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.

http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/TheAtlantic/~3/BNfZMkGDQxw/story01.gym
by Garrett Epps (June 25, 2013)
"Hubris is a fit word for today’s demolition of the [Voting Rights Act]," Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote in her dissent from the 5-4 decision in Shelby County v. Holder, announced Monday.

She nailed it.

The decision invalidated the requirement of "preclearance" of voting changes by states and jurisdictions with particularly bad records of racial discrimination. (My colleague Andrew Cohen looks at the practical effect of this decision on voting rights.) But beyond that, it illustrates the absolute contempt that the Supreme Court’s conservative majority harbors toward what is, after all, the central branch of our federal government: Congress, elected by the people and charged with exercising "all legislative powers" granted by the Constitution.

A brief reading of the Constitution reveals how seriously the Framers took the idea of congressional centrality. An even briefer glance at the Fifteenth Amendment shows that the Framers of that measure trusted Congress, not courts, with setting national policy against racial discrimination in voting.

Not this Court, which Monday invalidated Section Four of the Voting Rights Act — not on the grounds that it hasn’t worked; not even on the grounds that it won’t work; but on the grounds that the Court didn’t think Congress did as good a job as it could have.

In an opinion by Chief Justice John G. Roberts, the five conservatives (Roberts, Antonin Scalia, Anthony M. Kennedy, Clarence Thomas, and Samuel A. Alito) brushed aside a measure they explicitly agreed was (1) needed when originally enacted (2) dramatically successful since enacted and (3) reauthorized by Congress four times over 40 years, each time with a detailed legislative process and with careful adjustment to its terms.

To understand the success of the VRA, we must briefly review how it works. The act as a whole forbids certain kinds of manipulation of voting laws to exclude or dilute minority votes. The "coverage formula" provision in sections 4 designate certain sections of the country, on the basis of history, as being the most flagrant offenders of the Fifteenth Amendment’s command that "[t]he right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude." Under Section 5, those jurisdictions had to get preapproval from the Justice Department or from a federal court before they could change their voting procedures at all. The reason was that previous voting-rights laws had been neutralized when the Deep South jurisdictions invented new ways not covered by the laws of blocking black voters. This time, the state would have to justify its restrictions, rather than forcing the government and citizens to go to court each time a new stratagem appeared.

Each of the first three times the act was reauthorized, Congress changed slightly the Section Four formula for determining "covered jurisdictions." It also included new procedures to allow jurisdictions to get out of preclearance by proving they had cleaned up their act. The most recent reauthorization, in 2006, kept the "coverage formula" the same, but adjusted the law carefully to cover new forms of racial discrimination not apparent in 1965.

After that change, the vote to approve was almost unanimous in a Republican-led House and entirely unanimous in a Democratic-led Senate, and the bill was signed into law with great flourish by a Republican President, who hailed it, correctly, as "an example of our continued commitment to a united America where every person is valued and treated with dignity and respect." It was, by any sane model of self-government, an American success story, of a flexible, successful law, adjusted for changing conditions, achieving a significant national goal.

On Tuesday, at the Court, this entire successful 45-year bipartisan effort was brushed aside as farce. The factual record amassed in 2006 was extensive, the majority concedes; but it is also irrelevant. "Congress did not use the record it compiled to shape a coverage formula grounded in current conditions … we are not ignoring the record; we are simply recognizing that it played no role in shaping the statutory formula before us today."

The evidence for this startling assertion was … well, there was no real "evidence," if by that you mean proof. What there was instead was a simple declaration that Congress must not have used the record because it didn’t change the Voting Rights Act enough. The Court could have done a better job, and the Court didn’t think the problem was such a big deal any more after all.

