Segregation as Logical Extension of American Policies

Regular readers understand de facto segregation--based on race or class--is the primary scourge of modern Western societies, particularly when governments do not adhere to any borrowing limits. Yet, few people realize modern segregation is rooted in logic, not a nature-based pattern of "birds of a feather flocking together." To summarize, in a decentralized environment without a trusted mediator, new residents gravitate towards informal norms, including those relating to communication and conflict resolution; and because self-segregation allows minorities to replicate their informal norms (for example, see Amish or Mennonites), immigrants as a whole have tended to succeed when they self-segregate and to fail when they don't. (The West's response to its failure to correct racial segregation has been emphasizing or promoting individual minority outliers.) 

When Malcolm X and others discussed separation, they weren't just concerned with violence and police dogs--they were acknowledging a link between failure and ineffective governance in their own communities. More controversially, W.E.B. DuBois, Harvard's first African-American graduate--also referring to a lack of institutional trust--wrote of Germany's Jews banding together due to "oppression in the past." 

Kwame Appiah's The Lies that Bind (2018)

In my own California county, I notice clear distinctions when I drive 15 minutes in any direction, with Sunnyvale "belonging" to Indian-owned businesses, Cupertino "belonging" to Taiwanese-owned businesses, and East San Jose "belonging" to Vietnamese-owned businesses. Like DuBois, I, too, have seen minority Jews succeeding through voluntary separation, though in my case, I had argued other minorities ought to follow the same example in America. In the end, regardless of profession or location, the catalyst for self-segregation remains the same: a lack of trust in institutions, especially police and courts, increases the likelihood self-segregation will provide favorable outcomes, leading to a rise in the informal economy, which eventually weakens social cohesion and inhibits formal economic activity. 

Some countries understand this phenomenon well. Singapore, one of the world's most diverse countries, has taken so many measures to signal integrity, its overreach is sometimes comical--though no one can argue with its success. Like everywhere else, Singapore can be clannish; after all, its Chinese population was famously "kicked out" of Malaysia, and its experience with riots in 1964 led to its founder insisting "on a multiracial, multireligious, multicultural model to provide a cohesive identity for the new nation." (Kwame Appiah, The Lies that Bind Us (2018), hardcover, pp. 93) Despite its hallowed status as SE Asia's least corrupt country, most Singaporean experts have not fully connected their tough social harmony laws with a lack of entrenched mafia or a black market. Why not? Given the West's history, where racial subjugation and slavery have been based on widely publicized theories of inferiority, Western-educated graduates tend to focus on laws relating to "free speech" or race more than others, missing the fact that Singapore's laws restricted all non-modern behavior--to the point of fining residents in their own condominiums for being naked. (LKY, a lawyer educated in London, had no patience for those wishing to maintain "backwards" kampong behavior.) Somehow, Singapore knew it first had to establish social harmony then economic success, especially if it demanded sacrifices from most of its residents. 

Oddly enough, when modern thinkers today argue multiculturalism has failed, they do not cite poorly distributed government funding, inadequate governmental hiring practices, or convergence between vested political interests and historically one-race residency. They certainly do not point to their own failures of institutional integrity, causing either intentional or unintentional misdirection and further strengthening separatists, who often overlap with racists. The popular solution to modern society's ailments has been more meritocracy; however, elevated debt levels in both private and public markets have effectively propped up existing institutions regardless of merit, thereby entrenching the status quo. 

Appiah's The Lies that Bind (2018)

Indeed, any country where a man can borrow billions of dollars to invest in real estate under a tax code favoring such investments, then become president primarily on such a basis, means wealth and banking have become divorced from societal good. The effects of such a result are not only a coarsening of culture and greater skepticism of the kind of public-private partnerships making Singapore and China successful, but disillusionment, especially among young adults. 

