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After a chaotic summer of air travel in 2022, flights have been running relatively smoothly this year. But then storms in the Northeast this past week caused a series of flight cancellations. Here’s what to expect as the country heads into a projected record-high travel weekend—and how to keep your cool amidst air-travel unknowns.

First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

Being alive is bad for your health. Elite multiculturalism is over. Dave Grohl’s monument to mortality How to lose a century of progress

First Snag of the Season

An airport concourse after midnight is not a happy place: The travelers—bone-tired, their anticipation curdled into boredom and despair—rest their weary heads on benches and jackets. The restaurants have turned off their lights; the newsstands have pulled down their grates; the bars have flipped up their stools for the night.

Until this week, it appeared as if many Americans would be spared such indignities this travel season. Flight cancellations were down from last summer, and Memorial Day weekend went off with few travel hitches. After a summer of pain last year, when airlines and airports buckled under demand from travelers, and chaos last winter, when weather and tech problems snowballed into a yuletide imbroglio, things were going pretty smoothly.

In June of last year, 2.7 percent of flights were canceled, whereas 1.9 percent of flights have been canceled this month so far (that number may change after cancellations today), Kathleen Bangs, a spokesperson for FlightAware, a company that tracks flights, told me. Although that difference might not sound like a lot, Bangs said, travelers feel the difference. She added that delays have gone up slightly, from 24 percent last June to 26 percent this June.

Then, last weekend, storms hit the Northeast. Cancellations and delays spiked as weather issues collided with established staffing and operational issues. “Last weekend was the first real snag of the season,” Bangs said. Airlines canceled thousands of flights this week—more than 8 percent of scheduled flights were canceled on Tuesday, according to FlightAware—ahead of what is projected to be the busiest Fourth of July travel weekend on record. “Did weather start it? Yes. Why it caused a cascade for them, we just don’t know,” Bangs added.

Various parties are pointing fingers. United, which canceled more than 3,000 flights this past week, according to FlightAware, was quick to blame the Federal Aviation Administration for some of its woes. “The FAA frankly failed us this weekend,” United’s CEO reportedly wrote in a memo to staff. In an email, United told me that it is ready for the holiday weekend and is seeing far fewer delays today than in previous days this week.

“There’s shared responsibility between Mother Nature, the airline’s own actions, and the FAA,” Henry Harteveldt, a travel-industry analyst for Atmosphere Research Group, told me. “The FAA is not the sole cause and shouldn’t be made out to be the bogeyman.” It doesn’t help matters that we are at the end of a calendar month, when pilots and flight attendants may be running up against their maximum flying hours, he added.

Indeed, the FAA is currently quite understaffed—though it has said that it did not have staffing issues along the East Coast on Monday or Tuesday of this week. The FAA told me that it hires controllers annually and is hiring 1,500 people this year, adding that it recently completed a review of the distribution of controllers. (Republic and Endeavor, a subsidiary of Delta, also saw high rates of cancellations, according to FlightAware. Republic did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Delta told me that “as always, Delta and our connection partners work with our partners at the FAA to meet our shared top priority of safety, while running the most efficient operation possible for our customers.”)

The good news is that, after a few rough days, operations were recovering by yesterday. There were fewer flight cancellations that day compared with the ones leading up to it. Things may go okay for the airlines from here—“barring a computer meltdown,” Bangs said—as long as the weather cooperates. She added that even dense smoke could impact visibility and operations. That could remain an issue this summer as fires continue both in the U.S. and Canada.

Travelers cannot control acts of God—if only!—or airline-personnel issues. Indeed, what can be so frustrating about air travel is that so many factors are out of your control. But there are things travelers can do to try to avoid problems—or at least to increase the chances of having a decently comfortable time in the face of all the unknowns.

Bangs told me that if she were flying this weekend, she would try to get on the first flight of the day. “Statistically, there’s such a better chance of that flight not getting canceled,” she said. Harteveldt echoed that advice. If it’s doable for you, Bangs said, it could be worth looking into trying to change your booking to get on an earlier flight—or switching to a direct flight in order to reduce the chance of one leg of a trip messing up connecting flights. Also, download your airline’s app. It’s an easy way to make sure you have up-to-date info and can communicate with the airline in case things go awry.

Some of their other tips came down to preparation and attitude: It might be rough out there. Wake up early, pack light, and have your necessities consolidated in case you need to check a carry-on. Lines may be long at security. Give yourself time, and be flexible.

Bangs’s final tip: Be nice to flight attendants. Bangs, a former pilot, said that many flight attendants are scarred from “air rage” and difficult passenger interactions over the past few years. Though an airplane can be the site of frustration, seat kickers, and nonpotable water, it is also a place of work for people who have been through a lot. Be cool, everyone. And good luck if you’re traveling.

Related:

Air travel is a disaster right now. Here’s why. (From 2022) Air travel is going to be very bad, for a very long time.

Today’s News

The Supreme Court rejected President Joe Biden’s student-debt-relief plan, arguing that it overstepped the Education Department’s authority and required clear approval from Congress. Poor air quality is still affecting American cities, with experts warning that northern summer winds could continue to bring smoke from Canadian wildfires all season. Brazil’s electoral court voted to ban Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro from running for office for the next eight years on account of making false claims about voting-system integrity.

Dispatches

Up for Debate: Conor Friedersdorf solicits readers’ thoughts on affirmative action. The Books Briefing: Anyone looking for a guide to surviving our unstable era should look no further than the work of Eileen Chang, Maya Chung writes.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

More From The Atlantic

Olivia Rodrigo’s big, bloody return The Biden White House is following an ugly Trump precedent. The juicy secrets of everyday life

Culture Break

Bettmann / Getty

Read. Beyond the Shores: A History of African Americans Abroad expands upon the history of the Black Americans who nurtured their creativity overseas.

Watch. The second season of The Bear (streaming on Hulu) cements it as the rare prestige show that actually succeeds at radical reinvention.

Or check out these 11 undersung TV shows to watch this summer.

Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

If you plan to play pickleball this weekend, be careful: Analysts found that pickleball injuries may cost Americans nearly $400 million this year, and picklers appear to be driving up health-care costs.

The sport has grown massively over the past few years and is projected to keep growing. Many people love the sport, and I myself have enjoyed a bit of pickle from time to time. But not everyone is a fan. The game has notably angered many tennis players, and The New York Times reported today that people have been filing lawsuits complaining about the game’s noises. “The most grating and disruptive sound in the entire athletic ecosystem right now may be the staccato pop-pop-pop emanating from America’s rapidly multiplying pickleball courts,” the reporter Andrew Keh writes.

— Lora

Katherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.

Over breakfast yesterday, I read that physicists had discovered a sonic hum perhaps caused by enormous objects like black holes converging and rippling the space-time continuum. I grew up in my grandparents’ railroad apartment in South Brooklyn, and now live a life that stuns me with its privilege and creative freedom—I’m someone who thinks a lot about space and time, and how one traverses them. The idea of the ripples intrigued me: For a moment, I fantasized about my alternative futures. If I were born today, what might I become?

In the early morning, any future seemed possible. By lunch, after the Supreme Court had struck down affirmative action in college admissions, that was no longer true. The time of infinite possibility for a Latina from a low-income background like me was over. At least in this space called America.

When you’re an “other” at a predominantly white, elite institution, you share the knowledge that this place was not created for someone like you, no matter how welcome you might be now. Your presence relies on someone before you being the first—the first African American student, the first Latino, the first Asian American. This knowledge creates cross-cultural affinities—alliances and bonds among races and ethnicities that might not exist in any other setting. An understanding is born: We are all here, though our grandparents could not be. How can we be here for one another?

Almost immediately, texts began coming in from my college friends. One, a Latina who’d grown up in a New York City housing project and was the first in her family to attend college, proclaimed numbness, insisting she’d long ago lost faith in institutions, only to later admit that she was just pretending to feel that way as a form of self-protection. Another first-generation classmate, an Asian American woman from the Midwest, was distraught. “The entirety of what made you and me feel connected is like a separate universe now,” she said.

