I. Admissions Policy
" 'The Princeton Review' has, in the past, encouraged students of Asian descent to try to conceal their cultural identity." Financial adviser, Edward Blum, hopes for a college admissions process in which there would be no race nor ethnicity boxes to check, and students would be evaluated more or less anonymously. [1]
The first time the government used the term, "affirmative action,"in relation to race, was in March 1961, when President John F. Kennedy signed Executive Order 10925, which required government contractors to "take affirmative action" to help realize the nation's goal of "nondiscrimination." In 2003, the Supreme Court ruled, in Grutterv v. Bollinger, regarding the University of Michigan's undergraduate admissions policy, that educational institutions had a compelling interest in promoting diversity.
Harvard University maintains that its admissions process is a "whole person review," in which applicants aren't reduced to a single factor, whether it's academic excellence or their racial and ethnic identity. "What's at stake," Rachael Dane, Harvard's spokesperson, told Hua Hsu, "isn't just the school's admissions policy; it's the ability of Harvard to pursue its stated mission to 'provide a diverse living environment to the citizens and citizen-leaders for our society.' " Blum explained that he intended to prove that Harvard's admissions process sacrificed high-achieving Asian Americans in the name of racial balancing.
"As of 2016, there were an estimated 21.4 million Asians in the U.S., approximately 4.9 million of whom were of Chinese descent." A survey from 2012 showed that Asian Americans supported affirmative action by a three-to-one margin. They saw it as a key component in the struggle for multiracial justice. [2]
II. Atheists Still Suspects
"Americans, in large numbers, still do not want atheists teaching their children, or performing marriages. They would, according to surveys, prefer a female, gay, Mormon, or Muslim President to having an atheist in the White House." "Lack of belief in God is still too often taken to mean the absence of any other meaningful moral beliefs, and that has made atheists an easy minority to revile." [3]
"True religious liberty was rare in the colonies: dissenters were fined, flogged, jailed, and sometimes hanged." "Such is the slippery label of 'atheist' in the American context: slapped on those who explicitly respect it, eschewed by unbelievers who wish to avoid its stigma."
Indeed, the charge of atheism became a convenient means of discrediting nontheological beliefs, including anarchism, radicalism, socialism, and feminism." "The reason that atheists were not allowed to testify in court was the certainty that witnesses who were unwilling to swear an oath to God had no reason to be truthful, since they did not fear divine judgment." [4]
III. Philadelphia's Judicial Uniqueness
In 2015, Philadelphia had the highest incarceration rate of America's ten largest cities. Larry Krasner, Philadelphia District Attorney, contends that there are more parolees in Pennsylvania than anywhere else in the country; also, his findings are that one-third of the people in Pennsylvania's prisons are there because they violated the rules of their probation or parole. According to the Death Penalty Information Center, of the approximately two hundred death sentences handed down in Philadelphia since 1974, nearly a hundred and fifty have been overturned, often because of inadequate representation or prosecutors' misconduct. [5]
Krasner has called the police union "frankly racist and white-dominated," and reminds people that it endorsed Donald Trump for president, in a city where he got fifteen percent of the vote.
IV. West Fire Danger Grows
"Sixteen of the largest fires in California history have occurred over the past 19 years, three of them since last December [2018]." One 2016 study found that since 1984, anthropogenic climate change has doubled the area over which forest fires burn in the West. Another study, published early in 2018, found that "human influence" had quintupled the risk of extreme aridity in the West, increasing the probability of catastrophic wildfires. [6]
Footnotes"
[1] Hua Hsu, "School Colors," The New Yorker, October 15, 2018.
[2] Ibid.
[3] Casey Cep, "Without a Prayer," The New Yorker, October 29, 2018.
[4] Ibid.
[5] Jennifer Gonnerman, "Acts of Conviction," The New Yorker, October 29, 2018.
[6] Ben Ehrenreich, "The Fire This Time," The Nation, December 17/24, 2018.
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