You are currently browsing the category archive for the ‘Access’ category.
I’m pretty sure I read John Scalzi’s terrific essay Being Poor when he first wrote it, back in the days after Katrina, but I don’t think I ever made it all the way through the comments. I’m about halfway through right now, and I wanted to share this one:
Being poor is turning down a college scholarship because the college wanted the parents to contribute $800 for the year (!) and it might as well have been $80,000. (Later I found out that if we had just called the school and explained, they would have found a way for me to attend. But how were we to know? I was the first person in my family to attend college.)
The Breitbart machine’s attempt to smear President Obama for his 1990 embrace of civil rights activist and legal theorist Derrick Bell is an act of cynical, craven maliciousness. There was nothing covert about Obama’s support for Bell, nothing hidden about a video clip that appeared on television during the 2008 campaign and has remained online ever since. It’s a ginned up non-story grounded in a long list of lies and distortions.
Which is a shame not least because Bell is a figure around whom real, important arguments could easily be built. A civil rights lawyer who grew skeptical of the Brown vs. Board of Ed decision, a Harvard Law professor who wrote an agitprop sci-fi story that was adapted into a schlocky HBO production, Bell was a strange and complicated man. His views on race and justice were contrarian, pessimistic, and deeply unsettling to those — of any race — who regard the project of achieving American racial equality as having entered its mopping-up phase.
I’ve been going back and reading (often re-reading) some of Bell’s writings since this story broke yesterday, and I’ve been struck again and again by his ability to provoke and to unsettle. Take for instance his characterization, from a 1998 book review, of black people as living “at the mercy of a criminal justice system that unapologetically prefers and protects whites.”
It’s the “unapologetically” that inflicts the real pain there — a defiant, hostile characterization that seems designed to provoke defensiveness and dismissal. But the word is crucial to his larger argument, because it characterizes our society as one in which racism is not vestigial but essential. Racism, to Bell, wasn’t peripheral to American identity, but ingrained deeply within it, and if one did not acknowledge that reality, one’s efforts to combat it were bound to fail, and fail in shoddy, pathetic ways.
Bell’s critics often accused him of proceeding by assertion rather than argumentation, and there’s merit to that complaint. The “unapologetically” in that sentence is offered as a fact, not a hypothesis, and the casualness with which it is deployed renders it difficult to respond to. How would one prove that Bell was wrong? By offering examples of white American racial apology? By pointing to instances of liberal hand-wringing over racial abuses? Any attempt to engage seems to lead to entanglement, and Bell has no interest in finding a congenial middle ground.
But what he’s up to is something far more interesting than mere assertion, even in the parables that have drawn so much mockery. (Evidence of their confounding power can be found in the fact that they reduced a scholar as cogent as Richard Posner to the ugly and spluttering claim that they “reinforce stereotypes about the intellectual capacities of nonwhites.”) No, the project Bell is engaged in is the construction of an alternate reality, a brick-by-brick dismantling of received notions of how things are, to be replaced with a new way of seeing. Facts are important to this project, but Bell is mostly uninterested in arguing over facts — he proceeds from the premise that the facts are undisputed, and that it’s the interpretation of those facts that’s at issue.
Take this, from the piece I quoted above. Addressing the question of whether it is “proper to use a person’s race as a proxy for an increased likelihood of criminal misconduct,” Bell notes that from the dawn of slavery to the days of Korematsu, “the law’s answer was clearly, yes.”
He goes on:
“Affirmative action is under tremendous pressure politically and legally because whites claim they are innocent victims of policies that penalize them for the misconduct of others who also happen to be white. As a result, the Supreme Court has severely limited those programs by requiring that they meet the exacting standards of strict scrutiny. But the Court has approved race-based police stops with barely a mention of the harm suffered by innocent blacks or Mexican-Americans who look like suspects who also happen to be black or Latino. This inconsistency is not an aberration but part of a long-standing pattern to shape legal standards to protect whites when such protection can be achieved at the expense of blacks.”