I went to Brown in the mid-’90s, when the minority-student population was so small that we had little choice but to stick together. At that time, I didn’t realize that I would spend my life navigating white power structures; I thought the challenges of life at Brown were just a temporary discomfort. A discomfort that I weathered with the help of my friends: Black, Latino, Afro-Latino, East Asian, South Asian, Southeast Asian, Native American. Our shared resources—deans, campus space for cultural clubs, access to public computers—were limited, but our support for one another was bountiful. During Black History Month, or Latino Heritage Month, or the annual Legends of the SEA (Southeast Asian) dance performance, we could count on our collective minority community to turn out. Every Friday was Unity Day at the minority-student center, and we danced and snacked and gossiped together.

The blow of the ruling, of the way it will deny access by denying the existence of racism, was made more painful by how it happened. The cases relied on the cynical recruitment of a handful of aggrieved Asian American plaintiffs who felt, alongside white plaintiffs, that less-qualified Black and Latino students were taking their spots. After this decision, The New York Times reported, “campuses of elite institutions would become whiter and more Asian and less Black and Latino.” There it was, in black and white: We were all to be pitted against one another.

Young people of color aren’t just losing or gaining “spots”; they’re losing that multicultural community that once meant so much to me. Diversity will dwindle, but so too will the sense of shared grace that students of color extended to one another in these white spaces.

I did not deserve, on paper, to go to Brown. I had a perfect GPA in high school, but so did plenty of others who applied. I took what AP courses my public high school offered, which turned out, in the scheme of things, to be limited. I’d crushed my PSATs only to find myself crushed (twice) by the real thing. I was passionate about a handful of extracurriculars. Yet what I had and what they saw in me must have made me a good fit for their Open Curriculum: intense curiosity and the drive to act on it. I had not, like most of my classmates who’d gone through rigorous preparatory schools or well-funded suburban public ones, been “bred” to go to a school like Brown. But because of affirmative action, the admissions office looked past this imperfect pedigree, and saw me not for my limited experience in this elite arena, but for my possibility.

Like most things white society does for minorities, the concession came with a cost. It stung to have to endure—at the tender age of 17, when I was admitted (early, no less)—accusations from white students in my honors classes of having “used my ethnicity” to “take a spot.” In the beginning, it was hard to overcome this sense of needing to prove myself, to prove that I deserved my place there. But I chose to see it this way: Brown had taken a chance on me and I had taken a chance on Brown. For all parties, the gamble paid off.

I say I took a chance on Brown because there were easier paths. I could have gone full ride to any number of wonderful New York State or City schools, or even smaller private ones. I could have gone to a college where minority cultures were integral and not peripheral to campus life. Instead I went to Brown, a place that had taken 223 years to graduate a mere 100 Latinos. I took a chance and moved to Providence, and what I got in return was an expanded view of the world. An understanding of capital in all its forms. Entrée into spaces—whether or not people like to admit it—that only institutions like Ivies provide.

Above all, I gained from college a new sense of community and its importance. Yes, some of us were raised to go to places like Brown and others were not, but what we shared were curiosity, ambition—a desire to understand, and possibly better, the world. These are qualities that I still seek out in friends and colleagues.

But the gamble of affirmative action also benefited my alma mater—and all the predominantly white, elite institutions whose very DNA was changed by the practice. Though Clarence Thomas has clearly never gotten over what some see as the “stigma” of affirmative action, I certainly did. The same way that my worldview was expanded at Brown, the presence of minority students expanded the worldviews of our classmates.

We pretend we live in an equal and integrated society despite increased segregation over the past generation in our neighborhoods and our schools. A 2014 study found that three-quarters of white people didn’t have a single nonwhite friend. For many of my white classmates, college was their first chance to have meaningful relationships with a person from a different background. They participated—by force or by choice—in difficult conversations in dorm rooms about money or noise, and in classrooms about different assumptions. They were introduced to other cultures—salsa, banda, stepping, bhangra. In so many ways, the growing presence of people of color improved the “enrichment experience” for everyone around us.

Today, when I speak with minority students about imposter syndrome, I remind them that they are doing a service. They will likely be the only nonwhite friend most of their white college friends have for the rest of their life. I know that I am.

It may seem that this ruling affects only the most prestigious schools and the annoying overachievers who want to attend them. “Who cares?” you might ask. “If these kids have enough ganas, they can do just fine going to any school.” And to that I could reply: Eight out of the nine justices who just made this decision went to Ivies for undergraduate or law school (nine out of nine if we widen the category to “elite private schools”).

But even more important is the effect that diversity has on the research that elite institutions create. I have met many Latino academics, all probably products of affirmative action at some level, who simply did not exist in academia when I was in college. Their work on Latino health, voting patterns, emotional trauma, and other topics isn’t just good scholarship. It’s publicly accessible information that journalists like me can rely on to buttress a more expansive cultural conversation. Other minority researchers are studying unequal access to medical care, environmental racism, and the class disparities of health crises like long COVID. Affirmative action was designed to benefit minorities, but as America careens toward becoming a majority-minority nation, it has, in ways great and small, benefited us all.      

I am about to celebrate my 25th college reunion. Of its Ivy League peers, Brown is probably known as the most bohemian. But when it does tradition, it does it very well. Reunions

and commencement happen concurrently and involve a tradition called “the inverted sock.” The alumni cross our campus gates, oldest to youngest, lining the street all the way down to the church where the undergraduates have their ceremony. And when the graduates come out, the alumni all parade past them.

It is a way of paying tribute. Of creating a sense of lineage. But it is also like counting the rings of a very old tree. You can see when the school became co-ed—the women marching with Brown banners instead of Pembroke ones. And you can see the effects of affirmative action, as each reunion class that walks through those wrought-iron gates becomes more reflective not of white power, but of America. Immigrants, and the sons and daughters of immigrants, and descendants of slaves walking side by side—and having equal thoughts and potential and merit—with the descendants of slave owners.

I hate to think that, 25 years from now, watching that procession, our diversity and excellence will seem but a blip, and fade away in the ripples of time.

When caring for two toddlers during the pandemic felt impossible, I took solace in knowing that raising children used to be considerably more difficult. During the early 20th century, infectious organisms in tainted food or fetid water exacted a frightening toll on children; in some places, up to 30 percent died before their first birthday. In those days, there was often little more to offer children suffering from dehydration and diarrhea than milk teeming with harmful bacteria or so-called soothing syrups laced with morphine and alcohol.

Since then, deaths during childhood went from commonplace to rare. Partly as a result, the average human life span doubled, granting us, on average, the equivalent of a whole extra life to live. The field of public health is primarily responsible for this exceptional achievement.

Medicine revolves around the care of individual patients; public health, by contrast, works to protect and improve the health of entire populations, whether small communities or large countries. This encompasses researching how to prevent injuries, developing policies to address health disparities, and, of course, tackling disease outbreaks.

George Whipple, a co-founder of the Harvard School of Public Health, proclaimed in 1914 in The Atlantic that “one of the greatest events of the dawning twentieth century is the triumph of man over his microscopic foes.” Even he’d likely be shocked by the success of public health over the past century.

[From the May 1914 issue: The broadening science of sanitation]

But as the coronavirus pandemic wanes, the field of public health has come under a barrage of criticism. Some are calling to curtail the field’s power. Even many of public health’s strongest proponents are disappointed with how the profession navigated the pandemic.

While it is essential to learn from mistakes of the recent past, such rhetoric could have awful consequences. Our public-health workforce is already burdened by massive attrition. Simultaneously, a growing body of legislation and litigation is chipping away at public health’s ability to address current and future health threats. Politicians have accused health experts of being “wrong about almost everything” during the pandemic. Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky, a Republican who fundraised his reelection bid with “#FireFauci” ads, introduced a bill to eliminate the position that Anthony Fauci recently left at the National Institutes of Health and to split the agency in three.

