A Few Thoughts from Washington Post Columnists on Race:

 

 

By Editorial Board, Published: April 28

WHEN JUSTICE Sandra Day O’Connor gave affirmative action a 25-year reprieve, it seemed like more than enough time. Surely after another quarter-century of progress in racial relations, “the use of racial preferences,” as Justice O’Connor wrote, “will no longer be necessary.”

That was 11 years ago. Given the loathsome racism exposed in the past few days, it’s harder to be sanguine about that quarter-century. First it was Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy, whose lawbreaking was being celebrated by Republican senators Rand Paul (Ky.) and Dean Heller (Nev.) until Mr. Bundy began extolling the virtues of slavery for African Americans.

Then came the taped remarks ostensibly of basketball team owner Donald Sterling chastising his girlfriend for associating with African Americans: “It bothers me a lot that you want to broadcast that you’re associating with black people. Do you have to?” In a curious response, Mr. Sterling and his Los Angeles Clippers organization said they “do not know” if the tape is “legitimate” but that Mr. Sterling “feels terrible that such sentiments are being attributed to him.” As Post columnist Sally Jenkins and others have pointed out, this is not the first time that offensive comments have been “attributed to” Mr. Sterling.

Whenever such ugly sentiments surface, many white Americans who like to think that the country has moved beyond rank racism profess astonishment. Many black Americans see in that astonishment proof of the obtuseness, willful or otherwise, that prevents whites from acknowledging the obstacles African Americans still face. Optimists in this case might note that Mr. Bundy (age 67) and Mr. Sterling (80) are of a generation that Justice O’Connor expected would be gone from the scene by her deadline. Yet even optimists have to be dispirited by the revelation of such casually accepted racism.

Two data points don’t prove Justice O’Connor wrong, nor do they make a definitive case for or against affirmative action. They do, however, take us back to the rationale for diversity that Justice O’Connor was defending in 2003. To consign Bundy-style ignorance to history, the country needs younger people of all races interacting, including in law schools (the subject of the 2003 case) and other educational venues.

As the justice wrote then, in Grutter v. Bollinger: “The Law School does not premise its need for critical mass on ‘any belief that minority students always (or even consistently) express some characteristic minority viewpoint on any issue.’ To the contrary, diminishing the force of such stereotypes is both a crucial part of the Law School’s mission, and one that it cannot accomplish with only token numbers of minority students. Just as growing up in a particular region or having particular professional experiences is likely to affect an individual’s views, so too is one’s own, unique experience of being a racial minority in a society, like our own, in which race unfortunately still matters.”

Only 14 years to go, and Justice O’Connor’s observation seems no less true.

ght, and V. Stiviano, left, watch the Clippers play the Los Angeles Lakers during an NBA preseason basketball game in Los Angeles on Monday, Dec. 19, 2010.Los Angeles Clippers owner Donald Sterling’s apparent behavior is disgusting and outrageous, and he should be ousted from the NBA. He also needs to be thanked. Mr. Sterling’s blistering, bigoted blather has exposed not only his reprehensible personal sociology but also the flawed NBA ownership system, a club so inalienably linked to white privilege that it is just as liable for Mr. Sterling’s racist views as the man himself.

 

 

 “Race matters because of the slights, the snickers, the silent judgments that reinforce that most crippling of thoughts:

 ‘I do not belong here. ”   

 

Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor

 

By Robert Barnes, Published: April 22

Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s fierce defense of the affirmative action efforts such as the ones that helped move her from a Bronx housing project to the upper echelons of American law found renewed voice Tuesday in an impassioned dissent that accused colleagues of trying to “wish away” racial inequality — and drew a tart response from Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr.

In her most personal moment in 41 years on the court, Sotomayor read part of her dissent from the bench to emphasize her disagreement with six colleagues who upheld Michigan’s constitutional amendment banning the consideration of race in public university admissions.

It is a 58-page dissent, longer than the combined efforts of four other justices who wrote. The court’s first Latina justice directly took on Roberts’s view that the nation’s continued reliance on racial classifications hinders rather than promotes the goal of a color-blind society.

Sotomayor noted Roberts’s famous statement in a 2007 opinion that “the way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.”  Too simplistic, she said.

