Linda K. Kerber, “Frightened: A Legal Historian’s View From 2022”
All I have written and taught in more than 50 years as a historian has rested on bedrock assumptions: that the constitutional grounding under social change has been stable; that with a handful of exceptions—Dred Scott, Plessy, Lochner, the moment when FDR threatened to pack the Supreme Court—constitutional interpretation has expanded with modern change. I required students in my classes to memorize the first section of the 14th Amendment, including the provision that no state shall “deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.” (Note that it does not read “citizen,” but “person.”) I emphasized that long after they had forgotten the specifics of the class, they will still be able to lean on this guarantee of equal protection to all persons, and I sent them out to be good citizens in the civic world of which they are a part.
But suddenly that view of our history has turned hopelessly romantic.
Brittney Cooper, “God Help My Friendship With White Evangelicals After Dobbs”
My friend thinks that all this decision does is keep people from “using abortion as birth control.” Because the right has, for decades, successfully conjured up images of damaged, mangled fetuses to traditionally feminine southern white women, whose primary understanding of womanhood is inextricably linked to motherhood. Because when you have had the protections of empire behind your family for your entire life, it’s hard to imagine that there are things more horrible than an aborted fetus. Because it’s easy, in that context, to conclude that people are sitting in the clinic waiting room because they’ve simply been being promiscuous and unthoughtful about their reproductive capacity. Because, for them, it’s easy to conclude that those of us who believe in the right to abortion have no respect for the lives of the vulnerable.
But when you are one of the vulnerable ones, you see it differently. When you grow up as a Black girl in the same place as these willfully clueless white women with an entirely different experience of the world, one in which their whiteness became the pretext for racialized assaults on your body and life chances, you learn early that there are other horrors. … When you grow up in a world where your body, because it is not white, is not treated as sacred, you learn to value every protection, personal and political, against your violation. And you have the good sense to mourn when those protections fall away.
Alexandra Petri, “When is a child not a child?” (WaPo link)
A child is not a child when she does exist but you cannot admit, now, that what you are forcing her to do is more than dangerous for someone in a body so young — it is monstrous. You scramble to make it sound as though a law that forces a 10-year-old assault victim to give birth is a good law, with benefits. Or that the law does not do what it says.
These are men who don’t know a child from a woman, a person from a womb on two legs, because they simply do not want to know.
Ian Millhiser, “The post-legal Supreme Court”
There are a handful of Supreme Court decisions that legal scholars refer to as the “anti-canon,” decisions that were so poorly reasoned and monstrous in their consequences that they are taught to law students as examples of how judges should never behave. The anti-canon includes cases like the pro-slavery decision in Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857), the segregationist decision in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), the anti-worker decision in Lochner v. New York (1905), and the Japanese-American internment decision in Korematsu v. United States (1944).
Whole Woman’s Health v. Jackson belongs on this list. It is, as Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in dissent, so thoroughly inconsistent with the idea that the Constitution binds every state government that it threatens to transform that document into a “solemn mockery.” Jackson introduces an intolerable amount of unpredictability and arbitrariness into US law, transforming the constitutional rights that every American should reasonably be able to rely upon into dust that can be blown away by a sufficiently clever state legislature.
Kathryn Gin Lum, “The Religious and Anti-Chinese Roots of ‘Replacement’ Theory”
But it was one thing to go to the “heathen,” and quite another when the “heathen” began arriving on America’s shores. Though some ministers continued to see the arrival of the Chinese as an opportunity to convert them, others, like Blakeslee, began to claim that immigration restriction was necessary to keep America itself from becoming heathenized. The Great Commission needed to become the Great Omission, omitting anyone who threatened to replace the white American Christian way of life with something else. To think otherwise, Blakeslee alleged, was “false Christianity, false benevolence, false patriotism.” America needed to be a fortress. True “patriots” needed to defend that fortress in order to preserve a way of life that the rest of the world was supposed to emulate – but only from a distance.
Juan F. Perea, “Immigration Policy as a Defense of White Nationhood”
The repeated, cyclical expulsion of Latino immigrants for imagined harms demonstrates that Latinos remain uniquely expendable in the United States. Indeed, there seems to be a national consensus on the expendability of Mexicans and Central Americans. Both Democratic President Obama and Republican President Trump have enforced draconian immigration policies against brown immigrants from the southern border. Obama increased deportations to demonstrate that Democrats would be tough on border enforcement and to induce Republicans to negotiate immigration reform legislation. Most of Obama’s expulsions, however, occurred well after it became clear that Republicans would not negotiate on immigration reform legislation or anything else. There seems to have been no compelling reason for expelling millions of hardworking people after it became clear that Republicans would not work with him. While Trump has increased the volume and hostility of antiimmigrant discourse, he has largely followed in Obama’s deportation footsteps. And although Trump’s hostile, racist rhetoric has been criticized, there was little objection to the actions he took to capture and expel undocumented immigrants, until he forcibly separated children from their parents at the border.
This truth demonstrates a national consensus on the expendability of Mexicans and Central Americans. Regardless of the evidence showing that there is no immigration problem, both Democrats and Republicans agree on the necessity for additional border control measures, if not a wall. But if there is no actual immigration problem, why is it necessary to further fortify the border? To the extent that there are crimes at the border, crime control measures might be necessary. But actual crime control does not justify expelling mostly innocent immigrants and rejecting refugees seeking asylum. It is striking that hardly anyone is defending current levels of immigration nor making the case that more immigration might be positive and possibly necessary. Just as reunion among northern and southern whites after Reconstruction was accomplished through the abandonment of southern blacks, so does convergence between liberal and conservative whites occur through tacit acceptance of the expendability of undocumented Latino immigrants.
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