Public health wasn’t perfect during the pandemic; it never has been. But its remarkable track record—on the provision of clean water, prevention of childhood lead poisoning, tobacco-cessation programs, vaccine development and promotion, and much more—has driven unprecedented gains in better health and life expectancy worldwide. Public health saves lives, and is an essential component of protecting and improving our collective health.

Exacting revenge on the field following a devastating pandemic may feel satisfying to some people, but curtailing public health’s programs, credibility, and funding will not help anyone. What it will do is put a century of progress at risk.

I understand why the backlash has been so intense. There were errors at many steps. The CDC botched testing for SARS-CoV-2 early in 2020, delaying our ability to track the virus from day one. Much of the communication about masks and vaccines from public-health officials was unclear and unhelpful. We too often failed to put our best public-health knowledge to use in schools to keep kids learning while reducing spread, leading to closures that went on far longer than necessary; at bars and restaurants down the block, meanwhile, life continued as normal. The full extent of the damage done to a generation of students will not be known for years to come.

But at the same time, while critics love to talk about everything public health got wrong throughout the pandemic, they rarely stop to recognize all that it got right—and under truly challenging circumstances. For example, when asked to reflect on the COVID-19-vaccine rollout, many will note the confusion about eligibility or countless hours spent frantically clicking “Refresh” on appointment sites. But the fact is that in just six months, almost half of the U.S. population got vaccinated. As a health-care provider, I can say that the effects were dramatic: We quickly saw fewer and fewer patients arriving with severe illness. The phenomenal achievement of the vaccination rollout—coordinated by federal, state, and local public-health agencies—averted millions of deaths from COVID-19 to date and serves as a blueprint for how to mobilize mass-vaccination campaigns in the future.

[Read: 23 pandemic decisions that actually went right]

Rapid antigen testing feels routine now, but consider how widespread and accessible it became, and how quickly. For the first time, people are able to easily diagnose a respiratory infection at home without a doctor, helping prevent spread and avoiding unnecessary office visits. At the outset of the pandemic, we relied on time-consuming, expensive, and severely limited PCR tests. Within months, at-home tests were approved, and now hundreds of millions have been produced, shipped, and used across the country. This helped improve timely access to antivirals such as Paxlovid, which saved more lives yet. And the lessons learned from using rapid tests in this pandemic will help bolster preparedness and response in future disease outbreaks. Additionally, at-home rapid tests for other respiratory pathogens, such as influenza and respiratory syncytial virus, are on the immediate horizon.

The tendency to focus on public health’s slipups rather than its successes is not new. Americans have long undervalued public health: We almost never have to question if the food we consume or the medicines we’re prescribed will inadvertently sicken us and send us to the hospital. This disconnect between what we value and what truly benefits us becomes clearer when we compare public health with the field of medicine.

Throughout the pandemic, while public-health officials were met with pitchforks—forced out of their job or taunted with death threats—health-care providers (like myself) were applauded with pots and pans, in recognition of the challenges we faced on COVID’s front lines.

This is a classically American pattern. Public health is focused on the health of communities; medicine, on individuals. Almost all of the more than $4 trillion spent on health care annually supports individual patient care, with only 4 percent of funding going to public health. This is strikingly inefficient and helps explain why the U.S. has one of the lowest life expectancies and the highest rates of maternal and infant mortality among high-income nations.

Armed with a growing array of treatments and diagnostic tools, medicine has gotten much better at treating infections. But it can still do very little to stop a novel pandemic, and in March 2020, its ability to save lives from COVID wasn’t markedly better than during the 1918 influenza pandemic. America needs a robust field of public health to do what medicine cannot: keep people safe from emerging pathogens, environmental toxins, and gun violence. Medicine can treat people who are sick, but only public health can preserve their health in the first place.

It’s easy to assume that progress in public health is linear, and that over time the world’s population will only get healthier. But we’re witnessing profound challenges that may turn back the field’s achievements.

In 1972, the Noble-laureate immunologist Macfarlane Burnet predicted, “The most likely forecast about the future of infectious disease is that it will be very dull.” His optimism seemed justified in 1980, when the World Health Organization declared smallpox eradicated.

But the triumph over microbes was short-lived. In 1981, a CDC Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report outlined the first five cases of what would eventually be called HIV/AIDs, a global pandemic that has since killed 40 million people worldwide. More recently, outbreaks of measles, polio, and other diseases most of us know only from playing Oregon Trail pose new threats and challenges. Syphilis cases in the U.S. are at their highest level in 70 years.

The anger directed at public health following the pandemic could further weaken the field, accelerating this backslide. Dozens of states have implemented restrictions on public-health powers, intended to limit what politicians regard as the field’s overreach during the pandemic. This means greater gatekeeping and restrictions on the role of public-health authorities by politicians, a flawed and problematic setup in the midst of crises.

The problem isn’t coming only from politicians. A judge recently overturned the FDA’s approval of mifepristone, the first time a judicial appointee overruled the national authority on drug safety, which could open a challenge to all medications, vaccines, foods, and other products regulated by the FDA. Before the 1906 Pure Food and Drugs Act—the progenitor of our FDA—there was virtually no regulation of patented medicines or other “treatments” sold for a variety of illnesses. Many contained toxic chemicals and addictive substances, or were dangerously misbranded.

[From the May 2021 issue: You won’t remember the pandemic the way you think you will]

And another judge recently struck down a mandate that required private-health insurers to provide free preventive services. (Earlier this month, the Department of Justice reached a tentative deal to preserve preventive services while the legal case proceeds.) Such rulings would threaten access to mammograms, pre-exposure prophylaxis for HIV, and other basic health care for nearly 150 million Americans. The U.S. is already last in preventable deaths among 16 high-income nations, and the loss of preventive services will only make an already dismal situation worse.

If what we desire is a better response to future outbreaks and health threats, we must all—adversaries and advocates alike—push for a stronger, bolder, and better-resourced field of public health. In denouncing the failed policies of U.S. pandemic response, critics frequently point to Sweden as an exemplar of success during the COVID pandemic. Rarely do they point out that its public health-care system is one of the most robust and well resourced in the world.

In 1903 C.-E. A. Winslow—who created the standard definition of public health and founded what would become the Yale School of Public Health—wrote in The Atlantic that “immunity from certain diseases is accepted, like the sun­shine, without thought, by a generation which has not felt their incidence; and this condition has its dangerous side, for it leads often to a neglect of the pre­cautions necessary to retain the advan­tages won.”

The same sentiment can be applied to how public health more broadly is appreciated—or rather underappreciated—today.

You don’t need to recognize everything public health does for you in the background; it is used to being ignored. The President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, one of the greatest global public-health initiatives since smallpox eradication, just celebrated its 20th anniversary with almost no public recognition, despite saving tens of millions of lives around the globe.

But Americans must make sure that public health keeps working, even if it remains unnoticed. It’s how you know that the cauliflower at the supermarket isn’t crawling with Cyclospora or that the water from your faucet won’t keep your children from seeing their first birthday. We’re lucky we haven’t had to think about it, but that doesn’t mean we can take it for granted.

Welcome to Up for Debate. Each week, Conor Friedersdorf rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here.

Question of the Week

What do you think about the Supreme Court decision in this term’s affirmative-action cases?

Send your responses to conor@theatlantic.com

Conversations of Note

The Supreme Court’s decision striking down the use of race in admissions at Harvard University and the University of North Carolina was released today. Here’s an excerpt from Chief Justice John Roberts’s majority opinion:

The entire point of the Equal Protection Clause is that treating someone differently because of their skin color is not like treating them differently because they are from a city or from a suburb, or because they play the violin poorly or well. “One of the principal reasons race is treated as a forbidden classification is that it demeans the dignity and worth of a person to be judged by ancestry instead of by his or her own merit and essential qualities.” But when a university admits students “on the basis of race, it engages in the offensive and demeaning assumption that [students] of a particular race, because of their race, think alike … at the very least alike in the sense of being different from nonminority students. In doing so, the university furthers “stereotypes that treat individuals as the product of their race, evaluating their thoughts and efforts—their very worth as citizens—according to a criterion barred to the Government by history and the Constitution” …

While the dissent would certainly not permit university programs that discriminated against black and Latino applicants, it is perfectly willing to let the programs here continue. In its view, this Court is supposed to tell state actors when they have picked the right races to benefit. Separate but equal is “inherently unequal,” said Brown. It depends, says the dissent.