“This inconsistency is not an aberration.” That phrase, that idea, constitutes the heart of Derrick Bell’s analysis of race and law in the United States.
A little while ago I linked to a piece by Malcolm Harris on what he calls the “generational war” being waged against American youth. Harris’s argument has been criticized from the left by a blogger named Freddie DeBoer who writes that he’s “using the language of revolution to justify what is, at its essence, a dispute among the ruling class,” making “a case that is simply antithetical to the left-wing project: the notion that recent college graduates are the dispossessed.”
College is, DeBoer writes, the province of the elite:
Less than a third of Americans has a bachelor’s degree. The racial college achievement gap is large, and it’s not shrinking; it’s growing. Social class is extremely determinative of access to college education. From 1970 to 2006, those from the highest income quartile had a better than 70 percent change of holding a college degree. Those in the lowest quartile? 10 percent.
This is an important argument, and so it’s important to point out that DeBoer gets it wrong.
Yes, the white and the wealthy are more likely to attend college than the black (and Latino) and the poor. That’s true. But it’s less true than it’s been in the past, not more. Just look at the numbers:
In 1975, 64.5% of high income Americans who graduated from high school went on directly to college, while 34.8% of low income high school graduates did, a ratio of 1.9 to 1. A wealthy student, in other words, was nearly twice as likely as a poor one to go immediately to college, even if they both graduated from high school. By 2009, that ratio had dropped to 1.5 to 1. (The gap in high school graduation rates by income has remained largely constant during the same period.)
Comparing educational outcomes by race shows similar results. In 1970, a white American 25 or older was 2.6 times as likely than a black American in the same age group to have a college degree. Today, that ratio is 1.5 to 1. When whites and Latinos are compared the gap has narrowed more slowly — from 2.5 to 1 in 1970 to 2.2 to 1 in 2010 — but again, the trend is positive.
(And though DeBoer doesn’t discuss gender, it’s worth pointing out how much things have changed there too — in 1960, men earned almost two-thirds of bachelor’s degrees and ninety percent of doctorates. By 2009, women were earning 58% of all degrees granted in the United States, and more than half of doctorates.)
There are still racial and economic barriers to higher education, of course, and the issues that Harris identified are prominent among them. But DeBoer’s characterization of college students as white and privileged ignores major changes that have taken place in the demographics higher education in recent decades, perpetuating the tired stereotype of student activists as coddled whiners.
The American student body does not reflect the nation as a whole, not yet. But it comes closer to doing so than it ever has in the past, and the folks in Occupy who are fighting for higher education access and student debt relief are fighting to bring it even closer.
Running around today, but wanted to at least quickly follow up on the student protests in Sacramento and Albany yesterday.
The New York Times has a good overview of the Albany action. Excerpt:
About 300 students, most of them from public universities in New York, rattled the Capitol on Monday with an outburst of loud protests, in the gallery of the Senate Chamber and outside the governor’s office.
The students, part of a statewide coalition of campus organizations called New York Students Rising, were objecting to the tuition hikes that were approved last year under a measure that permits public universities in New York to increase tuition by up to 5 percent per year over the next five years. The research universities at Albany, Buffalo, Binghamton and Stony Brook are permitted an additional 3 percent tuition increase each year.
The bill also allows the universities to form partnerships with private corporations for development, a change that Alexi Shalom, a student atHunter College, said he feared would bring for-profit enterprises into the public universities.
“It’s a public university,” he said. “It’s supposed to be funded by tax dollars. We oppose corporations and big business being involved in our education.”
New York Students Rising, who mounted the protest, put together an exhaustive media roundup.
For Sacramento, Occupy Education CA had a liveblog and the Berkeley Daily Cal had a solid writeup:
As California Highway Patrol officers stood guard at the entrance of the state Capitol building’s rotunda Monday afternoon, protesters inside the building kicked off a 7-hour occupation that resulted in at least 72 arrests.
