Steve Sailer writes: From Justice Sotomayor’s dissent in Utah v. Strieff:
For a dissenting view on the philosopher of “black bodies” and “people who believe they are white,” see my “The First Rule of White Club.”
COMMENTS:
* These Sotomayor footnotes are so vague they are a joke. Why doesn’t she just say whatever she wants, and then footnote reference the 11th Edition of the Encyclopedia Brittanica, with copious Ibid.s thereafter? Alternatively, she could cite the Nancy Drew books or the complete Perry Mason series, now, on DVD.
* This business about “the talk” is unintentionally revealing of the parenting attitudes of some minorities. My parents never explicitly told me to be deferential to the cops, not because of white privilege, but because it was literally unthinkable that I would act otherwise. If you have to sit your 16-year-old down and say, “Look, son, if the cops approach you, don’t run, yell, ball up your fists…” you’ve probably already bungled things beyond saving. I imagine there are many black families who would agree with this and who are put off by this idea that black kids have to have this spelled out to them.
* Well, back when she was running for SCOTUS, Sotomayor talked up Nancy Drew and Perry Mason as her inspirations. So I guess if that’s your intellectual base, Teh Genius Coates will seem Kantian in comparison.
I have to agree with another poster, too, that bringing up this vague list of titles to deliver similarly vague pronunciamentos about the plight black youths, in a dissent that concerns a white guy, bespeaks a political/cultural agenda that is really inappropriate for a SCOTUS justice.
As per the case in question, the issue was whether an illegal search that revealed a search warrant on the suspect as well as meth was legal. Who cares. I’m tired of criminals getting off on technicalities. Save the SCOTUS for serious cases.
* I have little doubt That Teh-Nisisisisisi will crow about this for years to come, and will probably one day host a “symposium” where it will consist of him onstage with J. Sotomayor in front of a sympathetic TED-esque audience, where he makes comments about “black bodies” being “invaded” by whitey, and she grins like an idiot and nods her head and gives judicial approval.
How far lefty jurisprudence has fallen—-now it doesn’t even rely 0n logic, just one guy’s feeling about something. She’s literally citing articles that have no statistical backup to them, just the rantings of a token-black, blame-whitey writer who apparently can read the minds of others.
At least when Louis Brandeis gave the famous “Brandeis brief”, it was chock full of social statistics that could be, ya know, falsified, and were, ya know, pretty persuasive as an argument. But I guess arguments about legislative restrictions on working hours are a bit easier to prove with hard facts and figures than that the evil (white) police are shooting up thousands of “innocent” black men.
(She’s also blatantly violating more advanced jurisprudence rules —by citing “legislative” facts in her opinion, as opposed to being concerned solely with “judicial” facts. But citing her for that error here would be like citing an NFL player for trespassing after he breaks into his ex’s place and beats her up.)
* It’s standard-issue tribalism. No universal principles. Just who vs whom.
Of course to be a Progressive in good standing these days, one may not complain about any double standards that favor any Victim Group.
* It was very common back in the ’80 and ’90 (I don’t know about now) for adult black crack dealers to have children run (literally) product for them. Children wouldn’t be punished much for this. I am not surprised that Coates would have seen or heard about innocent black kids at play being harassed during that time when police swept the neighborhood on drug stings.
But who called 911 on the dealers to begin with?
* Justices Sotomayor & Thomas are both beneficiaries of affirmative action at Yale Law. A school that we now know gave extreme preferences to black & presumably Puerto Rican students in the 60s & 70s.
I guess Thomas is preferable as he had the good sense to shut up and follow Scalia’s lead. What an embarrassment & a window into our horrible future ahead.
* This section of the dissent is absurdly unnecessary and it looks like Sotomayor, or more likely her law clerk, had written it out for some other reason and simply could not wait to put it in an opinion, despite the fact that there is no connection between the actual case and these words. I note that the other dissenters did not join in this section; Kagan wrote her own dissent which is far more nuanced, and Ginsburg excluded herself from this section of Sotomayor’s opinion. Even those two liberals were probably embarrassed by this outburst. I also note the petulant “I dissent” and not the normal “I respectfully dissent”. Sotomayor looks very foolish.