“This refusal to accept the stark reality that race matters is regrettable,” Sotomayor wrote. “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to speak openly and candidly on the subject of race, and to apply the Constitution with eyes open to the unfortunate effects of centuries of racial discrimination.”

She added: “As members of the judiciary tasked with intervening to carry out the guarantee of equal protection, we ought not sit back and wish away, rather than confront, the racial inequality that exists in our society.”

Roberts responded with a short, sharp statement of his own.

“To disagree with the dissent’s views on the costs and benefits of racial preferences is not to ‘wish away, rather than confront’ racial inequality,” Roberts wrote.  “People can disagree in good faith on this issue, but it similarly does more harm than good to question the openness and candor of those on either side of the debate.”

Sotomayor, 59, has spoken extensively about how affirmative action was key to her rise from a public housing project where her parents spoke only Spanish. The search for minorities to diversify student bodies in the 1970s won her invitations and scholarship offers from Ivy League schools she had only just learned existed.

She excelled at Princeton, winning the top undergraduate prize, and went to Yale Law School. But she has drawn diametrically different lessons about the experience than Justice Clarence Thomas, the court’s only African American, who said affirmative action cheapened his Yale Law degree.

Thomas did not write separately in Schuette v. Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action. But Sotomayor, joined in the dissent by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, devoted pages to the country’s “long and lamentable record of stymieing the right of racial minorities to participate in the political process.”

And she said her colleagues ignored “the importance of diversity in institutions of higher education” and the decision “reveals how little my colleagues understand about the reality of race in America.”

Sotomayor filled her dissent with a detailed history of the court’s decisions regarding political empowerment and efforts by majorities to dilute the strength of minorities. She reprinted pages of graphics showing the decline of minorities at top universities in California and Michigan since the states prohibited the use of racial considerations.

She even wrote that she was not going to use the term “affirmative action” because of its connotation of “intentional preferential treatment” such as quotas, because the court has outlawed such practices. Instead, she called it a system of “race-sensitive admissions policies.” 

But the most striking part of the dissent was a rebuke to “the view that we should leave race out of the picture.”

“Race matters,” she wrote, to the minority teenager who sees “others tense up as he passes;” to the young person addressed in a foreign language although she grew up in this country; to the young woman who is asked “No, where are you really from?”

“Race matters because of the slights, the snickers, the silent judgments that reinforce that most crippling of thoughts: ‘I do not belong here,’ ” Sotomayor wrote.

Roberts repeated Sotomayor’s words before coming to the opposite conclusion.

“It is not ‘out of touch with reality’ to conclude that racial preferences may themselves have the debilitating effect of reinforcing precisely that doubt, and — if so — that the preferences do more harm than good,” he responded.

The debate provides a remarkable view of the court’s ideological split. But it is unlikely to change many minds — not of those who support what is a step-by-step effort by Roberts to remove racial classifications, or of those who support Sotomayor’s defense of what is clearly a minority view on the court.

Justices are not appointed by presidents “unless they have strong opinions,” said Michigan Attorney General Bill Schuette (R). “I think there are strong passions on each side of this argument.”

BLOGGER'S NOTE:  The conservative opinion may have won the decision but Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor brings to the table what Roberts can only dream of understanding.  Moreover, it's unfortunate that all his experience and education seems, for him, to negate any possibility that he is wrong.  WRONG as two left feet.  WRONG seven days a week and twice on Sunday.  WRONG.  WRONG.  WRONG.  And people like that don't usually wake up; their wrongheaded ideas are too much a part of who they are.

Justice Department prepares for clemency requests from thousands

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By Sari Horwitz, Published: April 21 

The Obama administration is beginning an aggressive new effort to foster equity in criminal sentencing by considering clemency requests from as many as thousands of federal inmates serving time for drug offenses, officials said Monday.

The initiative, which amounts to an unprecedented campaign to free non­violent offenders, will begin immediately and continue over the next two years, officials said. The Justice Department said it expects to reassign dozens of lawyers to its understaffed pardons office to handle the requests from inmates.

Video: Attorney General Eric Holder announced Monday that the Justice Department anticipates receiving thousands of applications for clemency from non-violent drug offenders.

Sari Horwitz APR 21

“The White House has indicated it wants to consider additional clemency applications, to restore a degree of justice, fairness and proportionality for deserving individuals who do not pose a threat to public safety,” Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. said Monday. “The Justice Department is committed to recommending as many qualified applicants as possible for reduced sentences.”

