Writing for the 8-1 majority, Chief Justice John Roberts said,

Things have changed in the South. (Minority) voter turnout and registration rates now approach parity. Blatantly discriminatory evasions … are rare. And minority candidates hold office at unprecedented levels, ….

Despite the Court’s declaration that progress has been made, we are all aware of the serious Voting Rights Act violations in the 2000 presidential election in Florida where minority voters were stricken from the rolls and had their voting places moved without notice.  Similar charges surfaced in Ohio in the 2008 presidential election.

Rather than deal with the weighty issue of striking down Section 5, the court suggests that the North Austin Utility District was entitled to and should seek an exemption from the Voting Rights Act.

That larger issue, Roberts said in an ominous note,  is a difficult constitutional question we do not answer today.

In a press statement today, the Advancement Project offers an analysis of the decision.

Writing for the Majority, Justice Anthony Kennedy, imposed a new and additional  burden upon the City and all employers to determine  exactly why the test resulted in a disparate impact.  The decision was otherwise narrowly written.

The court did not criticize the 2nd District Court of Appeal three judge  panel from which this case was appealed that included President Obama’s Supreme Court nominee, Sonia Sotomayor.

This was the central question tackled by an extraordinary array of interdisciplinary scholars at the 2009 CRS Symposium: Race in Colorblind Spaces.  In search of answers and ever better questions, panelists focussed on the following contexts in which colorblindness is the (legal) norm: universities, workplaces and employment, policing/law enforcement, and self-governance/voting.

In case you missed it, the very good news is that the sessions have been video recorded, archived, and made available to the public.  Selected session topics and links to the corresponding video follow below.  Links will open a video in Windows Media Player.

1.    Seeing Colorblindness
2.    Colorblind Consequences
3.    Bigger Pictures
4.    Colorblindness and Social Science: Are we Relevant to the Law?
5.    (Race-Conscious) Interventions

For more sessions, see generally: http://crsonline.law.ucla.edu/CRS_Program/Events/2009_Symposium/Agenda.

To access past CRS Symposia sessions online, visit the UCLA Library’s Electronic Reserves.

This event was put on by the Critical Race Studies Program at the UCLA School of Law.
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For additional information on the impact of California’s Proposition 209 in various sectors, including employment, government contracting, and education, visit Impact209.org.  See also a previous REP post — Affirmative Action Redux on Prop 209’s impact on employment and labor.

Imagine you’re in a scavenger hunt.  The goal of this scavenger hunt is to find fresh fruits and vegetables in the middle of a  gritty and densely populated urban area.  The initial idea of visiting the local supermarket quickly vanishes once you realize that the nearest market is 15 miles away and there is no public transportation.   The next stop is the local corner store.  You scan the shelves looking for your kale and butternut squash on your sacevenger list only to be greeted by a sea of  hamburger helper, chips, soda, and beer  You have just found yourself in one of  America’s food deserts.  A food desert is the term used to describe the trend for large supermarket chains to neglect the densely populated urban areas.  These food deserts are predominately found in low income communities of color.  The  alarming rise of the rates of obesity and diabetes in these communities has generated a greater awareness  for more access to fresh fruits and vegetables.

That’s the hope for the next wave of urban entrepreneur where the next big thing may be filling the void of the urban food desert.   In some neighborhoods it’s about luring the large chain grocery stores, while in others it’s about taking the matter in their own hands and growing the fruits and vegetables themselves on roof top gardens.  With the help of tax incentives these urban gardens have cropped up in neighborhoods from the Tenderloin in San Francisco to the Lower East Side in New York City.  These roof top gardeners have found that growing your own fresh produce is not only good for the community’s overall health but that it can be profitable as well.   Everyone seems to be getting into the act of urban gardening from  community organizations, schools, and restaurants.

When Lori Phanachone, a Laotian American teenager born in California, told officials at her new Iowa high school that a language other than English was spoken in her home, she was categorized as an “English Language Learner” and forced to take a basic English proficiency exam.  She passed the test as a sophomore, and felt the requirement to take it again the following year was insulting.

Despite her 3.9 GPA, school officials said she was “illiterate” because she refused to continue taking the English Language Development Assessment (ELDA). They called Phanachone’s refusal “insubordination” and suspended her for three days.

The plot thickens, however - it appears that the high school may have misused Panachone’s indication of Lao as the primary language spoken in her home in order to obtain extra federal funds available for students determined to have limited English proficiency.  “[The school] labeled me an English Language Learner when I enrolled without even bothering to test me. All I want is to continue my education without the school labeling me unfairly,” said Phanachone.

See the full story here on Colorlines.com.

Data-philes are abuzz with the recent launch of Data.gov a website created “to increase public access to high value, machine readable datasets generated by the Executive Branch of the Federal Government” according to the site description. Users can search the vast Data.gov catalog by category (Income, Expenditures, Poverty and Wealth; Law Enforcement Court and Prisons, etc.) and/or agency (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention or the Department of Defense, for example). The site offers two ways to access data: 1) the raw data catalog consisting of instant view/download of platform-independent, machine readable datasets in a variety of formats, and 2) a Tool Catalog with application-driven access to Federal data with hyperlinks and featuring data-mining and extraction tools and other services.

Feeling somewhat befuddled by these descriptions? No worries if you are, like me, technically-challenged. Using the handy Data.gov tutorial, I was able to determine with a five minute search that between 1999 and 2004, the lung cancer mortality rate in California for every 100,000 African-Americans was 55, significantly higher than for Whites at 44 per 100,000 (noting that this last figure probably includes Latinos because of the way in which the census categories Hispanics or Latinos). Incidentally, the link that Data.gov sent me to for these statistics, the CDC’s Wide-ranging Online Data for Epidemiological Research or WONDER, is a fantastic resource in its own right. Finally, Data.gov’s authors describe the website as a work in progress and invite users to suggest additional data sets and site enhancements to make the site an even more comprehensive tool for access to federal government data.

• Summary: This article authored by Professor powell, executive director of the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity and Gregory H. Williams in Civil Right and Civil Liberties at the Moritz College of Law at the Ohio State University, examines the import of the emerging “post racialism” movement in light of historical and current structural and institutional racism. The article also identifies possible policy solutions to remedy racial and ethnic inequity.

Derek W. Black, In Defense Of Voluntary Desegregation: All Things Are Not Equal, 44 Wake Forest L. Rev. 107 (2009).

• Summary: “This Article analyzes the concept of racial stigma in Justice Kennedy’s controlling opinion in Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1… [and] reveals that Kennedy’s fundamental concern is that using racial classifications to achieve voluntary desegregation racially stigmatizes students. In particular, he assumes that the classifications undermine individualism and reduce children to “racial chits.”” The Article proceeds to analyze Kennedy’s position and elucidate how Kennedy’s opinion “fails… to recognize the purpose of voluntary desegregation and the unique characteristics that distinguish it from other race-conscious programs.”