📈 first Derivative [91]
📈 first Derivative [91]
Sunday | July 9, 2023
🇺🇸 Good to be back in the US after traveling most of the last month (Colombia, Italy, and then stuck in Switzerland for a night). I came in on July 4th just in time to fly over the fireworks lighting up the dusk.
📚 I’m about 40% through reading Titan, Ron Chernow’s biography of John D. Rockefeller. I may end up writing a post on that, stay tuned.
🎬 Recent films I’ve seen that I can recommend: The new sequel, Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, is a thrill to watch even if it comes just shy of recapturing the magic of the first. I finally was able to catch a screening of Tokyo Story at Film Forum. A beautiful and moving film that will make you want to be better and kinder to your parents. If you’ve seen it and haven’t seen any Hirokazu Kore-eda, I highly recommend checking out Still Walking which I found personally more affecting. Only my second Yasujirō Ozu film after Late Spring.
And if you’re looking for a light summer romance with a pop of color, check out Rye Lane streaming on Hulu, which finally answers the age-old question: what if the cinematographer of No Sudden Move and the set designer of The Umbrellas of Cherbourg teamed up to shoot a love letter to South London. Not a perfect movie but one that has more life and energy than most of its well-rounded peers.
✍️ Finally, I had a lot of thoughts on the affirmative action case, and by the time I finished writing the issue got too long. So I wrote them up in another post you should get in a separate email as well. As always, I welcome your thoughts on this too, whether it’s just for private correspondence or if you’d like to share with fD.
Good reading,
-Teddy
🎓⚖️ Last week, the Supreme Court struck down affirmative action in the admissions programs at Harvard and UNC, finding that the universities violated the rights of Asian American applicants under the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment and Title VI of the Civil Rights Act. The decision overturned Grutter v. Bollinger and ruled it unconstitutional for universities to use race as a factor in admissions. (WSJ | Jess Bravin | Jun 2023)
Key Reads
Full Decision of Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard
On the unsurprising absence of Asian Americans, and the discrimination against them, from the center of the discussion around the case, Jay Caspian Kang’s in The New Yorker
So where did Asians actually fit into this picture, as imagined by the defenders of affirmative action? The word “Asian” appears only three times in Justice [Ketanji Brown] Jackson’s twenty-nine-page dissent—once as a footnote, once as part of a list of median household incomes compared across racial groups…
The dissent, which details the lengthy history of discrimination against Black people, never mentions the history of racism against Asians in America, whether the lynching of Chinese immigrants in the nineteenth century, the Chinese Exclusion Act, or Japanese internment. If a society should make decisions with a clear eye toward history—a sentiment I agree with—shouldn’t it also follow that a group who was expelled from the U.S. would at least have the right to not be lumped in with the people who kicked them out?
On what comes next as institutions try to maintain racial diversity through race-neutral alternatives, Jeannie Suk Gersen in The New Yorker.
Since the late twentieth century, the Court has made it exceedingly difficult to win discrimination cases in which a race-neutral government policy had a racially disparate impact…
But it’s conceivable that the conservative Court, after ending affirmative action, may be open to making it easier for plaintiffs to prevail on complaints about race-neutral efforts to seek racial diversity… If so, this development may, ironically, also have the knock-on effect of easing the path for discrimination plaintiffs more generally—an outcome that civil-rights advocates have sought for decades…
In this new world, there is yet another judicial bait and switch to watch, wherein liberal judges, almost by necessity, find it extremely easy to rationalize and brush past evidence of possible discrimination against Asian Americans in just the way that conservative judges have often done with discrimination against Black people.
A lot of attention has been drawn to the acknowledgement that universities can still consider race and its impact as discussed in personal essays. Chief Justice John Roberts though explicitly warned against reconstituting the status quo through that channel. Good reads in the WSJ and Manhattan Institute about this. Bottom line, it will be much harder for selective schools to maintain diversity and their elite status, both logistically and in terms of legal exposure.
On common misconceptions surrounding affirmative action, its practice, its effects, and its history, Coleman Hughes in Coleman’s Corner. Really great quote from Bayard Rustin in the full essay. For a condensed version, see his Twitter thread.