Holder has announced a series of initiatives to tackle disparities in criminal penalties, beginning in August when he said low-level, nonviolent drug offenders with no connection to gangs or large-scale drug organizations would not be charged with offenses that call for strict mandatory sentences. He has traveled across the country to highlight community programs in which nonviolent offenders have received substance-abuse treatment and other assistance instead of long prison sentences.

Underlying the initiatives is the belief by top Justice Department officials that the most severe penalties should be reserved for serious, high-level or violent drug traffickers. On April 10, after an endorsement from Holder, the U.S. Sentencing Commission — the independent agency that sets sentencing policies for federal judges — voted to revise its guidelines to reduce sentences for defendants in most of the nation’s drug cases.

In the meantime, however, thousands of inmates are still serving federally mandated sentences that imposed strict penalties for the possession of crack cocaine. The Fair Sentencing Act, which President Obama signed in 2010, reduced the disparity between convictions for crack and powder cocaine, and Obama has called sentences passed under the older guidelines “unduly harsh.” The law also eliminated the five-year mandatory minimum sentence for the simple possession of crack cocaine.

“There are still too many people in federal prison who were sentenced under the old regime — and who, as a result, will have to spend far more time in prison than they would if sentenced today for exactly the same crime,” Holder said Monday. “This is simply not right.”

For about two decades, strict sentences were imposed on offenders convicted of trafficking or possession with intent to traffic crack cocaine in the belief that the substance was more addictive than powder cocaine, inexpensive and linked to violent crime.

But in 2002, the sentencing panel found that sentencing guidelines were based on misperceptions about the relative dangers of crack cocaine compared with other drugs. The commission also found that the disparity had created a racial imbalance in which harsh sentences had been disproportionately imposed on minorities, particularly African Americans.

In December, Obama commuted the sentences of eight inmates serving long prison terms for crack-cocaine convictions handed down before the 2010 law was passed. Six of the eight were serving life sentences, including two who had not previously been convicted. Each of the eight had served more than 15 years for a crack offense.

Under the 2010 law, the same people would have received shorter prison terms and, in some cases, completed their sentences.

On Wednesday, Deputy Attorney General James M. Cole is expected to announce details about the new criteria the Justice Department will use in considering clemency applications and how the department plans to review those applications.

The department has asked the American Civil Liberties Union and other nonprofit groups to help identify candidates for clemency. Some of those groups are likely to help inmates submit the necessary paperwork.

“Once these reforms go into effect, we expect to receive thousands of additional applications for clemency,” Holder said. “And we at the Department of Justice will meet this need by assigning potentially dozens of lawyers — with backgrounds in both prosecution and defense — to review applications and provide the rigorous scrutiny that all clemency applications require.”

White House Counsel Kathryn Ruemmler said Obama has directed the department to improve its process for clemency recommendations and try to recruit more applicants from the federal prison population of low-level drug offenders.

In a speech at New York University’s law school last week, Ruemmler said clemency is an important “fail-safe mechanism” in the criminal justice system.

“When a worthy candidate runs out of other options,” she said, “the president has the power to correct an injustice that no one else has.” 


Katie Zezima contributed to this report.

BLOGGER'S NOTE:  I am for whatever it takes to get  people of color out of prison and into the type  opportunities for a second (or third) chance, that heretofore only white people have been able to get.

FDA warns against procedure 

to remove uterine fibroids; 

says it could spread hidden cancer

 

By Brady Dennis, Published: April 17 

The Food and Drug Administration on Thursday took the rare step of urging doctors to stop performing a surgical procedure used on tens of thousands of women each year to remove uterine growths, saying the practice risks spreading hidden cancers within a woman’s body.

The procedure, known as power morcellation, has long been used in laparoscopic operations to remove fibroid tumors from the uterus, or to remove the uterus itself. It involves inserting an electric device into the abdomen and slicing tissue in order to remove it through a small incision. The surgery is far less invasive than traditional abdominal operations.

But the FDA on Thursday agreed with a growing chorus of researchers and clinicians who oppose the procedure, saying that it can recklessly spread undetected cancers throughout the body and make the disease more lethal in the process. The agency is not seeking to ban the practice or the roughly two dozen FDA-approved devices used to perform it, but hospitals and gynecologists are likely to abandon the procedure because of potential liabilities.