* This grandstanding idiot Sotomayor with her big dissent today. No black or minority is involved this case. Just a white man who was stopped by the police and found to have meth or other drugs in his automobile. She piggishly seized this as her opportunity to show solidarity with BLM, by going off on her own racial tangent. I hear the libs loved it immediately, commented immediately and this is whom she is playing to.
Ironic given the firestorm that hit Trump when he complained about a biased Hispanic judge. Sotamayor is a fine example of one.
* Justice Ginsberg co-signed all of Soto’s dissent except the last section about black bodies and TNC.
The point seems to be if you are detained walking out of a drug dealer’s house, have an outstanding warrant for your arrest for a “minor traffic offense” and are found to have a pocket full of meth, the search should be tossed out.
Interestingly, this is not just the liberals on the Supreme Court’s view, but also the Utah Supreme Court’s majority.
It is nice to see Judge Breyer jointing the conservatives in the case.
The liberals on the court make a basic math error. They say if California has 2.5 million warrants that is 9% of its adult population, so the fact of a warrant alone should not be enough to justify a search if there were no grounds of the initial stop.
The problem is that of that 2.5 million, a lot will be for residents of other states, or duplicates, or the deceased.
* RE: Sotomayor’s struggles with English,
Judge Sonia Sotomayor said in a 1996 speech at Princeton University’s Third World Center (now called the Carl A. Fields Center) that when she arrived at Princeton in 1972 as her high school’s valedictorian, “I found out that my Latina background had created difficulties in my writing that I needed to overcome. For example, in Spanish we do not have adjectives. A noun is described with a preposition…. My writing was stilted and overly complicated, my grammar and vocabulary skills weak.”
You know, I don’t even speak Spanish, but….
libro rojo
red book
pluma roja
red pen
libros rojos
red books
plumas rojas
red pens
Maybe Sonia is semi-literate in two languages?
* POWERLINE: WALTERS & MURRAY: THE NEW JIM CROW REVISITED
After John Walters wrote a Weekly Standard article on President Obama’s commutations of incarcerated drug offenders, I asked him to take a look at Michelle Alexander’s dreadful but influential book The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. I noted the Walters article and discussed Alexander’s book in the post “Meet the new Jim Crow, same as the old BS.”
Now Mr. Walters has turned his attention to Alexander’s book. Together with his Hudson Institute colleague David Murray, he has written the important essay below on the book. The essay will be posted in footnoted form on the Hudson Institute site this Wednesday. In the meantime, we are pleased to present this essay that fills a gap in the literature on the controversy over “mass incarceration.” Walters and Murray write:
This book (hereafter, TNJC) is careless. The carelessness produces misdirection and it undermines the argument. Facts are stretched, the scholarly apparatus is weak, and the core argument is often contradicted by its own evidence.
Nonetheless, TNJC is a very popular book—rising to The New York Times best seller list, required reading for incoming students at Brown University, said by the San Francisco Chronicle to be “the Bible of a social movement.” Is its power rooted in a deeper truth or in a revealing lie that many of us want to believe or need to believe in the face of an ugly reality?
Full disclosure: We have lived through and remember the drug and crime problem of the 1980’s onward. We have done our best to make the problem smaller from positions within the White House, serving for at least a time in every Administration from Reagan to Obama. We know from personal experience that TNJC is built on falsehood. We also recognize that those who want to believe TNJC may view our experience as a cover-up of the great wrong alleged. But we write with the hope that open-minded readers can and will judge the facts for themselves.
In a nutshell, TNJC argues that “[w]e have not ended racial caste in America; we have merely redesigned it.” From the book jacket: “By targeting black men through the War on Drugs, and decimating communities of color, the U.S. criminal justice system functions as a contemporary system of racial control—relegating millions to permanent second-class status.” A primary concern is the loss of the right to vote.
The specific list of factual misstatements is long. For a book with scholarly pretentions, it is noteworthy that the book lacks a bibliography, and that its endnote citations are woeful.
Consider that we are told: “The Reagan administration hired staff to publicize the emergence of crack cocaine in 1985 as part of a strategic effort to build public and legislative support for the war.” The point is not a minor one, since it is offered in support of a core thesis: when there really wasn’t a drug problem in our cities, in order to achieve “social control” over blacks through “mass incarceration,” President Ronald Reagan created and then hyped a crisis using the media. This claim is found in the Introduction. Turning to the endnote, however, one finds no documentation, but rather a simple line that Reagan’s action “is discussed in more depth in Chapter 1.”