As I write, I am reminded of 12 year-old Cassius Clay being assisted by Louisville police officer Joe Martin in a state prohibiting race-mixing in social venues, public parks, recreation centers, schools, and public transportation (one reason Cassius must have been so distraught over his lost bicycle). What was it that made Officer Martin look at a scrawny, tearful boy, realize the bike was gone for good, and decide he had to make sure this kid wouldn't lose hope? Why did the same conservative legal Establishment in that same Louisville city continue to protect the teenager when he was no longer Cassius Clay but a man with a foreign name and an unfamiliar religion? How did one Southern city looked down upon by Northerners look out for a boy different from themselves and then a man even more different than the boy? It must be because social cohesion and integrity, whether in Singapore in 2001 or Kentucky in 1954, are the stewards of any successful enterprise, cities included, and authority, when just, can prevail in spite of written laws or because of them. 

From Louisville's Muhammad Ali Museum, featuring meritocracy in action.

I do not claim to know all the reasons some communities succeed while others fail. I do know, however, the more Americans continue their current path, where they do not learn from Singapore and its foundation of informally and formally enforced social harmony and also from Louisville's refusal to allow formal laws to dictate social outcomes, the more they create a society where a Schwinn bike is just another bicycle, and a police officer's badge just another piece of tin. 

© Matthew Mehdi Rafat (2019)

Justice Ginsburg

California Lawyer (November 2011) has an excellent interview with Justice Ruth Ginsburg.  Below is my favorite part: 

Q. I'd like you to talk a little bit about the cases that I've spent my life studying, the key gender cases that began in the 1970s, which you litigated and wrote amici briefs for. The 14th Amendment, which guarantees equal protection under the law, had been settled interpretation for, I think, 104 years. What made you think that you could get the courts to overrule more than a century of precedent?

A: The times. The Court is a reactive institution. It's never in the forefront of social change. When you think of Brown v. Board of Education, it was not only that Thurgood Marshall was a brilliant lawyer. It was the tenor of the times. We had just fought a war against an odious form of racism, and yet our troops through most of World War II were separated by race. Apartheid in America really had to go. Similarly, by 1970 the women's movement was revived, not just in the United States but all over the world. As a great legal scholar once said, the Court should never react to the weather of the day, but inevitably it will react to the climate of the era, and the climate was right for that change.

Perhaps, at least in a peaceful society, all good things come to those who wait?  I've sometimes wondered whether the Supreme Court's decision upholding Muhammad Ali's conscientious objector status would be the same if the case had arrived at the Court a few years earlier. In one article I read--it was from Men's Journal (Nov 2011)--the author wrote that the Supreme Court was set against Ali until a law clerk gave them a copy of Haley's Autobiography of Malcolm X. After reading the book, the Court allegedly had a change of heart. True or not, the anecdote demonstrates that the law, so long as it relies on interpretation by men and women, necessarily intersects with their bias.

In any case, regarding the efficacy of the Constitution against government tyranny--whether slavery, Jim Crow, Japanese internment camps, Abu Ghraib, etc.--I'll leave you with this Lysander Spooner quote: "But whether the Constitution really be one thing, or another, this much is certain--that it has either authorized such a government as we have had, or has been powerless to prevent it." [Updated on 3/25/12]

Bonus: see also "When Mass Murder and Theft of All Human Rights Were 'Legal': The Nazi Judiciary and Judges," by Hon. Richard D. Fybel, California Litigation, Vol. 25, No. 2, 2012, page 15-21.  He discusses Nazi Germany and the judicial branch's politically-convenient prostration before Hitler.

Update on 6/7/14: The Trials of Muhammad Ali (2013) includes an interview with a Supreme Court law clerk who worked on Ali's conscientious objector case. The Supreme Court almost dismissed the case but sent it back for review because a new wiretap issue arose (the government admitted to spying on conversations between MLK and Ali). Then, when the case returned to the Supreme Court after three and a half years, the preliminary vote was against Ali 5 to 3 until Thomas G. Krattenmaker, Justice Harlan's law clerk, argued--many times to Harlan--that the Nation of Islam should be treated the same as Jehovah's Witnesses who believed that only God may compel the followers to war and no one else. After reading the Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965) and Message to the Blackman in America (1965), he convinced Justice Harlan, who switched his vote, making it 4 to 4.  However, a deadlocked 4-4 vote would have put Ali in jail for 5 years and generated no substantive written opinion explaining the Court's rationale.  Then Justice Potter found precedent to rule in a narrow way that applied only to Ali based on denial of due process, which permitted the government to continue with its draft while allowing only Ali to file for C.O. status (rather than every single Nation of Islam member or prospective member). The revised opinion resulted in a unanimous 8 to 0 decision (Justice Thurgood Marshall recused himself because the NAACP Legal Fund was involved). The Court ruled Ali was denied due process because the government argued that he was insincere in his religious beliefs at the Draft Board yet later told the Supreme Court it believed Ali was sincere. And just like that, history was made. Without Krattenmaker, Harlan, and Potter, Ali goes to jail, never reclaims the title, and never raises the torch at the '96 Olympics.