And here is an excerpt from Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s dissent:

The Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment enshrines a guarantee of racial equality. The Court long ago concluded that this guarantee can be enforced through race-conscious means in a society that is not, and has never been, colorblind …

Today, the Court concludes that indifference to race is the only constitutionally permissible means to achieve racial equality in college admissions. That interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment is not only contrary to precedent and the entire teachings of our history, but is also grounded in the illusion that racial inequality was a problem of a different generation. Entrenched racial inequality remains a reality today. That is true for society writ large and, more specifically, for Harvard and the University of North Carolina (UNC), two institutions with a long history of racial exclusion. Ignoring race will not equalize a society that is racially unequal. What was true in the 1860s, and again in 1954, is true today: Equality requires acknowledgment of inequality …

Society remains highly segregated … Moreover, underrepresented minority students are more likely to live in poverty and attend schools with a high concentration of poverty … In turn, underrepresented minorities are more likely to attend schools with less qualified teachers, less challenging curricula, lower standardized test scores, and fewer extracurricular activities and advanced placement courses. It is thus unsurprising that there are achievement gaps along racial lines, even after controlling for income differences …

Students of color, particularly Black students, are disproportionately disciplined or suspended, interrupting their academic progress and increasing their risk of involvement with the criminal justice system. Underrepresented minorities are less likely to have parents with a postsecondary education who may be familiar with the college application process. Further, low-income children of color are less likely to attend preschool and other early childhood education programs that increase educational attainment. All of these interlocked factors place underrepresented minorities multiple steps behind the starting line in the race for college admissions.

Don’t Break Up With Your Friends

Here at The Atlantic, Olga Khazan describes a pattern she has noticed in multiple female friendships:

First comes the spark of affinity at the group hang: You loved the Ferrante novels too? Then come the bottomless brunches, if you don’t have kids, or playground dates, if you do. Together, you and your new friend weave text threads scheduling coffee and reassuring each other that you’re being normal and that those other people are being crazy. Periodically, the heart emoji interjects.

Eventually, though, comes a minor affront, a misunderstanding, a misalignment—then another, and another. They’re all small things, of course, but like, she always does this. And then, all too often, comes what is known in therapy circles as the “giant block of text.”

What’s more, she writes, “advice is proliferating on how to aggressively confront, or even abandon, friends who disappoint us. Online guides abound for ‘how to break up with a friend,’ as though the struggle is in what to say, rather than whether to do it. One TikTok therapist suggested that you tell your erstwhile friend ‘you don’t have the capacity to invest’ in the friendship any longer, like you’re a frazzled broker and they’re a fading stock. The massive paragraph of text, though not a friend breakup per se, often reads like one—and leads to one.”

Khazan argues for a different approach:

You don’t need a guide for breaking up with your friends, because you don’t need to break up with your friends. You just need to make more friends … The resounding chorus from everyone I interviewed was that no one person can fulfill all of your needs. Some friends are good listeners, some invite you on fun trips. The person you call in a crisis might not be the one who tells the best jokes at happy hour.

American Spoilsports

In an attempt to attract a younger fan base, professional sports leagues are touting their commitments to social justice. Ethan Strauss argues that the attendant politicization carries a cost:

America is composed of many societies and cultures. Among these cultures is a cohort of people who believe that sports serve a higher purpose, if not a massively important societal function. Kenny Chesney’s red state-rooted song “The Boys of Fall” is a good example. It’s an ode to football, from the high school level on up, that’s deeply emotional and totally without irony.

This game really matters to a lot of people, even if the New York Times so often portrays it in a negative light. As is true of sports generally, it binds the young to the old, and directs men, especially, towards a form of combat engagement that doesn’t raze cities. It’s a spiritual experience, an endeavor with almost mystical properties.

Back before sports became a massive industry, Dutch historian Johan Huizinga wrote Homo Ludens, his famous work on the importance of “play” in culture generation. In it, Huizinga coined the term “magic circle” to describe the space where we suspend normal rules in favor of a temporary artificial reality, e.g. a game. In Huizinga’s construction, we are under a spell when participating in this reality. Those who break the spell are called “spoil-sports,” a term that’s endured to this day. From Homo Ludens:

The spoil-sport shatters the play-world itself. By withdrawing from the game he reveals the relativity and fragility of the play-world in which he had temporarily shut himself with others. He robs play of its illusion — a pregnant word which means literally “in-play” (from inlusion, illudere or inludere). Therefore he must be cast out, for he threatens the existence of the play-community.

In bringing politics to the magic circle, the leagues themselves have become spoil-sports, breaking the spell over certain fans.

More Money, More Problems

At Marginal Revolution, Alex Tabarrok tries to explain why many people think that it was easier for families to thrive in bygone generations, even though the economic data say otherwise. He notes nostalgia and the effects of social media, but focuses on the value of time, drawing on a theory expressed by Staffan Burenstam Linder in The Harried Leisure Class.

Tabarrok writes:

Real GDP per capita has doubled since the early 1980s but there are still only 24 hours in a day. How do consumers respond to all that increased wealth and no additional time? By focusing consumption on goods that are cheap to consume in time. We consume “fast food,” we choose to watch television or movies “on demand,” rather than read books or go to plays or live music performances. We consume multiple goods at the same time as when we eat and watch, talk and drive, and exercise and listen. And we manage, schedule and control our time more carefully with time planners, “to do” lists and calendaring.

That can be difficult:

Time management is a cognitively strenuous task, leaving us feeling harried. As the opportunity cost of time increases, our concern about “wasting” our precious hours grows more acute. On balance, we are better off, but the blessing of high-value time can overwhelm some individuals, just as can the ready availability of high-calorie food.

So, whose time has seen an especially remarkable appreciation in the past few decades? Women’s time has experienced a surge in value. As more women have pursued higher education and stepped into professional roles, their time’s value has more than doubled, incentivizing a substantial reorganization of daily life with consequent transaction costs. It’s expensive for highly educated women to be homemakers but that means substituting the wife’s time for a host of market services, day care, house cleaning, transportation and so forth. Juggling all of these tasks is difficult. Women’s time has become more valuable but also more constrained and requiring more strategic allocation and optimization for both spouses. In previous eras, a spouse who stayed at home served as a reserve pool of time, providing a buffer to manage unexpected disruptions such as a sick child or a car breakdown with greater ease. Today, the same disruption requires a cascade of rescheduling and negotiations to manage the situation effectively.

It feels hard.

Covering similar terrain, Matthew Yglesias argues that “if you want a genuine 1950s lifestyle today, you can probably afford it.” He explains:

Middle-class people from the past were poor by our standards. In 1950, the average new single-family home was 983 square feet. If you’re willing to live someplace unfashionable like Cleveland, I can find you a 1,346-square-foot, three-bedroom house for $189,900. That’s an estimated monthly payment of $1,382 per month or $16,584 per year. Let’s say you’re living by the rule of thumb that says housing should be 30% of your annual income. Well, that pencils out to $55,280 per year. Is that out of reach for the modern Ohioan? The BLS says the mean wage for all occupations in the Cleveland metro area is $59,530. There’s no all-occupations median, unfortunately. But for postal service clerks, the median is $56,200. Suppose you know a skilled trade and you can apply for this mechanic job at the airport that pays $32/hour. That’s north of $60k per year.

So what about child care? Summer camp? All that Baumol stuff? Well, it doesn’t matter, because you’re thriving 1950s-style and your wife takes care of all that. People think it’s weird that you guys only have one car, but that’s the ‘50s for you. It’s a 27-minute commute to your job at the airport by metro. You’re four blocks from the elementary school and two blocks from the playground, so mom and the kids are fine to be carless if you need it for the day, and it’s only a 25-minute walk to the shopping center at Kamm’s Corners.

