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The plaintiffs in the hotly contested affirmative action case Ricci v. DeStefano stood out among the crowd outside New Haven City Hall today. They wore dress blues and wide smiles or poker-faces that occasionally cracked into grins. They were, but for one, white, and they were celebrating their win in a 5-4 decision handed down by a sharply divided Supreme Court.
Mingling on the sidewalk before the conference, plaintiff Frank Ricci posed for photos with his family. Ben Vargas, the one Hispanic amongst the 18 plaintiffs, grinned beneath his sunglasses and crisp peaked cap. Attorney Karen Torre, surrounded by her clients and jokingly donning one of their caps, delivered a statement in boldly Obama-esque fashion: “We had the audacity of hope—that some court at some point would enforce the letter and spirit of the civil rights laws, accord to firefighters the recognition and respect that they deserve, and reject attempts to lower professional standards of competence for the sake of identity politics.”
It took some audacity indeed to invoke Obama in support of a lawsuit that called into question the country’s most significant civil rights statutes. At a podium in the City Hall foyer, defendant and Mayor John DeStefano lamented the Court’s stance on equal opportunity when he declared this morning’s decision “a continual erosion of civil rights law by the Supreme Court.”
By choosing to hear the case, the Court placed the question of race-influenced hiring decisions back on the table. In an opinion written by Justice Kennedy, the majority decided that “the City made its employment decision because of race. The City rejected the test results solely because the higher scoring candidates were white.” If the city had rejected the results because the exams were poorly constructed or because there was a less discriminatory alternative—see Justice Ginsburg’s dissent for an argument that they were, and there is—then the court might have ruled differently. But scratching test results solely because city officials did not like the complexion of the top scorers, Kennedy argued, “is antithetical to the notion of a workplace where individuals are guaranteed equal opportunity regardless of race.”
Lieutenant Danny Stratton, who’s currently being considered for captain in the Camden, New Jersey Fire Department (see part one of our previous Ricci series for Camden’s own history of racial tension in its firehouses) and who came to New Haven today to show support for the Ricci plaintiffs, explained that diversity plays a big role in his department’s hiring decisions. “But it doesn’t guarantee you’ve got the top guy for the job,” he said. Like Stratton, Max Schneeman is a Camden lieutenant waiting for a promotion to captain. He’d taken the test, he told me, and is part of his own lawsuit. I assumed he meant a reverse discrimination suit similar to Ricci, but Schneeman quickly clammed up, crossing his arms and turning away, his eyes shielded by reflective sunglasses.
DeStefano acknowleged the divisive nature of the case, noting the views of both firefighters like Stratton and Schneeman, but also of those who were conspicuously not present—the minority firefighters. “I have no doubt that there is a set of firefighters who feel that they’ve played by the rules and who feel justified right now,” the mayor said. “And that there’s another group who feel like the rules are stacked against them and that as soon as they start to get ahead, the rules change.”
I kept thinking about the black firefighters I’ve been talking to over the past few weeks, none of whom I saw at the press conference. After decades and decades of lawsuits founded upon civil rights statutes, they have started to get ahead. Blacks and Hispanics, who make up about 60 percent of New Haven’s population, are now more or less proportionally represented within the rank and file of the city’s fire department. But their efforts to penetrate the upper management ranks have been less fruitful. Currently, only one of the city’s 21 fire captains is African-American. The anti-discrimination laws that once won them spots in New Haven’s firehouses are now the laws that have planted the smiles on Frank Ricci’s and Ben Vargas’ faces. There go the rules, changing again.
Photograph of Frank Ricci by Nicole Allan.
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A guest post from Double X intern Meredith Simons:
Liz Garbus, the Oscar-nominated director of The Farm, has a new documentary premiering tonight on HBO called Shouting Fire: Stories from the Edge of Free Speech. Her obsession with free speech is understandable: She was raised by Martin Garbus, a First Amendment attorney who risked the wrath of the federal government with his involvement in the dissemination of the Pentagon Papers in the early '70s. Ultimately he is the center of his daughter’s film.
Shouting begins (free speech is “a miracle”) and ends (“Don’t let the fucking guys win”) with quotes from the elder Garbus. His synopses of 20th-century free speech milestones are woven throughout the film and lend context and depth to the 21st-century cases his daughter highlights. These are the “stories” of the film’s subtitle, the cases of three individuals and one group who are astonished when their expressions of unpopular opinions leave them jobless, suspended or arrested.
Unfortunately, Garbus presents these stories as though the only thing people need to know is that someone expressed an opinion and was punished for it. Her almost unconditional defense of the individuals whose stories she tells can obscure some of the more tantalizing questions that could be asked about their cases. Should schools be able to ban offensive speech if it could affect another student’s learning environment? Is any dismissal precipitated by political wrangling a threat to academic freedom? The speed and ease with which Garbus handles these issues gloss over the difficulties that some of these questions should raise.