That’s a bit cheesy, but what then happens in Chapter 1? There, after reading about “code words” for race, we find again that Reagan “launched a media offensive to justify the ‘War on Drugs.’” And there’s another endnote which, when pursued, leads nowhere. It is a reference to the 1992 National Drug Control Strategy—produced after the Reagan Presidency.
This is cat-and-mouse. It anticipates an unserious, unquestioning reader, one willing to be led.
What about the author’s claim that the “War on Drugs” was initiated by Reagan (detractors of Richard Nixon will be disappointed), or the even more dramatic claim that Reagan’s “ambitious federal policy” in fact turned into “an actual war.” How are we to take this hyperbole?
The author cites fears “in poor black communities that the War on Drugs was part of a genocidal plan by the government to destroy black people in the United States.” She calls these “conspiracy theories,” but what does the professor actually believe? She tells us: “While the conspiracy theories were initially dismissed as far-fetched, if not loony, the word on the street [i.e., genocide] turned out to be right, at least up to a point.”
To forward the concept of a policy being “genocide up to a point” (that point being the intent to kill a race and actually trying to do so) is such extreme overstatement it should be self-discrediting.
Still TNJC plunges forward. Evidence that the crack epidemic was “genocidal” is supposed to be be contained in the claim that “[t]he CIA admitted in 1998 that guerilla armies that it actively supported in Nicaragua were smuggling illegal drugs into the United States.” The CIA further “admitted that . . . it blocked law enforcement efforts to investigate illegal drug networks” funding its covert war.
Whatever the claimed involvement of the CIA, its actual significance—how much illegal drug supply this “conspiracy” dumped into American streets—is something the author tellingly declines to explain or quantify. If you are old enough to remember the Medellin and Cali cartels (which really did traffic massive amounts of cocaine into the United States during that period), you are supposed to forget them here.
Assumptions like these, in which every development suggests the existence of a full-scale “plot,” might incline us to dismissiveness when the author finally gets to actual data. Blacks are disproportionately incarcerated for drug crimes on a straight per-capita basis. That’s certainly true. But it’s not a phenomenon peculiar to drug statutes; blacks are incarcerated for (and, crucially, victims of) almost every Index crime at depressingly higher per capita rates.
Even though TNJC’s attack ostensibly focuses on drug laws, it’s argument ultimately embraces the whole of American criminal justice: it is all “a tightly networked system of laws, policies, customs, and institutions” that produces “mass incarceration” to achieve “social control.” Here, Ms. Alexander quotes Michael Tonry: “Governments decide how much punishment they want, and these decisions are in no way related to crime rates.”
But this claim that blacks are subordinated and controlled creates an obvious problem. TNJC must explain away the election of Barack Obama within a system allegedly dedicated to keeping blacks from power: “Many will wonder how a nation that just elected its first black president could have a racial caste system,” and “[i]t’s a fair question,” she acknowledges. Indeed, it is. But her answer is odd: “[T]here is no inconsistency whatsoever between the election of Barack Obama to the highest office in the land and the existence of a racial caste system in the era of colorblindness. The current system of control depends on black exceptionalism; it is not disproved or undermined by it.” We have no idea what exactly that’s supposed to mean, but it does seem to suggest that for America, where Ms. Alexander is concerned, it’s damned when you do—and double-damned when you don’t.
Caste or Conduct?
TNJC opens with a compelling anecdote about a man named Jarvious Cotton:
Cotton’s great-great-grandfather could not vote as a slave. His great-grandfather was beaten to death by the Ku Klux Klan for attempting to vote. His grandfather was prevented from voting by Klan intimidation. His father was barred from voting by poll taxes and literacy tests. Today, Jarvious Cotton cannot vote because he, like many black men in the United States, has been labeled a felon, and is currently on parole.
The idea that the state of Mississippi, home to Jarvious Cotton, has deliberately designed its laws to create a systematic racial caste system would have been undeniable 50 years ago. But has there been no progress since? Yes, Mississippi continues to deny the ballot to any person convicted of “murder, rape, bribery, theft, arson, obtaining money or goods under false pretenses, perjury, forgery, embezzlement or bigamy.” If this is a caste system—unless you consider “murderer” and “arsonist” perfectly acceptable synonyms for “African American”—it’s an oddly leaky one.
