The end of affirmative action will leave Black patients to suffer
Say It Louder
Danielle Bell is a 3L at University of Hawaii at Manoa, William S. Richardson School of Law.
The first bad doctor I encountered was a gynecologist who barged into the exam room without knocking, greeting me, or introducing himself. He fired off the obligatory questions, glancing up periodically, not so much to make eye contact as to glare in my general direction. When it was time to perform my pap smear, he inserted the speculum without warning and cranked it open, ignoring my winces. I told him the exam hurt; he said it was supposed to. He then jabbed my cervix with a swab, shoved the swab in a tube, and muttered something about when to expect the lab results as he degloved. He walked out the door the same way he’d entered it 10 minutes earlier—without a word.
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Federal judge has a pointed message about race for the Supreme Court
Speaking Of...
In our judicial system, lower-court judges take instruction from the Supreme Court, not the other way around. In the case of U.S. District Judge Reggie B. Walton, that’s too bad. Walton, appointed to the local court in the District of Columbia by Ronald Reagan and to the federal bench by George W. Bush, has a message for the justices that is appropriate, respectful — and devastating.
Messages, actually, delivered in a speech Thursday about the importance of affirmative action, which the high court, as Walton predicted, is about to dismantle; and about the scourge of gun violence, which, as Walton outlined, has been made all the more intractable by the court’s wrongheaded Second Amendment rulings.
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Angry moms with lawyers vs the conservative legal movement
More of This
In one of the big political surprises of 2023, pockets of stiff resistance have sprung up to defend teachers, textbooks, novels and librariesagainst censorship efforts across the country. This liberal counter-mobilization is substantially less organized than the right’s culture-warring, but it has great untapped potential for Democrats.
These efforts just took an important turn, with a lawsuit filed by Florida parents in federal court Wednesday to try to stop book bans in school libraries in Escambia County, red-leaning terrain in the state’s panhandle. The suit could become a model to challenge bans across Florida and elsewhere.
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The most ambitious reparations plan ever proposed
Even More of This
Standing at the stoop of her childhood home — a slim but stately Victorian shaded by an evergreen pear tree — Lynette Mackey pulled up a photo of a family gathering from nearly 50 years ago. The men were all in suits, the women in skirts. Ms. Mackey, a teenager in red bell bottoms, stretched her arms wide and had a beaming smile.
Soon after that time, in the 1960s and 1970s, Ms. Mackey watched the slow erasure of Black culture from the Fillmore District, once celebrated as “the Harlem of the West.” The jazz clubs that drew the likes of Billie Holiday and Duke Ellington disappeared, and so, too, did the soul food restaurants.
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