The idea that the Court should approach congressional statutes with a presumption of contempt has few grounds in the Constitution or history generally.
As Andrew points out, in practical terms this result is bad enough. But beyond the question of voting rights lies this underlying contempt for Congress. Stanford Law Professor Pamela Karlan described the emerging attitude brilliantly in her recent essay, "Democracy and Disdain." We saw it displayed during oral argument in the health-care cases, when, for example, Justice Scalia suggested striking down the whole law if any part of it was unconstitutional, on the grounds that Congress couldn’t be trusted to fix it to the Court’s satisfaction. It has been apparent in the campaign-finance cases, which dismiss the judgments of legislators on the role of money in politics on the grounds that, in essence, they must be rigging the system to get themselves re-elected. It also glimmers as the substrate of decisions restricting anti-discrimination laws, reading broad language more and more narrowly on the cynical grounds that Congress could not have meant what the statutes seem to say.

The idea that the Court should approach congressional statutes with a presumption of contempt has few grounds in the Constitution or history generally; it has even fewer in the specific area of voting rights. The preclearance requirement, the majority says, "imposes substantial federalism costs’ and ‘differentiates between the States, despite our historical tradition that all the States enjoy equal sovereignty.’" In addition, it suggests that preclearance violates the Tenth Amendment’s rule that "all powers not specifically granted to the Federal government are reserved to the States or citizens." But it makes no attempt to apply these quasi-constitutional platitudes to the text of the provisions at hand. That’s because they don’t apply. The Fifteenth Amendment makes clear that states have no "reserved power" over violations of the right to vote "by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude." These are transferred from state authority to federal prohibition. And Congress, not the courts, is to enforce that prohibition "by appropriate legislation."

In other words, the majority’s limits on Congress’s power do not flow from the text, history, or structure of the Constitution; as Ginsburg’s dissent persuasively shows, they do not flow from the Court’s earlier precedent either. They flow from a sense by five justices (none of whom has ever served a day in legislative office) that Congress, on the whole, can’t do as good a job at anything as they can.

This is hubris indeed. Today it has damaged the ability of citizens to use the ballot to call their rulers to account. But that damage is only a part of a hole slowly widening in the fabric of constitutional congressional authority. There’s no reason to believe that this majority does not intend further unraveling in the near future.

http://m.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2013/06/on-voting-rights-a-decision-as-lamentable-as-plessy-or-dred-scott/276455/
By Andrew Cohen (June 25, 2013)

Let’s be clear about what has just happened. Five unelected, life-tenured men this morning declared that overt racial discrimination in the nation’s voting practices is over and no longer needs all of the special federal protections it once did. They did so, without a trace of irony, by striking down as unconstitutionally outdated a key provision of a federal law that this past election cycle alone protected the franchise for tens of millions of minority citizens. And they did so on behalf of an unrepentant county in the Deep South whose officials complained about the curse of federal oversight even as they continued to this very day to enact and implement racially discriminatory voting laws.

In deciding Shelby County v. Holder, in striking down Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act, the five conservative justices of the United States Supreme Court, led by Chief Justice John Roberts, didn’t just rescue one recalcitrant Alabama jurisdiction from the clutches of racial justice and universal enfranchisement. By voiding the legislative formula that determines which jurisdictions must get federal "preclearance" for changes to voting laws, today’s ruling enables officials in virtually every Southern county, and in many other jurisdictions as well, to more conveniently impose restrictive new voting rules on minority citizens. And they will. That was the whole point of the lawsuit. Here is the link to the ruling.

In a 5-4 ruling over liberal dissent, the Supreme Court today declared "accomplished" a "mission" that has become more, not less, dire in the four years since the justices last revisited the subject. They have done so by focusing on voter turnout, which surely has changed for the better in the past fifty years, and by ignoring the other ruses now widely employed to suppress minority votes. In so doing, the five federal judges responsible for this result, all appointed by Republican presidents, have made it materially easier for Republican lawmakers to hassle and harry and disenfranchise likely Democratic voters. And they have done so by claiming that the Congress didn’t mean what it said when it renewed the act by landslide votes in 2006.