Key Figures
Nearly three-quarters of Americans or more say gender, race or ethnicity, or whether a relative attended the school should not factor into admissions decisions. (Pew Research)1
Mr. [Peter] Arcidiacono found that an otherwise identical applicant bearing an Asian-American male identity with a 25 percent chance of admission would have a 32 percent chance of admission if he were white, a 77 percent chance of admission if he were Hispanic, and a 95 percent chance of admission if he were black. (NYT)
African and Caribbean immigrants and their children now account for more than 40 percent of the Black enrollment in the Ivy League, which risks crowding out the people that affirmative action was originally intended to help (NYT)
Over the ensuing quarter-century, this increase more or less stalled. Harvard’s Asian enrollment remained at about 17 percent, year after year, while the percentage of Asians in the population of the United States roughly doubled (NYT)2
43 percent of white students admitted to Harvard University were recruited athletes, legacy students, children of faculty and staff, or on the dean’s interest list — applicants whose parents or relatives have donated to Harvard… The study also found that roughly 75 percent of the white students admitted from those four categories, labeled 'ALDCs' in the study, “would have been rejected if they had been treated as white non-ALDCs,” the study said (NBC)
UCLA law professor Richard Sander found that after racial preferences were banned, there was a 55% increase in the number of black and Hispanic freshmen who graduated in four years from the University of California and a 51% rise in black and Hispanic students who earned degrees in STEM (NYP)
🏳️🌈☪️ On the growing tensions between American Muslims and the American Left (Plough | Shadi Hamid | Mar 2020) (The American Mind | Dragoman | Jun 2023)
Several pieces on this theme caught my attention around the same time, all worth reading in full. The first was this one in The Guardian:
In 2015, many liberal residents in Hamtramck, Michigan, celebrated as their city attracted international attention for becoming the first in the United States to elect a Muslim-majority city council…
this week many of those same residents watched in dismay as a now fully Muslim and socially conservative city council passed legislation banning Pride flags from being flown on city property that had – like many others being flown around the country – been intended to celebrate the LGBTQ+ community.
And the other essays I found through Shadi Hamid, one of his own and another he tweeted by an anonymous Muslim writer. Both, in their own ways, dive into the foundational tensions exemplified in the Guardian story: Muslims trying to remain observant to their faith while being accepted by American liberals while at the same time finding common cause with American conservatives who’ve championed shared social and political values with limited success.
At the core of the conservative or “traditionalist” argument is the idea that Muslim activists can and should support the rights of non-Muslim groups and individuals – but only so long as such advocacy stays well within the confines of Islamic legal precepts. They criticize their co-religionists for being too eager for mainstream acceptance, with good intentions leading to moral distortions. Out of the sense of threat created by anti-Muslim bigotry,
Muslims are all too willing, these critics argue, to make common cause with problematic allies who hold beliefs antithetical to Islamic teachings. The Detroit imam Dawud Walid, for example, in Towards Sacred Activism, emphasizes “the difference between coalitions and alliances.” Alliances, he suggests, require a deeper mutual affinity and a commitment to supporting the other’s goals. Walid argues that Muslims’ ultimate loyalty and allegiance must be to God and God alone.
The overture is actually made explicitly in The American Mind essay, offering an Islamic integralism in place of a Christian/Catholic integralism that has failed to gain momentum:
We don’t need you to pretend to like Islam; disliking Islam is not Islamophobia. The central deception of Muslims’ alliance with the Left was that we believed they would respect our immutable values even if they conflicted with their lifestyles… Conservatives haven’t succeeded in conserving very much; maybe they could stand to learn a thing or two from us here…
I can see certain conservative commentators expressing unease over the friendship between Islam and social conservatism, but these chauvinist voices will derail efforts to work towards shared objectives, including pro-family economic and education policies…
It’s my prayer that this piece helps to shed light on what I believe to be a great opportunity for these estranged groups to jumpstart their relationship and to work for shared policy goals that would strengthen America and return us to a degree of normalcy. Skepticism on both sides is inevitable, and that will have to be worked out. But such is the hard work of politics, done by means of tough conversations behind closed doors, in person.
I think this is an angle of attack that liberal American pluralists will have a lot of trouble dealing with because of their superficial love for diversity and blindness towards the normative values embedded in a “neutral” pluralism. The anonymous author correctly identifies that blindness in that “we were expected to racialize Islam into a cultural identity marker, and to take radical pluralism as our primary religion.“ Otherwise, as Hamid writes:
liberalism, particularly in its maximalist variations, is only neutral to those who are already liberal. As the political theorist Andrew March writes in Islam and Liberal Citizenship: “The practice of Islam represents a textbook illustration of both the appeals and the challenges of liberal neutrality.”
