the court knew full well that their ruling today was the same as stuffing several hundred thousand GOP red votes into the ballot boxes for the 2014 Congressional races.

The races have not yet started, but the "Katherine count" has already begun.

***

It was investigative reporter Greg Palast, for The Guardian and BBC Television who uncovered Katherine Harris’ purge of black voters in 2000. He is also the author of the recent New York Times bestseller, Billionaires & Ballot Bandits: How to Steal and Election in 9 Easy Steps. His film, Election Files, may be downloaded without charge at www.GregPalast.com.

http://bostonreview.tumblr.com/post/53872992792

Just hours after the Supreme Court handed down a ruling that guts parts of the Voting Rights Act, Texas is moving forward with a controversial voter ID law that state Attorney General Greg Abbott hopes to implement right away.

“With today’s decision, the state’s voter ID law will take effect immediately,” Abbott said in a statement to the Dallas Morning News. “Redistricting maps passed by the Legislature may also take effect without approval from the federal government.”

The Texas law requires voters to show photo identification to vote — a measure that was blocked by the Justice Department, arguing the law could discriminate against racial minorities […]

Well, that was quick.

This is Christmas morning to the Republicans. They’ve been waiting 50 years to open this racist present.

Justice Roberts is officially Santa.

http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/TheAtlantic/~3/TZt0realhsk/story01.htm

By Molly Ball (June 24, 2013)

Pleasant Surprise for Affirmative-Action Advocates
by Molly Ball
Atlantic MagYesterday, 15:09

Mark Wilson/Getty Images
The Supreme Court’s decision on affirmative action Monday wasn’t much of a decision. In a 7-1 vote, the justices sent the case, Fisher v. University of Texas, back to a lower court for reexamination (Justice Kagan recused herself).

Yet civil-rights advocates celebrated the result as a huge win for their side. "Today’s decision is an important victory for our nation as we strive to build a more inclusive, diverse America," said Wade Henderson, president and CEO of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights. "The educational benefits of diversity are clear, and the Court’s decision reaffirms that it is in our national interest to expand opportunities for everyone." Henderson spoke on a conference call with reporters, where he was joined by representatives of the NAACP, the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund (MALDEF), and other civil-rights advocacy groups.

Why were they so happy? In short, because the court’s decision could have been much worse for their side — and many feared it would be. Given the Court’s conservative tilt, advocates have been on tenterhooks about this case and the other major civil-rights case still pending, which challenges the constitutionality of Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act.

The fear was that the court might broadly declare any consideration of race in college admissions unconstitutional. The Court didn’t do that, and its decision allows the University of Texas’s race-based admissions process to continue, at least for now.

"Those on the other side who predicted a major defeat for affirmative action were clearly wrong," said Damon Hewitt of the NAACP’s Legal Defense and Education Fund. Henderson added that the ruling showed that "the court is not ready yet to overturn" the precedent set by the last affirmative action case it decided, 2003’s Grutter v. Bollinger.

David Hinojosa of MALDEF provided this helpful analogy to understand the court’s action: "This is basically like a check-engine light has come on and without looking under the hood you said, ‘Throw away the car,’" he said. "The court said, ‘No, let’s look under the hood.’ It might be a faulty light or it might just need a tuneup, but you definitely don’t need to just discard the car altogether."

The advocates acknowledge the situation has not been totally resolved in their favor. "If you just read the Scalia and Thomas opinions, they’re concurring in the judgment but they would still overturn Grutter," pointed out Sherrilyn Ifill of the NAACP. "I’m not sure you can see that as a great thing …. But it’s important that the court exercised restraint today."

Does that mean we can expect similar restraint from the court on the voting rights case, Shelby County v. Holder? I put this question to the advocates, but they demurred. "You can’t really read any tea leaves," Hewitt said.