No statute is ever perfect. Perhaps Congress should indeed have updated the "coverage formula" of Section 4 when it last revisited the law. But there are plenty of imperfect laws kept afloat by courts, including this Court. What happened here is that the Court’s conservatives were no longer willing to countenance the intrusion upon "state sovereignty" that Section 4 represented in the absence of what they considered to be "updated" justifications for federal oversight. To the majority, the fact that "minority candidates hold office at unprecedented levels," was more important than the fact that Section 4 was invoked more than 700 times between 1982 and 2006 to block racially discrimination voting measures.

The Decision

The opinion itself is as accessible as any you are likely to read. Writing for the Court, the Chief Justice declared that Congress simply failed to update the "coverage formula" of Section 4 to address the very successes that the Voting Rights Act has brought to minority voting rights over the past 50 years. If Congress is to divide the states between "covered" and uncovered jurisdictions, the Chief Justice wrote, it bears a heavy burden under the Tenth Amendment and "must identify those jurisdictions to be singled out on a basis that makes sense in light of current conditions. It simply cannot rely on the past."

"The sad irony of today’s decision," Justice Ginsburg wrote, "lies in its utter failure to grasp why the VRA has proven effective." It has been effective, of course, because it has made it harder to suppress the votes of minority citizens.
The Fifteenth Amendment, which decrees "that the right to vote shall not be denied or abridged on account of race or color," the Chief Justice wrote in a remarkable passage, "is not designed to punish for the past; its purpose is to ensure a better future." Yet the Court’s ruling today directly contradicts that lofty premise. A black voter in Shelby County today, as a result of this ruling, has a much grimmer "future" when it comes to voting rights than she did yesterday. Without Section 4’s formula, Section 5 is neutered, and without Section 5 that black voter in Shelby County will have to litigate for her rights herself after the discriminatory law has come into effect.

In a passionate dissent, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg immediately homed in on the extraordinarily aggressive nature of what the Court has just done. "The question this case presents," she wrote, "is who decides whether, as currently operative, Section 5 remains justifiable, this Court, or a Congress charged with the obligation to enforce the post-Civil War amendments ‘by appropriate legislation.’" Until today, Justice Ginsburg wrote, the Court "had accorded Congress the full measure of respect its judgments should garner" in implementing that anti-discriminatory intent of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. Until today.

"The Court," Justice Ginsburg wrote, "makes no genuine attempt to engage with the massive legislative record that Congress assembled. Instead, it relies on increases in voter registration and turnout as if that were the whole story." And then she proceeded to outline the countless ways in which racial discrimination in voting practices is alive and well in Alabama and other jurisdictions covered by the law. "The sad irony of today’s decision," she wrote, "lies in its utter failure to grasp why the VRA has proven effective." It has been effective, of course, because it has made it harder for vote suppressors to suppress the votes of minority citizens. No more and no less.

The Winners

We should also be clear today about who the winners and the losers are in the wake of this opinion. The primary winners are vote suppressors in those many jurisdictions covered by Section 5, the politicians, lobbyists and activists who have in the past few years endorsed and enacted restrictive new voting laws in dozens of states. The legal burden now will be shifted from these partisans to the people whose votes they seek to suppress. This will mean that discriminatory practices will occur with greater frequency than they have before. The Constitution, the Court declared, must be color-blind and may not discriminate between states even if it means being blind to the political realities of a nation still riven by racial divides.

Even in those jurisdictions not covered by Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, lawmakers will cite today’s ruling to justify future restrictions on voting — and in that sense this is a national disaster and not just a regional one. Proponents of racial redistricting, or voter identification laws that are really a poll tax, will find succor in today’s ruling. And that means we will see more of these measures and, as we do, the people most directly impacted by them will have fewer ways in which to fend them off. The deterrent effect of Section 4, alone, was enormous. As U.S. District Judge John Bates remarked last year in a case out of South Carolina, its mere presence has stopped lawmakers from pitching hundreds more dubious laws.

So the winners today are officials like Rep. Darryl Metcalfe, the Republican state senator from Pennsylvania, who defended his state’s statutory effort to suppress votes in the 2012 election by dog-whistling that those registered voters too "lazy" to get new identification cards didn’t merit a ballot. Rep. Alan Clemmons, a Republican state representative from South Carolina, also wins today. He’s a politician from a Section 5 state that sought to restrict voting rights. He answered "Amen" to a constituent who had written that encouraging black voters to get voter identification cards would "be like a swarm of bees going after a watermelon." Also winning big as a result of Shelby County? The grandees of the current iteration of the "voter fraud" myth.