Bonus: Interview with California Supreme Court Justice Stanley Mosk (1998):

LaBerge: [H]ow do you think both you and just the court in general can influence social policy, or vice versa, does social policy influence the decisions?

Mosk: Well, theoretically, we should be governed solely by the law and not by individual concepts of rights and duties.  But inevitably, individual rights do enter into opinions that may be written.  Whether that's good or bad, effective or ineffective, is always debatable. [pp. 84]

Mosk: I have a certain sympathy for individuals in our society.  Our society has grown so large and impersonal that I think we sometimes have the tendency to overlook an individual's rights and obligations. [pp. 85]  

Muhammad Ali: How He Wanted to Be Remembered

I recently finished reading David Remnick's biography of Muhammad Ali, King of the World. The book was so good, I actually dragged out the reading because I didn't want it to end. Ali tells us how he wants to be remembered:

As a black man who won the heavyweight title and who was humorous and who treated everyone right. As a man who never looked down on those who looked up to him and who helped as many of his people as he could--financial[ly] and also in their fight for freedom, justice, and equality. As a man who wouldn't embarrass them. As a man who tried to unite his people through the faith of Islam...

May Allah forever bless the Greatest of All Time.

Muhammad Ali: The Whole Story

I recently watched Muhammad Ali -- The Whole Story (1996), an incredible six hours journey through the life of Muhammad Ali. Here are some of my thoughts:

1. The only boxer who could go toe-to-toe with Ali was Ken Norton. No one else could handle Ali without getting beaten badly. When Ali was in his prime, only Joe Frazier and Ken Norton beat him. There are differences, however, in how Frazier and Norton won their fights. For example, Joe Frazier may have beaten Ali, but Frazier could not avoid getting hit. As a result, every time he and Ali fought, Ali's face looked clean as a whistle, while Frazier's face looked like it had been through a meat grinder. Meanwhile, Norton actually broke Ali's jaw in one fight.

2. Ali was successful at every stage of his career. He won an Olympic gold medal; won numerous amateur boxing awards; and beat every single serious professional contender through the age of 37 years old. When he went professional, he won the heavyweight championship three times, something no one else has ever done.

3. When George Foreman was younger, he seemed like nothing more than a surly thug. At one point, we see Foreman walking with his entourage in Zaire prior to the "Rumble in the Jungle." Someone, presumably a fan, asks to shake Foreman's hand, but Foreman's friend keeps her away and then happily reports he told her "she could shake my hand." Foreman sees what has happened and keeps walking. It is impossible to imagine the gregarious Muhammad Ali behaving similarly towards any of his fans. It is also incredible how Foreman completely reinvented himself in his old age, transforming from a reserved thug to a grandfatherly figure who sells fat-reducing cooking grills.

4. Before Larry Holmes became heavyweight champion, he was Muhammad Ali's training partner.

5. Were it not for Muhammad Ali, we would all be talking about Joe Frazier. When Frazier was young, he wasn't just an incredibly tough boxer--he was also gregarious and fun. Whereas other boxers took Muhammad Ali's comments seriously, Frazier played along with Ali. At one point, Frazier even tried to up Muhammad Ali's star power by singing a poem, and he displayed a surprisingly soulful voice.

6. When Ali was young, he was so quick, no one could hit him. After fifteen rounds in the ring, Ali's face would be unmarked. That's why he kept saying, "I'm pretty." Richard Pryor once remarked, "His punches are so fast you don't see 'em until they're coming back." It's hard to really understand the power and grace of Ali's speed until you see someone trying to hit him and failing miserably.

7. Ali's poetry: "I'm so bad, I make medicine sick."