race – Hank Kalet

Small victories

A frivolous and dangerous challenge to last year’s ruling by a gay federal judge that shot down the state’s ban on gay marriage has been tossed out.

Chief U.S. District Judge James Ware said former Chief Judge Vaughn Walker did not have to divulge whether he wanted to marry his own gay partner before he declared last year that voter-approved Proposition 8 was unconstitutional.

Lawyers for backers of the ban argued at a hearing Monday that Walker should have recused himself or disclosed his relationship because he and his partner stood to personally benefit from the verdict. Walker publicly revealed after he retired in February that he is in a 10-year relationship with a man. Rumors that he was gay had circulated before and after he presided over the trial in early 2010.

Ware said the ruling by Walker, who did not attend Monday’s hearing, raised important questions and called it the first case in which a judge’s same-sex relationship had led to calls for disqualification.

He said there probably were similar struggles when race and gender were the issues.

Just so the issue is clear: This ruling was not about same-sex marriage, but about the attempt to undercut judges. If the challenge had been upheld and Walker’s ruling was overturned, it would have made it impossible for gay judges to rule on gay issues — and opened the door for challenges to decisions made by black judges on racial issues, Latino judges on immigration issues, women judges on gender issues and so on.

Send me an e-mail.
Read poetry at The Subterranean.
Certainties and Uncertainties a chapbook by Hank Kalet, will be published in November by Finishing Line Press. It can be ordered here.
Suburban Pastoral, a chapbook by Hank Kalet, available here.

Race and the birth-certificate non-issue

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The president did something he should never have had to do: Release his birth certificate. As this amazing commentary points out, this is about his citizenship as determined by race. The right is apoplectic over this issue because it believes that someone who looks like Barack Obama should not be allowed to be president. He is not a full citizen, the birthers believe, for no other reason than his race.

Send me an e-mail.
Read poetry at The Subterranean.
Certainties and Uncertainties a chapbook by Hank Kalet, will be published in November by Finishing Line Press. It can be ordered here.
Suburban Pastoral, a chapbook by Hank Kalet, available here.

Broken schools? Depends on where you live

I have been thinking hard on the charter plan being pushed by Gov. Chris Christie, a retread of the tired schools choice debate that has been going on nationally and pushed by free-market zealots for years.

Gov. Christie used a (flawed) Star-Ledger special report issued earlier this week to back up his contention that school choice works:

The report obtained by The Star-Ledger compared 2010 standardized test scores for charter schools against district schools. The scores were from grades 3 through 8, and 11th grade. That data is contained in a report expected to be released today by the state Department of Education.

The newspaper analysis shows 76 percent of charter school eighth grades outpaced performance in their districts in language arts, for example, as did 68 percent of fourth-grade classes in language arts, and 58 percent of fourth-grade classes in math. At the high school level, 69 percent of schools outperformed district classes in the language arts portion of the high school proficiency exam, and 54 percent outdid district classes in math.

There are about 73 charter schools operating in New Jersey now, most in urban areas, serving varying grade levels.

Bob Braun, the Ledger’s fine columnist, reminds us that we must look at the charter numbers with a jaundiced eye. The report — later issued by Christie — did little more than prove “that the charter schools best able to exclude the neediest students got both the highest test scores,” which is something charter critics have long argued. If the best students can migrate away from urban schools, it has a residual effect on the schools left behind.

From a statistical standpoint consider this:

We have a school district with 35 kids. The median test school is 70 (the student with the 18th highest score; 17 higher and 17 lower) and the average is 70 (meaning that, when you add all scores together and you divide by the number of students you get 70). If you remove the top six students — say they average 90 — then you move the median figure downward — the median would be the 15th highest (14 higher and 14 lower). No change in results, but the median drops. Same with the average — take the top six scores out and you are left with 29 students with a 66 average without anything else changing.

Braun calls school choice another broken promise to the state’s neediest children:

School choice—that’s the latest ticket to “equal educational opportunity,” according to the governor. Finally, a solution that won’t require children to be with other children who don’t look like them. A solution that won’t require a lot more money or state effort.

But it’s not helping, either. It’s just further isolating the neediest children. Charters enroll far fewer very poor children with educational problems than do the traditional schools.

And, while a few charters might be helping a small number of inner-city children, their test scores, like those of traditional schools, still lag behind the rest of the state.

Addressing the failings of poor schools will take far more of a commitment of resources than we seem willing to provide and it will mean addressing the long-standing racial, ethnic and class segregation that has plagued this allegedly liberal state. But then, no one seems to be all that concerned with fixing things for he poorest of the poor.

Send me an e-mail.
Read poetry at The Subterranean.
Certainties and Uncertainties a chapbook by Hank Kalet, will be published in November by Finishing Line Press. It can be ordered here.
Suburban Pastoral, a chapbook by Hank Kalet, available here.

Sherrod controversy in context: The uses of racism by the right

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Rachel Maddow last night offered the best summary of the larger meaning of the Shirley Sherrod controversy — one that demonstrates how it is part of a larger narrative the GOP has been using since the passage of the Civil Rights Act and the fleeing of southern whites from the Democratic Party.

There are a number of interesting things that could be said — about Fox News’ bias and its infection of the mainstream media, about the weakness of national reporting, the ease with which black women continue to be scapegoated and the capitulation of the Obama administration to Washington’s consensus narrative — but the Maddow point, that the GOP is using lingering white fear of black advancement to fan the flames of resentment in the hopes of recreating the Nixonian southern strategy, is perhaps the most important. I’ll let her explanation stand on its own.

Send me an e-mail.
Read poetry at The Subterranean.
Suburban Pastoral, a chapbook by Hank Kalet, available here.

Gates-gate: Race, class and status in America

Eugene Robinson’s take on the Henry Louis Gates arrest — a media firestorm that deserved far less coverage than it got — is race-based, but not in the usual way. Most of the focus has been on the notion of profiling, which never seemed right to me.

Robinson, however, makes it clear how race functioned in this absurd little morality play:

Apparently, there was something about the power relationship involved — uppity, jet-setting black professor vs. regular-guy, working-class white cop — that Crowley couldn’t abide. Judging by the overheated commentary that followed, that same something, whatever it might be, also makes conservatives forget that they believe in individual rights and oppose intrusive state power.

He says the confirmation hearings for Judge Sonia Sotomayor shared some of the same characteristics — a white male judge with a sharp tongue would never had his temperment questioned, while “the idea of a sharp-tongued ‘wise Latina’ making nervous attorneys, some of them white male attorneys, fumble and squirm,” sent up a red flag for the GOP.

Robinson cuts to the chase, asking the operative question and then answering it:

Is a man of Gates’s station entitled to puff himself up and remind a police officer that he’s dealing with someone who has juice? Is a woman of Sotomayor’s accomplishment entitled to humiliate a lawyer who came to court unprepared? No more and no less entitled, surely, than all the Big Cheeses who came before them.

Yet Gates’s fit of pique somehow became cause for arrest. I can’t prove that if the Big Cheese in question had been a famous, brilliant Harvard professor who happened to be white — say, presidential adviser Larry Summers, who’s on leave from the university — the outcome would have been different. I’d put money on it, though. Anybody wanna bet?