The Losers

Who loses today? Not just the tens of millions of minority voters whose ability to cast a ballot now may be more easily restricted by new voting laws. Not just the millions who now will be more vulnerable to redistricting plans that are patently discriminatory. But the poor, the elderly, and the ill of all races, men and women who have voted lawfully for years but who will not be able to find the money to pay for new identification cards, or take the time out of work to travel to state offices to get one, or have the health to make the journey to obtain identification they otherwise do not need. These people, everywhere, were the indirect beneficiaries of Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act. And today their right to vote is far less secure.*

So the losers today are registered voters like Craig Debose, a Vietnam veteran and longtime resident of South Carolina. Last year, he traveled 11 hours by train to Washington to testify in a Section 5 lawsuit. He doesn’t have a car, which is why he didn’t have photo identification, which is why he was going to be disenfranchised by state lawmakers until the Voting Rights Act saved him (for at least the last election cycle, the South Carolina law is still on the books). Losing today, too, is Jacqueline Kane, an elderly woman in Pennsylvania who had voted lawfully without incident for decades but who would have been forced from her nursing home to get an identification card. All to prevent "voter fraud" no one can prove.

The America described by the Chief Justice, the one in which "blatantly discriminatory evasions of federal decrees are rare," is an America which has never once existed and which obviously does not exist today.
Losing today also are citizens of all races in Texas who work for a living but cannot afford to travel hundreds of miles to state licensing offices. They were spared last year by Section 5 when a federal court declared, among other things, that officials intentionally limited the hours of operation for offices available to issue new identification cards so as to preclude the working poor from getting there. "A law that forces poorer citizens to choose between their wages and their franchise unquestionable denies or abridges their right to vote," declared a federal court last year. Today’s ruling in Washington stands for precisely the opposite proposition.

Postscript

The Court’s majority is wrong. Terribly wrong. The Voting Rights Act isn’t outdated. Its vitality was amply demonstrated in the years before the 2006 renewal, and in the years since. What has become outdated is the patience of a certain political and legal constituency in this country that has decided for itself over the past few years that there now has been enough progress toward minority voting to justify the law’s demise. To this constituency, it is enough that more blacks and Hispanics now vote or are elected to office. To them, Section 4’s actual burdens on officials — petty little bureaucratic burdens when compared to the burden of losing one’s right to vote — suddenly are burdens so unreasonable they cannot be constitutionally borne.

Today’s decision is the legal sanctification of an ugly movement that has brought America a new generation of voter suppression laws. It is the culmination of an ideological dream of a young Reagan Administration official named John Roberts, who sought 30 years ago to block an earlier renewal of the law. It is the latest manifestation of America’s unfortunate eagerness to declare itself the grand victor even when a fight is clearly not won. Indeed, as today’s setback demonstrates, the nation’s fight for voting rights will never be over because the effort to undermine these rights is ceaseless. Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act was so strong that it took 48 years and this dubious ruling to bring it down. But down it has come.

For these reasons and many more, the Supreme Court’s decision in Shelby County is one of the worst in the history of the institution. As a matter of fact, and of law, it is indefensible. It will be viewed by future scholars on a par with the Court’s odious Dred Scott and Plessy decisions and other utterly lamentable expressions of judicial indifference to the ugly realities of racial life in America. And to those tens of millions of Americans whose voting rights were protected last year by Section 4, it is a direct slap in the face rendered by judges who today used the banner of "states rights" to undermine the most basic right any individual can have in a free society — the right to be able to vote free from racial discrimination employed by public officials.

