Susan M. Collins is the new president and CEO of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston. Per the bank’s press release, Collins is just the second woman to lead the organization as well as the first person of color. I didn’t know until reading the Bloomberg piece that 1969 was the year Jamaica put their own dollar into circulation, replacing the pound. That’s also the year both my parents left the island to immigrate to the U.S. Another thing that stood out to me in the Bloomberg profile is her parents–particularly her father. His work for the United Nations reminds me of my own father’s work for another international organization–The World Bank. The bit about his challenges winning arguments against economists (his Ph.D. was in social anthropology) also reminds me of my dad, in that I saw (and would later participate in) many a debate on the issues of the day with family members and friends.
Category: Uncategorized
What Do Black Americans Think About Roe v. Wade—and Why
Another excellent piece by Dr. Ted Johnson that makes sense of the disconnect between the voting patterns of black Americans and their personal views. Johnson touches only briefly on the ways in which black distrust of medical and governmental institutions is informed by a long history of abuses visited upon black people by those same institutions. It’s bad enough that maternal mortality in the United States is among the worst in the developed world. The rate of maternal mortality in the US for black women is even worse. The end of Roe v. Wade will certainly reduce the availability of safe, legal abortion care and will disproportionately impact poor women, black women, and other women of color.
Social “Firsts” and the Supreme Court
A few days ago, Stephen Breyer announced his retirement from the Supreme Court of the United States at the end of the current term. Because Joe Biden pledged to nominate a black woman to the nation’s highest court if he became president, he now has an opportunity to make good on that pledge. Predictably, we began to hear and see a lot of high-minded (and hypocritical) commentary about how Biden should be choosing the “most-qualified” justice–regardless of their skin color. Our attention span as a country is so short, we’ve already forgotten that Trump’s rise to the presidency was powered at least in part by publicizing a Federalist Society-authored list of high court nominees he would choose from if the opportunity presented itself. We’ve already forgotten that Ronald Reagan promised to name a woman to the Supreme Court.
But the history of using the Supreme Court to accomplish social firsts stretches back much further than we might suppose from current commentary. This thread by David Frum takes us all the way back to 1887, when President Grover Cleveland appointed Lucius Quintus Lamar to the high court in a bid to gain the support of conservative white southern Democrats for re-election. Read Frum’s thread in full to get a complete sense of how unrepentant a Confederate Mr. Lamar was. This dubious social first—the appointment of a traitor to the Union to nation’s highest court–would prove very important for a reason not fully touched on at all in Mr. Frum’s thread. 1887 marked the year the US federal government fully abandoned Reconstruction–and the nation’s black citizens to decades of voter disenfranchisement, terrorism, property theft, murder, and Jim Crow laws.
No discussion of the Supreme Court and social firsts would be complete without mentioning Maryland’s own Thurgood Marshall. He earned his undergraduate and law degrees from 2 HBCUs (graduating 1st in his class from Howard Law because the University of Maryland School of Law was still segregated). Out of 32 cases he argued before the Supreme Court, Marshall won 29, losing just 3. He served as a federal appeals court judge for the second circuit for a number of years prior to becoming the nation’s first black solicitor general. Some months of his tenure as an appeals court judge were served as a recess appointment due to certain southern senators holding up his official appointment, including the same segregationist James Eastland that Joe Biden recalled a civil relationship with. He would win 14 cases on behalf of the government in that role, losing just 5. Among his peers both at the time and since, there may not be a more successful justice at winning arguments before the Supreme Court prior to becoming a member of it.
Discussing the legal and rhetorical brilliance of Thurgood Marshall requires discussion of his successor. Few nominations to the high court are a better demonstration of the hypocrisy of many of today’s conservatives regarding “qualifications” (including those who oppose Trump) than the absence of such concerns being raised when Clarence Thomas was nominated to the Supreme Court. In contrast to the years served as an appellate court judge and solicitor general by Marshall, Thomas was an appellate judge for the DC circuit for just 16 months. Thomas graduated in the middle of his law school class at Yale in contrast to Marshall’s 1st in class at Howard. The White House and Senate Republicans apparently pressured the American Bar Association (ABA) to give Thomas a qualified rating even while attempting to discredit the ABA as partisan–and this is before Anita Hill’s interview with the FBI was leaked to the press and led to the re-opening of Thomas’ confirmation hearings. The same GOP that loves to quote that one line from that one speech of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. could not have cared less about “the content of [Thomas’] character”. They cared that he was both conservative and black. The way the Senate treated Anita Hill during those re-opened confirmation hearings would in retrospect be a preview of the treatment awaiting future black women appointees to federal roles.