Of course with three kids and a modest income, you’re not taking vacations by airplane or dining out much, but 1950s people didn’t do that either … For $80 you can get a television with a bigger screen and better resolution than what RCA was selling for $400 in 1965.

Provocation of the Week

In Liberties, James Kirchick argues that an important figure in the struggle for gay rights doesn’t get his due:

While Stonewall was the birthplace of gay liberation, the movement for gay civic equality had begun much earlier. After some fizzling starts in Los Angeles and San Francisco in the early 1950’s, the effort found its footing in the more staid precincts of Washington, D.C. The leaders of this cause may not have been “revolting” drag queens, but they were revolutionaries, of a sort.

The central figure was a Harvard-trained astronomer named Franklin E. Kameny. In 1957, Kameny was fired from his job with the Army Map Service on account of his homosexuality. Thousands of people had already been terminated on such grounds, but Kameny was the first to challenge his dismissal, a decision that would, in the words of the legal scholar William Eskridge, eventually make him “the Rosa Parks and the Martin Luther King and the Thurgood Marshall of the gay rights movement.’” In 1960, Kameny appealed to the Supreme Court to restore his job. The petition that he wrote invoked the noblest aspirations of the American founding: life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. To the government’s claim that his firing was justified on account of its right to prohibit those engaged in “immoral” conduct, Kameny replied with what was, for its time, a radical, even scandalous, retort: “Petitioner asserts, flatly, unequivocally, and absolutely uncompromisingly, that homosexuality, whether by mere inclination or by overt act, is not only not immoral, but that, for those choosing voluntarily to engage in homosexual acts, such acts are moral in a real and positive sense, and are good, right, and desirable, socially and personally.” He continued: “In their being nothing more than a reflection of ancient primitive, archaic, obsolete taboos and prejudices, the policies are an incongruous, anachronistic relic of the Stone Age carried over into the Space Age—and a harmful relic!”

Inspired by the African-American civil rights movement, Kameny expressed his outrage at being treated as a “second-rate citizen,” and like the leaders of that heroic struggle he appealed to America’s revolutionary founding document for redress:

We may commence with the Declaration of Independence, and its affirmation, as an “inalienable right,” that of “the pursuit of happiness.” Surely a most fundamental, unobjectionable, and unexceptionable element in human happiness is the right to bestow affection upon, and to receive affection from whom one wishes. Yet, upon pain of severe penalty, the government itself would abridge this right for the homosexual.

Kameny’s arguments may have been revolutionary, but his goals were not. He had no desire to overturn the American government; he just wanted it to live up to its self-proclaimed principles. When his appeal to the Supreme Court was denied, Kameny founded the first sustained organization in the United States to represent the interests of “homophiles” (as some gays called themselves at the time), the Mattachine Society of Washington, D.C., in which capacity he led peaceful protests, wrote letters to every member of Congress, and engaged in public awareness campaigns. In 1965 — four years before Stonewall — Kameny organized the first picket for gay rights outside the White House. Men were required to wear jackets and ties; women, blouses and skirts reaching below the knee. “If you’re asking for equal employment rights,” he instructed his nine comrades, “look employable.” Eight years later, he played a crucial role in lobbying the American Psychiatric Association to remove homosexuality from its register of mental disorders.

To the younger and more militant gay liberationists of New York and San Francisco, Kameny’s dedication to liberal reform reeked of assimilationism. Many of them came to view Kameny with contempt, speaking of him in the same tones with which black nationalists derided Martin Luther King, Jr. With his fussy dress codes, his carefully typewritten letters, and his veneration of the Constitution, Kameny was a practitioner of dreaded “respectability politics,” which for radicals (then and now) has been the great scourge of American liberalism. But Kameny was no conformist. In his petition in 1960, he declared:

These entire proceedings, from the Civil Service Commission regulation through its administration and the consequent adverse personnel actions, to respondents’ courtroom arguments, are a classic, textbook exercise in the imposition of conformity for the sake of nothing else than conformity, and of the rigorous suppression of dissent, difference, and non-conformity. There is no more reason or need for a citizen’s sexual tastes or habits to conform to those of the majority than there is for his gastronomic ones to do so, and there is certainly no rational basis for making his employment, whether private or by the government, contingent upon such conformity.

In 2015—fifty years after staging his picket outside the White House, and four years after his death at the age of eighty-six—Kameny was vindicated when the very Supreme Court that had refused to hear his case of wrongful termination ruled that the Constitution recognized the right of same-sex couples to marry.

That’s all for this week. A happy Fourth of July to my American readers. I’ll be on vacation next week, so I’ll see you all the week after that.

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On the first day of class in the fall of 1924, Martha Lum walked into the Rosedale Consolidated School. The mission-style building had been built three years earlier for white students in Rosedale, Mississippi.

Martha was not a new student. This 9-year-old had attended the public school the previous year. But that was before Congress passed the Immigration Act of 1924, banning immigrants from Asia and inciting ever more anti-Asian racism inside the United States.

At the time, African Americans were fleeing the virulent racism of the Mississippi Delta in the Great Migration north and west. To replace them, white landowners were recruiting Chinese immigrants like Martha’s father, Gong Lum. But instead of picking cotton, many Chinese immigrants, like Gong and his wife, Katherine, opened up grocery stores, usually in Black neighborhoods, after being shut out of white neighborhoods.

At noon recess, Martha had a visitor. The school superintendent notified her that she had to leave the public school her family’s tax dollars supported, because “she was of Chinese descent, and not a member of the white or Caucasian race.” Martha was told she had to go to the district’s all-Black public school, which had older infrastructure and textbooks, comparatively overcrowded classrooms, and lower-paid teachers.

Gong Lum sued, appealing to the Fourteenth Amendment’s equal-protection clause. The case went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. All nine justices ruled in favor of school segregation, citing the “separate but equal” doctrine from 1896’s Plessy v. Ferguson decision.

[Imani Perry: Lessons from Black and Chinese relations in the Deep South]

“A child of Chinese blood, born in and a citizen of the United States, is not denied the equal protection of the law by being classed by the state among the colored races who are assigned to public schools separate from those provided for the whites when equal facilities for education are afforded to both classes,” the Court summarized in Gong Lum v. Rice on November 21, 1927.

A century from now, scholars of racism will look back at today’s Supreme Court decision on affirmative action the way we now look back at Gong Lum v. Rice—as a judicial decision based in legal fantasy. Then, the fantasy was that separate facilities for education afforded to the races were equal and that actions to desegregate them were unnecessary, if not harmful. Today, the fantasy is that regular college-admissions metrics are race-neutral and that affirmative action is unnecessary, if not harmful.

The Supreme Court has effectively outlawed affirmative action using two court cases brought on by Students for Fair Admissions (SFFA) against Harvard University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Organized by a legal strategist named Edward Blum, SFFA filed suit on behalf of Asian American applicants to Harvard as well as white and Asian applicants to UNC to claim that their equal-protection rights were violated by affirmative action. Asian and white Americans are overrepresented in the student body at selective private and public colleges and universities that are well funded and have high graduation rates, but they are the victims?

This is indicative of a larger fantasy percolating throughout society: that white Americans, who, on average, stand at the more advantageous end of nearly every racial inequity, are the primary victims of racism. This fantasy is fueling the grievance campaigns of Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis. Americans who oppose affirmative action have been misled into believing that the regular admissions metrics are fair for everyone—and that affirmative action is unfair for white and Asian American applicants.

It is a fantasy that race is considered as an admissions factor only through affirmative action. But the Court endorsed SFFA’s call for “race neutral” admissions in higher education—effectively prohibiting a minor admissions metric such as affirmative action, which closes racial inequities in college admissions, while effectively permitting the major admissions metrics that have long led to racial inequities in college admissions. Against all evidence to the contrary, the Court claimed: “Race-neutral policies may thus achieve the same benefits of racial harmony and equality without … affirmative action policies.” The result of the Court’s decision: a normality of racial inequity. Again.