The FDA said its analysis determined that an estimated 1 in 350 women who undergo morcellation have an unsuspected form of uterine cancer called uterine sarcoma. 

“The existence of the risk is not new,” said William Maisel, chief scientist at the FDA’s Center for Devices and Radiological Health. “What is new is that the magnitude of the risk appears to be higher than was appreciated by the clinical community.”

Maisel acknowledged that the agency was spurred to action — or at least moved more quickly — because of a high-profile campaign waged in recent months by a Massachusetts couple, both doctors, for a moratorium on the practice.

Anesthesiologist Amy Reed, a mother of six who last spring treated Boston Marathon bombing victims as well as one of the suspected bombers, underwent what was supposed to be a routine procedure last fall to end bleeding from fibroids. The procedure spread undetected, cancerous tumor fragments throughout her abdomen. Now she is battling stage-four leiomyosarcoma, a rare and aggressive form of uterine cancer. 

Her husband, Hooman Noorchashm, a Harvard-affiliated cardiothoracic surgeon, responded by launching a campaign to ban the widely used procedure. He has e-mailed numerous regulators, doctors and lawmakers, written to medical journals and lobbied hospitals. The couple started a Change.org petition to end the practice.

Noorchashm said Thursday that he appreciated the FDA’s relative speed in addressing the problem. “You don’t even have to be a doctor to recognize that if tissue or a tumor has malignant potential, you should not mince it up inside someone’s body,” he said. “That’s just bad medicine.” 

Many women develop uterine fibroids — benign growths that originate in the muscle tissue in the wall of the uterus. Although many fibroids do not cause problems, others can result in frequent urination, prolonged menstrual bleeding and pelvic pain.

Of the more than 500,000 hysterectomies performed in the United States each year, about 11 percent, or more than 50,000, involve morcellation, according to the American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists. Some doctors advocate performing a morcellation only when using an “isolation bag” in an effort to minimize the spread of tissues, but that method is not foolproof, as the bags can break.

“When you consider what the benefit is, which is a shorter hospital stay and less pain, then consider what the risk is — this could kill you — most women would not choose that risk if they really understood what is at stake,” said Diana Zuckerman, president of the Cancer Prevention and Treatment Fund. 

Even before Thursday’s announcement by the FDA, the push to limit uterine morcellations had gained traction.In February, Temple University Hospital issued guidelines instructing surgeons not to perform the procedure on fibroids over a certain size. Doctors may use the procedure for smaller fibroids only after informing patients about the risks and, in most cases, using isolation bags. Even before that, prompted by Noorchashm’s campaign, Massachusetts General Hospital and Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston took similar measures. 

On Thursday, the heads of obstetrics and gynecology at both Boston hospitals promptly notified their staffs to suspend use of power morcellation until further notice.

Margaret Jacobson, the medical director of Whatcom Hospice in Bellingham, Wash., cried upon hearing of FDA’s action on Thursday.  In March 2012, her sister, Elizabeth Jacobson, had a hysterectomy by morcellation. Elizabeth Jacobson did not want to miss much work, and the promise of a minimally invasive procedure appealed to her. 

But inside the large fibroid that a doctor shredded lurked malignant cells that spread throughout her abdomen, her sister said. Soon, Elizabeth Jacobson was diagnosed with aggressive uterine cancer. She then had a second surgery, rounds of chemotherapy and long stretches of misery. She died Jan. 8, 2013. 

“She suffered terribly,” Margaret Jacobson said. “It devastated our family.”

Thursday’s news brought a measure of relief, she said, that other women might avoid the same fate, especially given that safer surgical alternatives already exist. 

“It’s a victory ,” Jacobson said. “It’s not okay to tolerate these deaths. . . . My sister’s life was extraordinary; she was beautiful and loving. She does not deserve to be an easily dismissed statistic.”

BLOGGER'S NOTE:  This is so scary.  Most of us have believed, for years, that almost any "minimally invasive" procedure was safer than one that required a large incision.  And I guess it still is, IF you know for absolute certain that there is no cancer in your body that could be disturbed from a single (in situ*) location and spread throughout the body.