The America described by the Chief Justice, the one in which "blatantly discriminatory evasions of federal decrees are rare," is an America which has never once existed and which obviously does not exist today. The America the rest of us see so clearly with our own eyes, the America in which officials all over are actively seeking to suppress black and Hispanic votes, is the one that tens of millions of the rest of us have to live with, at least for now, without the protections of Section 4 of the venerable law. When rights are weakened for some, they are weakened for all. We all are much weaker today in the wake of this ruling.

*Update: For example, to get a sense of how swift will be the descent into unequal justice, just hours after the Court struck down Section 4, Texas declared that it would immediately move to implement its restrictive voter identification law, the one that a federal panel of judges declared last year to be discriminatory and violative of Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act. Meanwhile, in North Carolina, a voter identification law that had been stalled out of concerns that it is racially discriminatory will also now move forward. These laws will ultimately be challenged in court–at great expense to minority citizens, who now have the burden of demonstrating that that they violate the Constitution.

http://www.njspotlight.com/stories/13/06/23/nj-foreclosures-in-the-wake-of-the-superstorm/

The housing market takes another big hit, while many NJ homeowners struggle to deal with a raft of new mortgage problems.

http://feeds.propublica.org/~r/propublica/main/~3/Nx0Lk9M7-4c/

by Nikole Hannah-Jones

Affirmative action occupies a telling place in a nation painfully aware of its racial inequities yet painfully divided over how to solve them.
Great numbers of Americans support the overarching goals of assuring equal access to educational opportunity and maintaining racial diversity in the country’s institutions of higher learning. At the same time, polls show Americans are deeply conflicted – often along racial lines – about policies that achieve those goals by allowing colleges to use race as a factor in their admissions decisions.

The latest chapter in this national struggle was supposed to come with the U.S. Supreme Court’s consideration of an affirmative action case involving a white student and the University of Texas.

But the ruling – announced Monday amid much anticipation – merely sent the case back to the lower courts for reconsideration.
Afiirmative action, in its threadbare form, lives for now. But there was enough in Monday’s opinion to suspect it will be diminished further in time.

All of which makes it an opportune moment to think again about what some people think could be a fairer and more palatable way of ensuring diversity on America’s campuses – affirmative action based on class.

The idea seems simple enough: This approach would give poor students of any race a helping hand into college, and any policy that gives an admissions boost to lower-income students would naturally benefit significant numbers of black and Latino students.

Richard Kahlenberg, a senior fellow at the progressive think-tank The Century Foundation, is one of the principal proponents of what has come to be called "the economic integration movement."

"My primary interest is in ensuring that we have a fair process that looks at the biggest disadvantages that people face today, which I see as class-based," Kahlenberg said in a recent interview. "That will end up helping low-income and working-class students of all races."
Kahlenberg knows that many dispute this belief. But he says skepticism directed at the class-based solution has to be weighed against its dim alternative: If race-based affirmative action disappears with no program to replace it, African Americans and Latinos on college campuses will disappear too. Studies show that African-American and Latino enrollment at the nation’s top 200 colleges would plummet by two-thirds if colleges stopped considering race when deciding whom to accept.

Yet ignoring race does not wipe its effects away. A formula that uses class while disregarding race may be politically popular, but many scholars say race remains so powerful a factor that a class-based system would seriously reduce black and Latino representation at American colleges from their current levels.

At the heart of their argument: Poor white Americans are still privileged when compared to poor African Americans and Latinos. Use class as the basis for admissions preference, studies show, and the nation’s colleges will be flush with poor white students. "There are disadvantages that accrue to African Americans and Latinos that are not explained by class," said Anthony Carnevale, director of the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce. "You simply cannot get race by using class."

* * *

The idea of abandoning race for an admissions system targeting those clinging to the bottom rungs of the economic ladder holds powerful sway for many who believe that in modern America race is no longer much of an obstacle to success.
There is no doubt that the greatest imbalance in American colleges is not white versus black or male versus female. It is the wealthy versus everybody else.

Kahlenberg asserts that affluent students – those whose families earn at least $123,000 a year – outnumber poor students by 25-1 on the campuses of the nation’s most select schools. He said that while white Americans are twice as likely to earn a college degree as black Americans, the affluent are seven times as likely to earn one as the poor.