But even if Garbus tends to pick sides in free speech controversies, she’s not guilty of picking sides when it comes to party politics. One of Shouting Fire’s most touching segments is on Debbie Almontaser, a hijab-wearing Yemen native who conservative WASPs loved to hate when she was trying to launch a dual-language Arabic-English school in New York in 2007. But just as the film starts to feel like another tired diatribe against the evils of Christian conservativism, Gunder turns her camera, and her sympathies, toward Chase Harper, a conservative, white, Christian teen who is suspended when he wears a shirt with a Bible verse and the words “Homosexuality is shameful” to school. Now it’s the liberals’ turn to get pilloried, as Garbus interviews a young man who earnestly declares that shirts like Harper’s should be banned because they contribute to suicides by gay teens.
Both of the Garbuses are pessimistic about the possibility of a flourishing of free speech in the near future. The fear that comes with war and advances in surveillance technology have created a poisonous cocktail of free speech curtailments disguised as security measures, Martin Garbus says near the end of the film. Then he does some gloomy calculations about the ages of John Roberts and Samuel Alito. He concludes that we’re stuck with a court that’s unlikely to offer much in the way of protection for freedom of expression for at least the next quarter-century.
Still from Shouting Fire courtesy of Liz Garbus.
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On Slate, Walter Dellinger and Linda Greenhouse agree that Judge Sotomayor has little to fear from today's Supreme Court ruling in favor of the white New Haven firefighters who sued their city when it threw out the results of a test for promotions. Justice Kennedy's majority opinion barely mentions the brief panel opinion Sotomayor signed. Justice Alito's concurrence is a little more critical, but not much. Court observers, including me, will patiently explain that the Supreme Court came up with a whole new rule in its decision today, which it wasn't Sotomayor's job, as a Second Circuit judge, to do. This is how the law is supposed to develop: The lower courts abide by their own precedents, and the Supreme Court's prior rulings, until the high bench tell them to shift course.
But as Linda points out, the right will try to make hay with today's decision anyway. Alito gave them some pretty good lines. He talks about the idea that the white firefighters who sued deserve "sympathy," an idea that is in the opinion Sotomayor signed on to, as well as Justice Ginsburg's dissent today. Then he bristles: "But 'sympathy' is not what petitioners have a right to demand. What they have a right to demand is evenhanded enforcement of the law--of Title VII's prohibition of discrimination based on race. And that is what, until today's decision, has been denied them."
This is a clear retort to Obama's call for judges with empathy. It's also a claim, fair or no, that the white firefighters were denied evenhanded enforcement of the law in the courts below. That will resonate with white people who think applicants of color are taking jobs away from them. Justice Kennedy is solicitious of these people, too. He treats New Haven's decision to throw out the test as a form of "racial preference" and says that "is antithetical to the notion of a workplace where individuals are guaranteed equal opportunity regardless of race." There are good answers for why this mischaracterizes what was at stake in this case. Sotomayor will surely be asked for one at her confirmation hearing. I'm eager to hear what she comes up with.
Photograph of Sonya Sotomayor by Alex Wong/Getty Images.
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Parents of children born with an ambiguous gender often beg doctors to let them choose one gender or another. Now, in Sweden, a couple has decided to raise their now 2-year-old with no gender. Of course, the kid has one, but they won’t tell anyone what it is. They dress the kid in any old colors. When they change the diaper, they hide its parts. The kid’s name is Pop. “We want Pop to grow up more freely and avoid being forced into a specific gender mould from the outset,” Pop’s mother told a Swedish newspaper. “It's cruel to bring a child into the world with a blue or pink stamp on their forehead.”
I had a militant feminist mother friend like this once. She only let her daughter play with cars and trucks, and then one day came in the room to see her daughter swaddling Baby Tonka in a blanket and feeding her a bottle through the chassis. Experiment over. What the Swedish couple is doing is of course absurd on many levels. To raise a child gender-free requires a kind of vigilance that can only lead to obsession with gender. If they keep it up, in a few years they will have to redirect Pop’s every natural instinct, and then what to do about the hair?
What’s interesting to me is how gender neutrality has now become an ideal. Trying to raise a girl with boy interests has the benefit, at least, of building empathy for the other sex. But the idea of no gender at all is radical and dispiriting.
Photo by Getty Images.
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This weekend, both the Times and the Post published complimentary yet enormously frustrating profiles of Mark Sanford's wife Jenny. They portray her as a tough, sharp domestic goddess, without ever questioning what such a tough, smart woman is doing playing domestic goddess in the first place. Both pieces make clear that Sanford is a very intelligent, hard working, focused, “Old Testament woman with a 170 IQ,” who has been indispensable to her husband’s rise. A magna cum laude Georgetown graduate and a former vice president at the enormously reputable Lazard Freres & Co., Sanford walked away from her career to have a family and help her husband realize his political ambitions. Junk trade?
A typical Jenny Sanford anecdote goes like this: Mark Sanford apparently told his wife he wanted to run for Congress while she was still in the hospital, just having delivered their second child. Despite the fact that this news came out of nowhere, on a very busy day, she took it in stride. This—supportive and game, but never at the expense of her family—seems to be her M.O. “The Sanford house was in a perpetual state of constructive chaos, friends said. Jenny Sanford would be folding laundry and cooking dinner while on the telephone with campaign advisers about what the next television advertisement would say,” writes the Post. “She oversaw his staff, drafted speeches, set policy and raised money. She even baked oatmeal chocolate chip cookies for reporters and other guests.”