How Thomas fared during his confirmation hearings almost certainly animated the treatment of Lani Guinier after her nomination to become assistant attorney general for civil rights by Republicans. Her treatment by them, conservative media, and by the White House who nominated her was utterly shameful. Conservatives lied about her positions. The same Joe Biden who contributed to the poor treatment that Anita Hill received before the Senate Judiciary Committee he chaired 2 years earlier, reported “grew lukewarm about Guinier”. President Clinton would ultimately withdraw the nomination in the face of lies and distortions about her writings. His administration had apparently instructed her not to make any public statements about until after he’d already decided to withdraw her nomination, enabling her opponents to smear her in the press and her “allies” to get cold feet about supporting her. Particularly now as a wave of anti-CRT legislation, book bans, and attacks on affirmative action gain traction around the country (especially in light of Guinier’s recent death), it is important to remember that Guinier only got to make her case to the public in one interview with Ted Koppel–and the public received her views well. She never got the Senate hearing that even Robert Bork got for his extreme views because Bill Clinton–her friend from Yale Law School–pulled her nomination instead.
Not even two weeks have passed since the annual hypocrisy-fest that is MLK Day, and a significant majority of Americans surveyed seem to have decided once again that black women should wait for what should be theirs.
Just over three-quarters of Americans (76%) want Pres. Biden to consider "all possible nominees," while 23% want him to follow through on his commitment to nominate the first Black woman to the Supreme Court, per a new @ABC News/Ipsos poll. https://t.co/ExfUG4vYUV
— ABC News (@ABC) January 30, 2022
The attacks on the first black woman Supreme Court nominee will be fierce (if Biden follows through on his commitment).
When it comes to the Supreme Court and credentialism however, perhaps the best example of the double standard that seems to exist for women generally is the brief nomination of Harriet Miers. Conservatives in particular dragged this woman for her lack of elite education (she earned degrees in mathematics and law at Southern Methodist University). Only in looking back did I learn that Harry Reid (Senate minority leader at the time) actually recommended Miers as the successor to O’Connor, and that other members of the Senate Judiciary Committee hoped to see nominees from outside the federal appellate court system. Perhaps because Reid earned his law degree in George Washington University’s part-time program, he didn’t put as much stock in an Ivy League pedigree as he did in bringing the perspective of an experienced practicing lawyer to the Supreme Court. Potential conflict of interest concerns raised by Miers’ relationship with President Bush and his staff might ultimately have sunk her nomination anyway had she not withdrawn it. By contrast, Clarence Thomas has ruled in numerous cases where he had clear conflicts of interest with little or no criticism from his supporters on the political right.
Considering the sorts of cases which will soon come before the Supreme Court, we should remember that as an institution it has been used as often as a tool to remove and restrict rights as it has to grant them (if not more so). The aforementioned appointment of Lucius Lamar is not the only time that the Supreme Court has been used to undermine full citizenship for black people in the United States. Before William Rehnquist became associate justice (nominated by Nixon), then Chief Justice of the Supreme Court (nominated by Reagan), he was a “poll watcher” in Arizona under the auspices of Operation Eagle Eye, a nationwide campaign by the Republican National Committee to suppress black votes. This 2021 piece by Charles Pierce makes a convincing argument Rehnquist tried to pass off his personal opposition to the ultimate outcome of Brown v Board of Education as that of the justice he clerked for (Robert Jackson, Jr). In this memo, he defended Plessy v Ferguson as good law, and likely lied about it in both of his Supreme Court confirmation hearings. From the time he became one of Rehnquist’s law clerks, to replacing him as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, John Roberts has had the Voting Rights Act in his sights as a law to be weakened (if not destroyed).
Contrary to the polls (and numerous previous demonstrations of an utter lack of spine), Lindsey Graham has emerged as a supporter of the idea of a black woman nominee to the Supreme Court. Current US District Court judge J. Michelle Childs of South Carolina being a possible nominee certainly doesn’t hurt. If the current shortlist is any indication, any of the black women Biden selects from it will be just as qualified–and likely more so–than any of their colleagues at the time of their selection. It wouldn’t surprise me if Biden chose Breyer’s former clerk (Ketanji Brown Jackson) to succeed him. But as a state university graduate myself, part of me hopes that someone with at least one degree from outside the Ivy League gets selected.
The Minimum Wage Debate is Too Narrow and Small
Recently I’ve found myself having variations of the same conversation on social media regarding the minimum wage. Those to my political left have made statements such as “if your business would fail if you paid workers $15/hour you’re exploiting them.” Those to my political right–some current or former business owners, some not–argue that minimum wage increases had a definite impact on their bottom line.