This is what the Court considers to be fair admissions for students, because the judges consider the major admissions metrics to be “race-neutral”—just as a century ago, the Court considered Mississippi public schools to be “separate but equal.”

Chief Justice John Roberts, in his majority opinion, recognized “the inherent folly of that approach” but doesn’t recognize the inherent folly of his “race neutral” approach.

History repeats sometimes without rhyming. “Race neutral” is the new “separate but equal.”

The Court today claimed, “Twenty years have passed since Grutter, with no end to race- based college admissions in sight.” In actuality, twenty years have passed, with no end to racial inequity in sight.

Black, Latino, and Indigenous students continue to be underrepresented at the top 100 selective public universities. After affirmative action was outlawed at public universities in California and Michigan in the 1990s, Black enrollment at the most selective schools dropped roughly 50 percent, in some years approaching early-1970s numbers. This lack of diversity harms both students of color and white students.

In its reply brief in the UNC case, SFFA argued that the University of California system enrolls “more underrepresented minorities today than they did under racial preferences,”  referencing the increase of Latino students at UC campuses from 1997 to 2019. But accounting for the increase in Latino students graduating from high school, those gains should be even larger. There’s a 23-point difference between the percentage of high-school graduates in California who are Latino and the percentage of those enrolled in the UC system.

Declines in racial representation and associated harms extend to graduate and professional programs. The UC system produced more Black and Latino medical doctors than the national average in the two decades before affirmative action was banned, and dropped well below the national average in the two decades after.

[Bertrand Cooper: The failure of affirmative action]

Underrepresentation of Black, Latino, and Indigenous students at the most coveted universities isn’t a new phenomenon, it isn’t a coincidence, and it isn’t because there is something deficient about those students or their parents or their cultures. Admissions metrics both historically and currently value qualities that say more about access to inherited resources and wealth— computers and counselors, coaches and tutors, college preparatory courses and test prep—than they do about students’ potential. And gaping racial inequities persist in access to each of those elements—as gaping as funding for those so-called equal schools in the segregated Mississippi Delta a century ago.

So what about class? Class-based or income-based interventions disproportionately help white students too, because their family’s low income is least likely to extend to their community and schools. Which is to say that low-income white Americans are far and away less likely than low-income Black and Latino Americans to live in densely impoverished neighborhoods and send their kids to poorly resourced public schools. Researchers find that 80 percent of low-income Black people and 75 percent of low-income Latino people reside in low-income communities, which tend to have lesser-resourced schools, compared with less than 50 percent of low-income white people. (Some Asian American ethnic groups are likely to be concentrated in low-income communities, while others are not; the data are not disaggregated to explore this.) Predominately white school districts, on average, receive $23 billion more than those serving the same number of students of color.

When admissions metrics value SAT, ACT, or other standardized-test scores, they predict not success in college or graduate school, but the wealth or income of the parents of the test takers. This affects applicants along racial lines, but in complex ways. Asian Americans, for example, have higher incomes than African Americans on average, but Asian Americans as a group have the highest income inequality of any racial group. So standardized tests advantage more affluent white Americans and Asian ethnic groups such as Chinese and Indian Americans while disadvantaging Black Americans, Latino Americans, Native Americans, and poorer Asian ethnic groups such as Burmese and Hmong Americans. But standardized tests, like these other admissions metrics, are “race neutral”?

Standardized tests mostly favor students with access to score-boosting test prep. A multibillion-dollar test-prep and tutoring industry was built on this widespread understanding. Companies that openly sell their ability to boost students’ scores are concentrated in immigrant and Asian American communities. But some Asian American ethnic groups, having lower incomes, have less access to high-priced test-prep courses.

Besides all of this, the tests themselves have racist origins. Eugenicists introduced standardized tests a century ago in the United States to prove the genetic intellectual superiority of wealthy white Anglo-Saxon men. These “experimental” tests would show “enormously significant racial differences in general intelligence, differences which cannot be wiped out by any scheme of mental culture,” the Stanford University psychologist and eugenicist Lewis Terman wrote in his 1916 book, The Measurement of Intelligence. Another eugenicist, the Princeton University psychologist Carl C. Brigham, created the SAT test in 1926. SAT originally stood for “Scholastic Aptitude Test,” aptitude meaning “natural ability to do something.”

Why are advocates spending millions to expand access to test prep when a more effective and just move is to ban the use of standardized tests in admissions? Such a ban would help not only Black, Native, and Latino students but also low-income white and Asian American students.

Some selective colleges that went test-optional during the pandemic welcomed some of their most racially and economically diverse classes, after receiving more applications than normal from students of color. For many students of color, standardized tests have been a barrier to applying, even before being a barrier to acceptance. Then again, even where colleges and universities, especially post-pandemic, have gone test-optional, we can reasonably assume or suspect that students who submit their scores are viewed more favorably.

When admissions committees at selective institutions value students whose parents and grandparents attended that institution, this legacy metric ends up giving preferential treatment to white applicants. Almost 70 percent of all legacy applicants for the classes of 2014–19 at Harvard were white.

College athletes are mostly white and wealthy—because most collegiate sports require resources to play at a high level. White college athletes make up 70 to 85 percent of athletes in most non-revenue-generating sports (with the only revenue-generating sports usually being men’s basketball and football). And student athletes, even ones who are not gaming the system, receive immense advantages in the admissions process, thus giving white applicants yet another metric by which they are the most likely to receive preferential treatment. Even Harvard explained as part of its defense that athletes had an advantage in admissions over nonathletes, which conferred a much greater advantage to white students over Asian American students than any supposed disadvantage that affirmative action might create. And white students benefit from their relatives being more likely to have the wealth to make major donations to highly selective institutions. And white students benefit from their parents being overrepresented on the faculty and staff at colleges and universities. Relatives of donors and children of college employees normally receive an admissions boost.

Putting this all together, one study found that 43 percent of white students admitted to Harvard were recruited athletes, legacy students, the children of faculty and staff, or on the dean’s interest list (as relatives of donors)—compared with only 16 percent of Black, Latino, and Asian American students. About 75 percent of white admitted students “would have been rejected” if they hadn’t been in those four categories, the study, published by the National Bureau of Economic Research, found.

While private and public universities tout “diversity” recruitment efforts, their standard recruitment strategies concentrate on high-income students who are predominantly white and Asian, at highly resourced schools, positioned to have higher grade point averages and test scores that raise college rankings. Public colleges and universities facing declines in state and federal funding actively recruit white and wealthy out-of-state students who pay higher fees. At many institutions, including a UC campus, “admission by exception,” a practice originally promoted as a means of expanding opportunities for disadvantaged groups, has been used to enroll international students with the resources to pay U.S. tuition fees.

Targeting international students of color to achieve greater diversity on campus disadvantages American students of color. Targeting students from families who can pay exorbitant out-of-state fees benefits white families, who have, on average, 10 times the household net worth of Black families.

Affirmative action attempted to compensate not just for these metrics that give preferential treatment to white students, but also for the legacy of racism in society. This legacy is so deep and wide that affirmative action has rightly been criticized as a superficial, Band-Aid solution. Still, it has been the only admissions policy that pushes against the deep advantages that white Americans receive in the other admissions metrics under the cover of “race neutral.”

[Issa Kohler-Hausmann: No one knows what ‘race neutral’ admissions looks like]

If anti-affirmative-action litigants and judges were really supportive of “race neutrality”—if they were really against “racial preferences”—then they would be going after regular admissions practices. But they are not, because the regular admissions metrics benefit white and wealthy students.