Guys, she bakes cookies! “So often when a woman is business minded, they’re not good at being a cookie baking soccer mom, but that’s the thing about Jenny,” a friend of Sanford’s told the Times. “You cannot stereotype her that way. She can be either one of those things and do it effortlessly.”
As these two pieces tell it, if Mrs. Sanford is not a woman who had it all, she was a woman who did it all. She did the thinking, and she did the babies. She managed the campaign, and she made snacks. “She was the bulldozer that cleared the path and got [Mark Sanford] there," and she was the woman who would “choose one of her son’s class plays over a presidential dinner anytime.”
Now, it’s not that this set of characteristics doesn’t have a certain appeal (and, not to cast too many partisan stones, a particularly Republican one at that), but in light of last week’s events, they also have a stark downside. Because she did the thinking and the babies, now she’s a very tough, very smart woman with a killer oatmeal chocolate chip cookie recipe who is best known, personally and professionally, for having a husband who likes to “spark” on women other than her. Turns out doing it all amounted to doing everything for everyone but herself. And that may be admirable, but, in light of her husband’s behavior and Mrs. Sanford’s seemingly real and impressive talents, it's some seriously misdirected energy.
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Last weekend, 17-year-old, Marietta, Ga. native Melanie Oudin beat 24-year-old, sixth-seeded Serbian Jelena Jankovic in a surprise upset at Wimbledon. Earlier this year, Jankovic was ranked No. 1 in the world. This is Oudin's first Wimbledon.
After the match, Oudin scored critical praise for her ability to get herself out of scrappy situations. Jankovic begged to differ: "She doesn't have any weapons, from what I've seen."
According to the more experienced tennis player, she lost because she wasn't feeling well. In other words, she blamed it on her period.
"It's not easy being a woman, sometimes," Jankovic said. "All these things happen. What can I do? After the first set, I felt really dizzy, and I thought that I was just going to end up in the hospital. I started to shake. I was losing my—how you say—consciousness. I was really going to lose it, you know, to fall down and just, you know, probably go—call the ambulance and leave the court."
Bridget Crawford at Feminist Law Professors suggests Jankovic was looking for pity from male sportswriters: "Maybe Jankovic had cramps. But unless she takes to her bed each month, a world-class athlete probably has played (well) with cramps before. More likely, Jankovic is making excuses for her poor performance and thought she’d get a 'pass' from the mostly male sportswriters," she writes.
Whatever the case, it seems we'll have to add "woman issues" to sore loser excuses. If all else fails, you can always blame it on the ovaries.
Photograph of Jelena Jankovic by Ian Walton/Getty Images.
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A few weeks back, Meghan and Emily posted about the poignant, brief pregnancy loss scene in Pixar’s Up. It was a doubly powerful rendering of miscarriage and grief, because it happened silently, in the midst of a gregarious, dreamy children’s movie. I am wondering what you all thought of the miscarriage scene in Away We Go, Sam Mendes’ new film about pregnant slackers seeking a home.
As Dana’s already pointed out, it’s not a perfect movie. Too many cartoon characters bouncing around cartoonishly (although Allison Janey, Maggie Gyllenhaal, and Josh Hamilton are such brilliantly wrought caricatures, it hardly matters). But as soon as we meet Melanie Lynskey, playing hip Montreal supermom, Munch Garnett, we know something different is coming.
Munch can’t conceive, and has thus adopted a Victorian houseful of impossibly tidy, polite children with perfect pitch. But the instant she finds herself in a room with the explosively pregnant Verona (played by Maya Rudolph), it’s clear Munch is being devoured by something. And later that evening, after a good amount of wine, Munch takes to the stage at an open mic night to perform the saddest, least sexy pole dance ever witnessed, all jerking head and hollow eyes. Her husband, Tom, played by Chris Messina, explains that Munch has just suffered her fifth miscarriage. He can’t take his eyes off her as he describes the blasted hope of yet another pregnancy lost. I found the scene completely devastating, in part because it’s narrated by the grieving husband, and in part because it captured something of the way miscarriage yanks away your sense of yourself as a mom, the kind with the stretchy leggings, and forces you to become some other kind of woman, overnight. The precocious little adopted girl who opens the door to Rudolph and John Krasinski earlier that same evening, telegraphs all this when she explains that her mom is still upstairs, changing into a short skirt.
And something about Tom’s confession leads Krasinski and Rudolph to change their minds about moving to Montreal. Tom and Munch aren't the perfect family anymore.
Courtney at Feministing says she “absolutely detested” the pole dance scene, and I can see why it offends. But it affected me the same way the miscarriage scene in Up affected me; I couldn’t breathe. I wonder if that’s because we still talk about pregnancy loss so rarely and so poorly, or because it conveyed almost too much about sex, hope, love, loss, grief, longing, and the silence and shame that come with it.
Still of Maya Rudolph and John Krasinski in Away We Go © 2009 Focus Features.
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