I have two problems with the first argument: (1) it oversimplifies and trivializes a very serious issue, (2) these days, the arguers tend to aim it at small business owners. Worker exploitation is real, and conflating every employer who follows the law when it comes to pay and other facets of employment harms the cause of combatting serious harms. The outgoing Trump administration has been trying to reduce the wages of H-2A workers. Undocumented workers in sectors like agriculture, food, home-based healthcare, and others fare even worse. In some cases, drug addiction treatment has turned thousands of people into little more than indentured servants, with complicity from judges and state regulators. Until recently, large corporations like Wal-Mart and Amazon evaded accountability for low worker pay and mistreatment despite having significant percentages of workers on food stamps and Medicaid and a high rate of worker injuries.
Another variation of the first argument takes a starting point in the past (like the 1960s) then says the minimum wage should be whatever the rate of inflation would have grown it to be between then and today. If you go back to when Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was alive (for example), the minimum wage today “should” be $22/hour. You can pick any point in time and say what the minimum wage should be based on inflation, but that’s not the same as grappling honestly with how industries have changed and/or how the nature of work has changed in the half-century plus since the civil rights era.
One challenge with the second argument is that the examples cited are typically restaurants or food services–businesses that operate at low margins and have high fixed costs in addition to being labor-intensive. Even in that sector, the impacts of a $15/hour minimum wage are not necessarily what you might expect. But not every business is the restaurant business, and a single sector cannot govern the parameters of debate for an issue that impacts the entire economy and the broader society get a broadly beneficial result.
At this point in the discussion, someone usually brings up automation, followed by someone mentioning universal basic income (UBI). What I have said in the past, and will continue to say, is that automation is coming regardless of what the federal government, states, and/or localities do with the minimum wage. As someone who has written software for a living for over 20 years, the essence of my line of work is automating things. Sometimes software augments what people do by taking over rote or repetitive aspects of their jobs and freeing them up to do more value-added work. But if an entire job is rote or repetitive, software can and does eliminate jobs. The combination of software and robots are what enable some manufacturers to produce so many goods without the large number of workers they would have needed in the past.
Talking about UBI enlarges the conversation, but even then may not fully take on the nature of the relationship between government, business, and people. We do not talk nearly often enough about how long the United States got by with a much less-robust social safety net than other countries because of how much responsibility employers used to take on for their employees. Nor do we talk about the amount of additional control that gives employers over their employees–or the cracks in the system that can result from unemployment. The usual response from the political right whenever there is any discussion of separating health care from employment is to cry “socialism”. But the falseness of such charges can be easily exposed. Capitalism seems to be alive and well in South Korea, and they have a universal healthcare system–a significant portion of which is privately funded. Germany is another country where capitalism, universal healthcare, and private insurers seem to be co-existing just fine.
The conversation we need to have, as companies and their shareholders get richer, share fewer of those gains with their workers, and otherwise delegate responsibilities they used to keep as part of the social contract, is how the relationship between government, business, and people should change to reflect the current reality. The rationale always given for taxing capital gains at a lower rate than wages was investment. But as we’ve seen both in the pandemic, and in the corporate response to the big tax cut in 2017, corporate execs mostly pocketed the gains for themselves or did stock buybacks to further inflate their per-share prices. Far from sharing any of the gains with workers, some corporations laid off workers instead. Given ample evidence that preferential tax treatment for capital gains does not result in more investment, the preference should end. People of working age should not be solely dependent on an employer or Medicare for their healthcare. A model where public and private insurance co-exist for those people and isn’t tied to employment is where we should be headed as a society.
We need to think much harder than we have about what has to change both to account for the deficiencies in our social safety net (that corporations will not fill), and an economy on its way to eliminating entire fields that employ a lot of people today. Bill Gates advocated in favor of a tax on robots year ago. The challenges of funding UBI and whether or not it’s possible to do that and continue to maintain the social safety net as it currently exists need to be faced head-on. Talking about the minimum wage alone–even as multiple states and localities increase it well beyond the federal minimum–is not enough.
What I’m Thankful For
I have plenty to be thankful for this year. My 4-year-old twins are doing well–healthy, happy, and eating everything in sight. My parents, sister, and extended family are doing well. My wife is having some success with her consulting business. I’ve passed the two year mark at my current company and it continues to be the best environment I’ve been part of as a black technologist in my entire career so far.
I’m looking forward to continuing professional and personal growth in 2020 (and beyond) and wish those who may read this the same.