The occupation followed a rally on the Capitol building’s steps in which thousands of protesters from across the state called for lawmakers to end the recent trend of decreased funding to the state’s public higher education systems.
Feel free to add links to additional coverage and analysis in comments.
Three days after causing a huge uproar by calling Georgetown law student Sandra Fluke a “slut,” a “prostitute,” and a “feminazi,” Rush Limbaugh has apologized. But his statement makes clear that he has absolutely no clue what Fluke said in her testimony to Democratic members of Congress, or what her arguments on the subject of contraceptive coverage actually were. Either that, or he’s intentionally smearing her again by misrepresenting her position.
Here. Take a look. Judge for yourself:
Limbaugh: “I think it is absolutely absurd that during these very serious political times, we are discussing personal sexual recreational activities before members of Congress.”
Fluke made no reference to her own sexual history in her congressional testimony. She spoke not on the basis of her own personal experience of birth control use, but in her position as past president of Georgetown Law Students for Reproductive Justice.
Limbaugh: “I personally do not agree that American citizens should pay for these social activities.”
Fluke was not advocating for public financing of contraceptives, but for a policy mandating “contraception coverage in [the Georgetown] student health plan.” There was no contemplation of a government contraceptive entitlement program in Fluke’s testimony, or in the Obama administration proposal she spoke in favor of.
Limbaugh: “What happened to personal responsibility and accountability? Where do we draw the line?”
As Fluke made abundantly clear, coverage of contraceptive services is a matter that affects students who do not use the prescriptions for birth control. She spoke movingly and at length of a friend at Georgetown who “has polycystic ovarian syndrome and has to take prescription birth control to stop cysts from growing on her ovaries.” Her insurance claim “was denied repeatedly on the assumption that she really wanted the birth control to prevent pregnancy,” despite the fact that she is a lesbian.
Limbaugh: “If this is accepted as the norm, what will follow? Will we be debating if taxpayers should pay for new sneakers for all students that are interested in running to keep fit?”
Again, the question at hand is not what “taxpayers should pay” for, but what services will be covered under insurance plans established by institutions for employees, students, and other beneficiaries. There’s no issue of taxpayer funding on the table at all.
Limbaugh: “In my monologue, I posited that it is not our business whatsoever to know what is going on in anyone’s bedroom…”
Actually, Mr. Limbaugh, you not only discussed Ms. Fluke’s sex life — a subject which she had made literally no reference to in her testimony — at length and in graphic detail, you also demanded that she “post the videos online so we can all watch.”
This is worth underscoring. Sandra Fluke made no reference to her own sexual behavior in her congressional testimony. She said nothing to indicate that she has ever had heterosexual sex in her thirty years on the planet. Mr. Limbaugh’s extensive, repeated, prurient allegations and speculations as to her history and her proclivities had literally no basis in anything she had said to the members of Congress she addressed.
Limbaugh: “…nor do I think it is a topic that should reach a Presidential level.”
The president’s February 10 announcement of his contraceptive coverage policy made no reference to anyone’s sexual behavior. In fact it, like Ms. Fluke’s testimony, emphasized the importance of contraception “as a way to reduce the risks of ovarian and other cancers, and treat a variety of different ailments.”
The president also recognized the significance of prescription contraceptives as a method of birth control, of course, but given that — as he noted — “nearly 99 percent of all women have relied on contraception at some point in their lives” — the prudent course for those who are uninterested in public discussion of “what is going on in anyone’s bedroom” is to make contraception universally available to those who need it.
Limbaugh: “My choice of words was not the best…”
“She must be paid to have sex — what does that make her? It makes her a slut, right? It makes her a prostitute. She wants to be paid to have sex. She’s having so much sex she can’t afford the contraception … she’s having so much sex, it’s amazing she can still walk.”
Limbaugh: “…and in the attempt to be humorous, I created a national stir. I sincerely apologize to Ms. Fluke for the insulting word choices.”
Cool story, bro.
studentactivism.net 
Recent Comments