Going back to the pride flag example, we might call the situation we’re in now “Pareto commensurability”, in which the free exercise of one group’s rights can now only come at the expense of another’s. It’s not too hard to imagine in the near future, an America that looks like a cultural patchwork where enclaves populated by conservative immigrant communities will exercise American democracy to protect their own cultural values locally in a way that might be ambivalent for Christian conservatives but largely compatible with their natural sympathy for federalism and diverse localisms. On the other hand, we’ll see more conflict with liberals and their established preference for universal policies applied through the courts, recent defeats in SCOTUS notwithstanding.
Hamid contrasts the situation in the US and Europe more hopefully though, painting of a picture of a de-Christianized and secular Europe in which Islam isn’t just a religion so much as the instantiation of religiosity itself.
Muslims aren’t just Muslims: they become a proxy for a deeper set of issues including gender equality, sexual freedom, gay rights, long-term demographic shifts, and the decline of Christianity. Defenders of Europe’s secular status quo often claim that they are merely protecting the neutrality of the public sphere…
Even if conservative Muslims wish to be discreet, their faith commitments make that difficult: wearing a headscarf, requesting halal food or prayer exemptions in the workplace, or refraining from alcohol are, from a secularist perspective, both intrusive and ostentatious. Muslims come to appear strange and countercultural, standing athwart the steady march of progress toward the post-religious future that many Europeans assumed was already their present.
On the other hand, because American Christianity is much stronger and vital:
Enough American Christians are outwardly unapologetic about their faith that religiosity appears socially normal. Even if secular liberals know few people of faith within their own circles or find Christian witness off-putting, they at least know it exists. The visible practice of religion isn’t primarily associated with Muslims and Islam. This explains why American Muslims, despite contending with resurgent racism and Islamophobia, are living in what may well be the freest environment for Muslims anywhere in the world
🇰🇵❤️ A touching North Korean love story about a defector and the one she had to leave behind. (FT | Edward White, Kang Buseong | Jun 2023)
I could see this being adapted into a movie, given the recent popularity of Korean content and the especially recent release of a movie like Past Lives.
With few exceptions, all those fleeing North Korea cross into China somewhere along the 1,400km-long border between the two countries. The best cover is usually found along remote corners of the Yalu River, which runs for almost half the border length and freezes over through the long winters, when Siberian storms plaster the peninsula with thick ice and snow. When the family came to the edge of the Yalu, it was still late summer, the river high and flowing fast. They strung a rope around their waists, tying themselves together in case one of them slipped, and waded across…
For months, Joo Kyung resisted her mother’s increasingly urgent calls to join the family. She agonised over how and when to tell Hyeok. The thought of him asking her to stay would be bad enough, but the idea of him telling her to leave was also difficult to bear. And she was petrified of being caught a second time. In the end, she lied. She told Hyeok she had to leave town to visit her grandmother. “I couldn’t stay just for the sake of maintaining the relationship,” she said. “I just left, without telling him the truth.”
Public opinion on affirmative action varies greatly depending on how the question is framed, i.e. when affirmative action is explained as race-conscious admissions people respond much more negatively
An interesting note in a NYT interview with Edward Blum, founder of the plaintiff organization, Students for Fair Admission
In 2014, the year we sued Harvard, the Asian admissions rate was, I think, around 18, maybe 19 percent. During the last eight years, the admissions rates at Harvard for Asians have grown from about 18 percent now up to 30 percent. Yet if you look back from 2014, all the way back to about 1999, it was flatlined for 20 years. But then when Harvard gets sued, all of a sudden the number of Asians go [sic] up by 60 percent. How is that possible? How did that happen? Well, I think the numbers speak for themselves.
and as Christopher Caldwell wrote in the NYT:
In 1988 the Department of Education investigated Harvard for anti-Asian bias. Although the school was absolved, Harvard’s Asian enrollment shot up in the course of the investigation from about 11 percent in 1988 to 16 percent in the early 1990s
Something to consider for anyone who thinks schools will easily recreate the current regime through nominally race-neutral means