Litigants and judges continue to use Asian Americans as political footballs to maintain these racial preferences for white and wealthy students. Particularly in the Harvard case, SFFA’s Edward Blum used Asian plaintiffs to argue that affirmative action harms Asian American applicants. No evidence of such racist discrimination was found in the lower courts. According to an amicus brief filed by 1,241 social scientists, the so-called race-neutral admissions policy SFFA advocated for (which was just adopted by the highest Court) would actually harm Asian American applicants. It denies Asian American students the ability to express their full self in their applications, including experiences with racism, which can contextualize their academic achievements or struggles and counter racist ideas. This is especially the case with Hmong and Cambodian Americans, who have rates of poverty similar to or higher than those of Black Americans. Pacific Islander Americans have a higher rate of poverty than the average American.

Pitting Asian and Black Americans against each other is an age-old tactic. Martha Lum’s parents didn’t want to send their daughter to a “colored” school, because they knew that more resources could be found in the segregated white schools. Jim Crow in the Mississippi Delta a century ago motivated the Lums to reinforce anti-Black racism—just as some wealthy Asian American families bought into Blum’s argument for “race neutral” admissions to protect their own status. Yet “separate but equal” closed the school door on the Lums. “Race neutral” is doing the same. Which is why 38 Asian American organizations jointly filed an amicus brief to the Supreme Court in support of affirmative action at Harvard and UNC.

A century ago, around the time the Court stated that equal facilities for education were being afforded to both races, Mississippi spent $57.95 per white student compared with $8.86 per Black student in its segregated schools. This racial inequity in funding existed in states across the South: Alabama ($47.28 and $13.32), Florida ($61.29 and $18.58), Georgia ($42.12 and $9.95), North Carolina ($50.26 and $22.34), and South Carolina ($68.76 and $11.27). “Separate but equal” was a legal fantasy, meant to uphold racist efforts to maintain these racial inequities and strike down anti-racist efforts to close them.

Homer Plessy had sued for being kicked off the “whites only” train car in New Orleans in 1892. About four years later, the Court deployed the “separate but equal” doctrine to work around the Fourteenth Amendment’s equal-protection clause to defend the clearly unequal train cars and the exclusion of Black Americans like Plessy from better-equipped “whites only” cars. Later, the Court used the same doctrine to exclude Asian Americans like Martha Lum from better-equipped “whites only” schools.

The “separate but equal” doctrine was the Court’s stamp to defend the structure of racism. Just as Plessy v. Ferguson’s influence reached far beyond the railway industry more than a century ago, the fantasy of “race neutral” alternatives to affirmative action defends racism well beyond higher education. Evoking “race neutrality,” Justice Clarence Thomas recently dissented from the Supreme Court decision upholding a provision in the Voting Rights Act of 1965 that prohibits racist gerrymandering.  

Now that “racial neutrality” is the doctrine of the land, as “separate but equal” was a century ago, we need a new legal movement to expose its fantastical nature. It was nearly a century ago that civil-rights activists in the NAACP and other organizations were gearing up for a legal movement to expose the fantasy of “separate but equal.” In this new legal movement, defenders of affirmative action can no longer use the false framing of affirmative action as “race conscious” and the regular admissions metrics as “race neutral”—a framing that has been used at least since the Regents of the University of California v. Bakke decision in 1978, which limited the use of affirmative action. Racist and anti-racist is a more accurate framing than “race neutral” and “race conscious.”  

[From the September 2021 issue: This is the end of affirmative action]

Affirmative-action policies are anti-racist because they have been proved to reduce racial inequities, while many of the regular admissions metrics are racist because they maintain racial inequities. To frame policies as “race neutral” or “not racist” or “race blind” because they don’t have racial language—or because the policy makers deny a racist intent—is akin to framing Jim Crow’s grandfather clauses and poll taxes and literacy tests as “race neutral” and “not racist,” even as these policies systematically disenfranchised southern Black voters. Then again, the Supreme Court allowed these Jim Crow policies for decades on the basis that they were, to use today’s term, “race neutral.” Then again, voter-suppression policies today that target Black, Latino, and Indigenous voters have been allowed by a Supreme Court that deems them “race neutral.” Jim Crow lives in the guise of “racial neutrality.”

Everyone should know that the regular admission metrics are the racial problem, not affirmative action. Everyone knew that racial separation in New Orleans and later Rosedale, Mississippi, was not merely separation; it was segregation. And segregation, by definition, cannot be equal. Segregationist policies are racist policies. Racial inequities proved that then.

The Court stated in today’s ruling, “By 1950, the inevitable truth of the Fourteenth Amendment had thus begun to reemerge: Separate cannot be equal.” But it still does not want to acknowledge another inevitable truth of the Fourteenth Amendment that has emerged today: Race cannot be neutral.

Today, racial inequities prove that policies proclaimed to be “race neutral” are hardly neutral. Race, by definition, has never been neutral. In a multiracial United States with widespread racial inequities in wealth, health, and higher education, policies are not “race neutral.” Policies either expand or close existing racial inequities in college admissions and employment. The “race neutral” doctrine is upholding racist efforts to maintain racial inequities and striking down anti-racist efforts to close racial inequities.

Race, by definition, has never been blind. Even Justice John Harlan, who proclaimed, “Our Constitution is color-blind” in his dissent of Plessy v. Ferguson, prefaced that with this declaration: “The white race deems itself to be the dominant race in this country” and “it will continue to be for all time, if it remains true to its great heritage.”

In the actual world, the “color-blind” often see their color as superior, as Harlan did. In the actual world, an equal-protection clause in a constitution can be transfigured by legal fantasy yet again to protect racial inequity.

“Separate but equal” then. “Race neutral” now.

The first major EV assembly and battery plant projects are taking shape, and many of the new jobs reside in the US south, according to a recent report from S&P Global Market Intelligence. The EV transition reflects a larger trend—the south is becoming a crucial hub for North American automotive production, shifting…

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With today’s decision curtailing affirmative action in higher education, the Supreme Court has landed another powerful blow for older white America in its struggle against the kaleidoscopically diverse and more populous younger generations for control of the nation’s direction.

The ruling by the Court’s six Republican-appointed justices prevents higher-education institutions from considering race in admissions precisely as kids of color, for the first time, comprise a majority of the nation’s high-school graduates. Against that backdrop, the decision could widen the mismatch between a youth population that is rapidly diversifying and a student body that is likely to remain preponderantly white in the elite colleges and universities that serve as the pipeline for leadership in the public and private sectors. That seems a formula guaranteed to heighten social tension.

“Education is the system that has the most powerful effect on reproducing race, class, and gender differences across generations,” Anthony Carnevale, the director of the Georgetown Center on Education and the Workforce, told me. Banning affirmative action will mean that “the people who govern us, the elites in American society, will increasingly not look like America.”

In the broadest sense, the Republican-appointed justices have moved to buttress the affluence and status that allow white people to wield the most influence in society, and to diminish the possibility that accelerating demographic change will force a renegotiation of that balance of power. In that way, the ruling is a judicial extension of the proliferating red-state laws meant to constrain the potential influence of younger generations through measures making it more difficult to vote, banning books, and censoring how teachers talk about race and gender inequities.

All of these conflicts reflect the mounting tension between what I’ve called the brown and the gray: the racially and culturally diverse younger generations who are becoming the cornerstone of the Democratic political coalition, and the mostly white older generations who provide the foundation of Republican electoral strength.

“The attack on affirmative action is part of the larger, conservative extremist attack on young people and future generations of Americans who are more progressive, open-minded, racially and ethnically diverse, and inclusive than the waning demographic of the electorate,” Janai Nelson, the president and director-counsel of the Legal Defense Fund, told me in an email.

Affirmative action in education, employment, and government contracting has always been an imperfect tool to promote racial equality. It has prompted ambivalence even among many of its beneficiaries, who have been confronted with questions about whether they “deserved” their place in classrooms or on worksites. Skeptics see it as a violation of traditional notions of merit and fairness. Opposition to affirmative action in education has been most intense among white and Asian American voters, but it has also faced resistance in polls from substantial numbers of Latinos and a measurable minority of African Americans. Even in liberal-leaning California, a ballot initiative to ban consideration of race in college admissions passed easily in 1996. A measure to repeal the ban failed by an even larger margin in 2020.