According to the most recent data available, about three-quarters of students at the nation’s top 146 universities come from families in the upper quarter of the nation’s economic scale. Just 3 percent come from the bottom quarter. A study released this year by The Brookings Institution documented how selective colleges enroll nearly all of the high-achieving high school seniors from families in the highest income quartile, but just one-third of the top low-income students.

Lani Guinier, a Harvard law professor who filed an amicus brief in the Fisher case supporting race-based affirmative action, said all the focus on the unfairness of race preferences ignores the bigger problem.

"Students who are getting into institutions of higher education tend to be upper middle-class students and they are the ones who are getting a preference," Guinier said. "Their preference comes from their parents’ ability to spend a lot of money preparing them for SAT’s and other college entrance exams and even hiring coaches to help them draft their personal statements."

And it seems that Americans, when asked, think that inequity should be fixed. While divided about racial preferences, polls show that about 85 percent of Americans approve of policies that offer special advantages or treatment for the economically disadvantaged.
So what’s the problem? Poverty does not produce an equal opportunity burden across racial lines.

Being poor simply does not sequester white and Asian Americans from opportunity in the same way as African Americans and Latinos.

The typical low-income white American lives in a neighborhood where just one in 10 of their neighbors is poor, according to U.S. Census data. Their children typically attend middle-class schools where they benefit from the same qualified teachers and rigorous college prep curricula as their wealthier classmates.
The experience of poor African Americans and Latinos is starkly different. The typical poor black family lives in a heavily segregated neighborhood with twice the poverty rate of their white counterparts. Their children largely attend racially isolated, high-poverty schools, which are often burdened further by substandard teachers and a dearth of college prep classes.

Even middle-class African Americans and Latinos – whom many Americans do not believe deserve affirmative action – often cannot gain entry to better neighborhoods and top-notch schools. Affluent African Americans and Latinos live in poorer neighborhoods on average than working-class white Americans, a Brown University analysis of 2010 U.S. Census data showed. As a result, most black children – regardless of their family’s income – attend schools where two-thirds of their classmates are poor and resources and college prep courses are limited.

That poor white and Asian students are not generally consigned to deeply poor neighborhoods and their failing schools, experts say, helps explain why white and Asian students account for nearly all (84 percent) of the nation’s low-income students who are considered high achievers – defined as students with an A-minus average who score in the top 10 percent on the SAT or the ACT. And under a strictly class-based system, these experts argue, these high-achieving low-income students would snap up the open spaces at top colleges.

For black and Latino students, then, a set of affirmative action programs that treat class preferentially could be disastrous. Some studies have shown that a college admissions system that favors the poor would indeed boost enrollment of working-class students – making them as much as 40 percent of the student body – but it would sink black and Latino enrollment. Representation of blacks and Latinos in college could fall from its current 16 percent into the single digits.

Carnevale and his Georgetown colleague, Stephen Rose, have studied the degree to which affirmative action programs targeting class can produce a more economically diverse student body while maintaining current levels of black and Latino enrollment.

Rose said colleges would have to recruit seven to eight poor white students to get one black or Latino student. Unless colleges set aside close to half of their seats for class preferences, Rose said, black and Latino enrollment would decline severely. And, he said, class preferences that look only at the poor would also disadvantage middle-class black students trapped in high-poverty, high-crime neighborhoods and struggling schools.

"The common view is that it’s really not race, it’s class – you get that from left, right, black, white," Carnevale said. "It is true that higher education has all but ignored class. But that doesn’t change the fact that African Americans and Latinos are disproportionately excluded from selective colleges and college in general. It isn’t either/or."

* * *

Both Kahlenberg, the champion of economic integration, and Carnevale and Rose, the skeptics, agree that an effective way forward would be to use both class and race in the admissions calculus.
Kahlenberg, for his part, would like to target race without being explicit about it. He is against a narrow, income-based admissions program that only looks at how much a student’s parents earn in their jobs because it would be "unfair to African Americans and Latinos students who on average face substantial obstacles that whites of similar income do not face." He proposes an elaborate array of tools admissions officers could use. Universities should determine the wealth, net worth, education and occupations of a student’s parents, he said, and consider as well whether applicants live in neighborhoods of concentrated poverty and come from single-parent homes.

