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A former medical student is claiming that he was suspended from the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey for describing himself as a “white, African, American.”
Paulo Serodio is of European descent, was born in Mozambique, and is a citizen of the United States, so each of the components of his self-identification is literally accurate, but he says that students and staff at the university objected to it.
Serodio claims that he was harassed and assaulted after making the comments, and his lawyer told the Associated Press that “directly” as a result of the comments he was suspended from the school. Serodio is now suing.
This story is already blowing up in the right-wing blogosphere, for obvious reasons, but as far as I can tell the AP article is the only source on it so far, and I have to say it doesn’t feel complete to me.
We don’t have the whole story on this yet, and I bet you ten bucks that the full version is going to be more interesting than the one we have now.
1 pm update: I’ve found a copy of the complaint. More soon.
A group of Florida high school students is waging war against a local curfew.
The law — which bars under-18s from downtown West Palm Beach after 10 o’clock on weeknights and eleven on weekends — is, they say, unconscionable age discrimination. But that’s not all.
The law exempts married young people, but not those who are out with parental permission. On the contrary, it imposes fines on parents who “knowingly permit or by insufficient control allow” their children to break the curfew. “Insufficient control” is apparently nowhere defined — is a parent whose 17-year-old is in college expected to exercise “sufficient control” to keep him or her indoors at night?
The most bizarre — and, in a bizarre way, comforting — provision of the two-year-old law is one which exempts young people who are “attending or traveling directly to or from an activity that involves the exercise of rights protected under the First Amendment of the United States Constitution” from the curfew.
That’s right. The curfew as written only applies to those young people who don’t intend to speak while they’re out on the town. If you’re going to be exercising your freedom of speech (or assembly, or religion, or the press, or, you know, petitioning the government for redress of grievances), you’re golden. If you’re heading out to sit by your grandmother who’s in a coma, though, you’re getting a ticket.
(Only not really. The city is mostly just using the law as a mechanism for rousting young people rather than going through the hassle of ticketing them — as of the end of March it had issued a thousand warnings but only five citations.)
It’s ridiculous, is what it is, and the National Youth Rights Association of Southeast Florida is doing something about it.
NYRASEFL leaders Zach Goodman and Jeffrey Nadel (both 16) spent a big chunk of the spring explaining to the mayor and city commission just how farkakte the law is, but didn’t get anywhere. Then in late March they retained local civil rights attorney Barry Silver, who managed to get a law that criminalized feeding the homeless (yes, really) overturned last year. But so far he hasn’t had any luck either.
So on the evening of May 1, they took to the streets, letting the city know when and where they would defy the curfew.
During the protest they were tailed by two officers on Segways, but otherwise left alone. Their presence does seem to have gotten under the cops’ skin, though, as police ticketed several teens who were waiting for their parents outside a nearby movie theater as the protest was going on.
NYRASEFL intends to make one final effort to convince the city commission to repeal the curfew law before filing suit against the city. We’ll keep you informed as the story develops.
Update: As Justin Graham notes in comments, NYRASEFL is on Twitter, too.
I posted earlier about one misconception about Tuesday’s Supreme Court arguments in the case of Safford School District v. Redding, and now I’d like to take on another.
The case stems from a lawsuit brought by Savana Redding, who was strip-searched when she was in the eighth grade by school officials looking for prescription-strength ibuprofen.
In a Slate story on the oral arguments, Dahlia Lithwick quotes ACLU attorney Adam Wolf as saying that school officials required “a 13-year-old girl to take off her pants, her shirt, move around her bra so she reveals her breasts, and the same thing with her underpants to reveal her pelvic area.” Justice Breyer, Lithwick says, responded by wondering whether the strip search Wolf described was “all that different” from requiring a student to “change into a swimming suit or your gym clothes.”
But Breyer’s example was not, as Lithwick claims, offered as parallel to Wolf’s — just the opposite.
Here are the thirteen demands put forward by the students who sat in at the University of Vermont yesterday:
1. REVOKE all DISMISSALS and non-reappointments thus far issued.
2. TERMINATE all plans for more layoffs and non-reappointments of staff and faculty.
3. Return positions that have been reduced to part-time back to FULL-TIME status.
4. Issue a statement of NEUTRALITY respecting the right of staff and faculty to ORGANIZE.
5. DISCLOSE all budget reconciliation options that were reviewed and considered prior to the decision to initiate layoffs.
6. DISCLOSE all information related to administrative compensation and bonuses.
7. Return ALL administrative BONUSES from FY `08 and FY `09 to the UVM general fund.
8. Return administrative salary pool to the 2002 levels.
9. Pursue all legal options to utilize the university’s ENDOWMENT to close the FY `10 operating budget gap.
10. CAP rate of TUITION and room and board fee increase at corresponding year rate of inflation.
11. Establish with us a democratic process by which students, staff, and faculty have a decisive role in decisions regarding the budget.
12. CAP student body population at Fall 2009 levels.
13. REINSTATE the varsity Softball and Baseball teams.
On Tuesday, the United States Supreme Court heard oral arguments in Safford School District v. Redding, the case of Savana Redding, an eighth-grade girl who was strip-searched by school officials looking for prescription-strength ibuprofen.
It’s an interesting and important case, and I’ve got lots to say about it — expect another couple of posts on the subject in the next day or two. But I’d like to start by clearing up a misconception.
A reporter named David G. Savage covered the case for the Tribune Company, which publishes the Baltimore Sun and the Los Angeles Times. In his story, which appeared in both of those papers, he said that when Justice Scalia asked Matthew Wright, the school district’s attorney, whether a body cavity search would be permissible in a school setting, Wright “insisted it would be legal.”
Savage’s take on the exchange has been echoed by a bunch of blogs. But it’s a profound misrepresentation of what Wright actually said.
studentactivism.net 
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