Owning My Words
After Scott Hanselman retweeted this blog post recently about owning your words, I’ve decided to get back into blogging (and hopefully spend less time on social media) after a long hiatus from an already-infrequent blogging schedule. Twitter in particular has probably consumed the bulk of my writing output from 2014 to now, with Tumblr hosting a few longer pieces on topics outside of tech.
I’m finding the process of coming with new topics that merit a blog post on a more regular basis a bit challenging, so I’ll probably start by revisiting older posts and using them as starting points for new work. The topics here will go back to having a clear tech connection, while other areas I’m interested in will get their own site. I bought a new domain recently that I like a lot better than the current .org that I may move this tech content to as well as a subdomain if I’m feeling especially ambitious.
The JavaScript Guide to Clean Code
This is a great presentation with numerous examples of clean JavaScript (and the much worse alternatives). Highly-recommended for refreshing your grasp of JavaScript fundamentals (and building further upon them).
Europe in Winter: Barcelona, Spain (Day 2)
The bus mentioned in yesterday’s post was the Barcelona Bus Turistic. It turned out to be a lot of fun and would have been an even better value if we’d had the time to book it for 2 days instead of one. We purchased two tickets for the north-south route via Viator. Our hotel was conveniently located just a short walk from one of the stops. The route takes you past every attraction of note in Barcelona, and with the option to get on and off the buses at various points when desired, it’s possible to see a lot of Barcelona this way. In addition to the bus tickets, we received large coupon books of discounts to a large number of the attractions the bus takes you past. Another underrated benefit of the bus–good wireless internet access.
One such discount is for the Montjuic cable car, which takes passengers to and from Montjuic Castle. The views of the city from a cable car are pretty amazing, and the castle at the top is a nice place to walk around a bit, or just sit and relax. There are many other stops worth getting off to see that I’d like to visit on a return trip, including Camp Nou, the Gothic quarter, and some of the museums.
Tomorrow, we bid a too-soon farewell to Barcelona and fly to Nice, France.
Europe in Winter: Barcelona, Spain
Barcelona is the first stop on our trip to Europe (hotels courtesy of my lovely wife, flights courtesy of me). In our first 36 hours here, we’ve managed to recover from the change in time zones between DC and Barcelona, visit La Sagrada Familia, and visit Park Guell. Both were highly-recommended by the concierge at our hotel (Ritz-Carlton Barcelona, also known as Hotel Arts Barcelona).
Buying tickets ahead of time for La Sagrada Familia is highly-recommended also. We bought a tour with an English-speaking guide on ticketmaster.es for under 40 euros and probably saved ourselves 2-3 hours of waiting in line to get in. The guided portion of the tour was around an hour–the guide shared a wealth of historical information about the architect (Gaudi), the building, some of the sculptors, Catholicism, and the Bible itself. As someone who appreciates history and churches, the tour was excellent.
Park Guell was quite a bit of walking, but also fun. The monument zone of the park charges admission, which gives you access to some of Gaudi’s interesting outdoor works (along with some shops and restrooms). Once you leave the monument zone however, you can’t return without paying the same fee again. The best views of Barcelona are actually outside the monument zone anyway (if you don’t mind climbing a lot of stairs).
We got to and from both attractions and our hotel by metered cab. Ride costs ranged between 8-12 euros. Only one of the four cab drivers we’ve had so far spoke enough English for us to have a conversation.
Tomorrow, we’ll probably try the 1-day hop-on, hop-off bus and see as many attractions as we can.
Candied Sweet Potatoes 2013
Since the first time I posted a candied sweet potato recipe, I’ve made it a few more times. What follows is the 2013 version I made this past Thanksgiving (and will probably make for Christmas since family and in-laws have been asking):
Ingredients
4-5 lbs of sweet potatoes
1 20oz can of pineapple (preferably crushed)
1 1/2 cups of dark brown sugar
1 1/4 cup of unsalted butter
cinnamon, nutmeg, & ground ginger to taste
Instructions
If you only have regular pineapple instead of crushed pineapple, slice it up into small pieces. Otherwise, skip to the rest of the instructions below.
Fill an 8qt pot 2/3rds of the way with water. Bring to a boil. Boil the sweet potatoes for around 15 minutes. Drain and set aside to cool for peeling and slicing later.
In a saucepan, melt the butter (over low heat), add the brown sugar and stir. Add cinnamon, nutmeg, and ginger until the sauce tastes how you want it.
After you’ve peeled and sliced the sweet potatoes, lay down a layer of them, drizzle/smear on some of the sauce, and sprinkle on some of the pineapple. Repeat until you’ve filled whatever casserole dish or foil pan you’re using.
Bake this at 425 degrees for around 55-60 minutes.