"Under that program, you will take up lots of African Americans and Latino students," he said. "But that is different than a program that says, ‘Check a racial box.’"
Rose and Carnevale say that Kahlenberg’s approach might appeal to Americans ready to embrace a post-racial American ideal, but it still won’t work. They spent years working as researchers at the standardized testing giant, Educational Testing Service, trying to find the "holy grail" – the class dynamics that could negate the role of race in educational opportunity. They looked at the factors Kahlenberg suggested and then some.

"We were trying to prove that you get race by getting the right socioeconomic factor," Carnevale said. "We can never do it."
Carnevale said the only way colleges can maintain black and Latino enrollment in a nation where soon half of all school children will be of color is to continue the unpopular but successful practice of explicitly taking race into account.

"We want to figure out ways to get race without using race – if it weren’t so tragic it would be funny," said Carnevale. "The bottom line is race and class are not the same thing. There are a lot of ways to be unequal but race is still the worst – it is still the one you don’t want to be."

By the New York Times editorial board (June 21, 2013)

Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey has tried to undermine the state’s commitment to affordable housing at every turn. In addition to trying to dismantle the independent state agency that oversees affordable housing development, he has sought to weaken the state law that prohibits local governments from using zoning to exclude housing for poor and working-class people.

The latest episode in the continuing dispute between Mr. Christie and fair housing advocates involved the state government’s effort to seize up to $165 million from housing trust funds held by municipalities and earmarked for affordable housing. A state appellate court recently ruled that the Christie administration could not seize the money unless local governments and nonprofit developers had been given an opportunity to challenge that action. The court also said that it expected the state’s affordable housing agency “to create and promote the development of affordable housing,” as the current law requires.

Earlier this year, housing advocates and Mr. Christie also clashed over the state’s federally financed Hurricane Sandy recovery plan, which included too little money for building and repairing rental properties, where lower-income residents typically live. The Christie administration increased this financing only after fair housing groups complained to the Department of Housing and Urban Development, which could have moved to reject the plan.

His administration is also seeking to undermine the New Jersey Supreme Court’s 1983 landmark ruling in the Mount Laurel housing case — which limits the use of exclusionary zoning by wealthy communities and has led to the creation of tens of thousands of housing units in the state — in two cases now before the State Supreme Court. One case is about whether New Jersey can dismantle the affordable housing agency and move its function to the executive branch. The other deals with the use of a formula favored by the governor that would essentially allow localities to decide how much affordable housing would be built.

The court should reject both changes and strongly reaffirm the Mount Laurel decision.

http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/~3/_Rz1cN_xQGk/130618101734.htm

Women in the US exposed to high levels of air pollution while pregnant were up to twice as likely to have a child with autism as women who lived in areas with low pollution.

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Scientists have found that exposure in infancy to nitrogen dioxide (NO2), a component of motor vehicle air pollution, is strongly linked with later development of childhood asthma among African Americans and Latinos.

By Ta-Nehisi Coates

The Urban Institute revisits Daniel Moynihan’s "The Negro Family: The Case For National Action" and finds that a lot has changed. Mostly for the worse: “These demographic trends are stunning. Five decades after Moynihan’s work, white families exhibit the same rates of non-marital childbearing and single parenting as black families did in the 1960s when Moynihan sounded his alarm. Meanwhile, the disintegration of the black nuclear family continued apace.

“That the decline of traditional families occurred across racial and ethnic groups indicates that factors driving the decline do not lie solely within the black community but in the larger social and economic context. Nevertheless, the consequences of these trends in family structure may be felt disproportionately among blacks as black children are far more likely to be born into and raised in father-absent families than are white children.”

Continue reading…

http://m.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2013/06/revisiting-the-moynihan-report/276936/