But, for all its limitations, affirmative action has proved crucial for maintaining any alignment between the diversifying youth population and the student body at the most elite educational institutions. Even with affirmative action, experts note, the racial makeup of the most selective schools has not kept pace. “There has been no serious attempt to achieve diversity commensurate with the high-school class in America,” Carnevale said. “That’s just not the game that we play.”

Growing diversity in the nation’s youth population is, as Carnevale put it, a “runaway train.” Whereas about three-fourths of Baby Boomers and older generations are white, kids of color comprise about 45 percent of Millennials, almost exactly half of Generation Z, and an absolute majority of the youngest Americans born since 2012 (generally considered the cutoff for Gen Z), according to calculations by William Frey, a demographer at Brookings Metro.

In 2014, for the first time, kids of color constituted a majority of public-school K–12 students. The National Center for Educational Statistics estimates that kids of color became a majority of all high-school graduates for the first time last year; the center projects that by the end of this decade, minority kids will comprise about 57 percent of all high-school graduates. As recently as around 2000, about seven of every 10 graduates still were white.

This profound transformation is inevitably reshaping the entering class of college students. Kids of color have grown from about a fourth of the entering class for colleges and universities nationwide in 1995 to nearly two-fifths in 2009 to almost half today. But, as Carnevale notes, even with many institutions using some form of affirmative action, white kids remain overrepresented, and Black and Latino kids in particular remain substantially underrepresented at the most exclusive institutions.

In 2021, Black and Latino students combined accounted for only a little over a fifth of the entering class at the public and private colleges rated the most selective by Barron’s magazine, according to new data from the Georgetown Center provided exclusively to The Atlantic. Asian American students accounted for about another one in eight of their students. White students, though now down to only about half of all incoming students, still filled about three-fifths of the seats in the entering class of the most elite institutions, the center found.

The Black and Latino share of the entering class steadily rises in the institutions that are less selective. They accounted for about a third of the incoming class at the public and private schools in the middle tier of selectivity, and almost 45 percent of the entering class at the least-selective “open access” schools.

Taken together, these patterns leave big majorities of Black, Latino, and Native American first-year students attending the least-selective schools—about three-fifths of Black students, and two-thirds of Latino and Native American students. By contrast, well below half of all white and Asian American students attend these schools.

This distribution matters in part because the most elite institutions spend more than three times as much per student as the open-access schools and generate much better outcomes on such key measures as college completion, graduate-school attainment, and lifetime earnings. And despite the claim that affirmative action “mismatches” kids of color into demanding institutions where they can’t succeed, Carnevale says the evidence is unmistakable that the greater investment of elite schools is especially beneficial in improving results for kids from low-income backgrounds. “The lower income you are, the more you gain from a selective college,” Carnevale told me. “In fact, the gains for minorities and low-income kids far exceed those for the usual white kids who go to a selective college.”

Harder to quantify, but perhaps even more profound, is the potential impact on the nation’s leadership class of further reducing the number of nonwhite students at the most prestigious colleges and universities. Joe Biden is the only president since 1988 who did not receive either an undergraduate or a graduate degree from an Ivy League school; all but one of the Supreme Court Justices (Amy Coney Barrett) graduated from law school at Harvard or Yale. “If opportunity is concentrated among certain racial groups and not equally open to others, that will necessarily create a caste system that is not sustainable in a functioning democracy,” Nelson, at the Legal Defense Fund, said.

Victor Shi, a UCLA student and strategy director at Voters of Tomorrow, a liberal-leaning group that tries to engage Gen Z in politics, says his contemporaries are already aware of how little their diversity is reflected in the nation’s public and private leadership. “That’s one of the biggest systemic issues: Are there enough people up there who represent people of color?” Shi told me. “Getting rid of affirmative action reemphasizes this outlook among Gen Z that our systems are broken.”

In a dissent written by Justice Sonia Sotomayor, the three Democratic-appointed Justices emphasized the likelihood that the majority’s ruling will dangerously widen the gap between a society that is changing rapidly and a leadership class that could remain disproportionately White. “The Court ignores the dangerous consequences of an America where its leadership does not reflect the diversity of the People,” Sotomayor wrote. “At its core, today’s decision exacerbates segregation and diminishes the inclusivity of our Nation’s institutions in service of superficial neutrality that promotes indifference to inequality and ignores the reality of race.

The experience in states that have ended affirmative action leaves little doubt that the Court’s decision will in fact further diminish the number of Black and Latino kids on elite campuses. In separate legal briefs, the state universities in California and Michigan—two states where voters have banned affirmative action in higher education—recounted the extensive efforts they have had to make to preserve diversity without it.

These measures have included greatly increased outreach to inner-city schools, new scholarship programs for minority kids, deemphasizing standardized test scores, guaranteeing admission to some percentage of students with the best grades in every school, and providing more advantage in admission decisions to those who come from low-income backgrounds. Despite all these initiatives, the schools explained, they could not maintain racial diversity commensurate with the overall youth population. As the University of California concluded in its brief, “There remain stark differences between the demographics of UC’s enrolled student population … and California public high school graduates.” Michele Siqueiros, the president of the Campaign for College Affordability, a group that advocates for low-income and minority students in higher education, told me that with the Court barring affirmative action, the nation risks reverting “to the kind of segregation … that ensured that only white wealthy men could go to college in this country.” To avoid that fate, she says, advocates will need to more forcefully challenge every way the system tilts against low-income and minority applicants—perhaps most important among them legacy admissions that favor the children of alumni (who tend to be mostly white at selective schools).

Plenty of admissions practices like these undermine the idea that affirmative action represents a unique departure from the principle of impartial “merit,” Carnevale pointed out: “If you did college admissions [solely] by academic talent, half the people in the elite schools would have to leave.” Absent such a fundamental reassessment of admissions, the GOP-appointed Supreme Court justices have now made much more likely a future in which the most elite educational institutions remain mostly white (or even grow whiter) as society becomes more diverse. By all indications, that is a future likely to be welcomed by the electoral coalition that placed those justices on the Court.

Across a wide range of issues—including ending the constitutional right to abortion, privileging claims of religious liberty over LGBTQ rights, restricting government regulation of firearms, and blocking federal efforts to confront climate change—the GOP-appointed majority is systematically ruling in ways that reflect the priorities of a predominantly white and Christian electoral coalition. The Court majority has rejected some of the most extreme and fringe legal theories popular in that coalition, particularly the so-called “independent state legislature doctrine” and challenges to the 2020 election outcome. But such decisions remain the exception. In its ruling against affirmative action, the Court majority has reified the bedrock belief of most Republican voters that bias against white people is now as big a problem as discrimination against minorities. Through these decisions and others, the Court has become a powerful weapon for a Republican coalition that is defining itself, especially in the Donald Trump era, in open opposition to the demographic and cultural changes reshaping American life in the 21st century.

These rulings from this majority not only collide with the dominant views among Gen Z, but in many cases threaten the intrinsic identity of a generation that is more racially diverse, more likely to identify as LGBTQ, and less likely to belong to any organized religion than any in American history.

Americans born since 1980 already represent a majority of the U.S. population, and by 2028 they almost certainly will become the biggest single bloc of the nation’s voters. Yet, with the two oldest of the conservative Justices only in their mid-70s, this Supreme Court majority could rule against Gen Z’s preferences for another decade or more. The choice to end affirmative action precisely as the nation’s youth population reaches unprecedented levels of diversity shows just how fiercely the gray may fight to avoid ceding power to the brown.

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.

The Supreme Court released a somewhat surprising—and pretty important—decision yesterday. Should it change the way we think about the Court? Before we get into it, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

The comic strip that explains the evolution of American parenting The new Republican litmus test is very dangerous. Stop firing your friends.

Conservative, Not MAGA

It’s good to be back at The Daily! I spent a lot of time last year writing about candidates trafficking in election denial. Looming above all of my coverage was a case at the Supreme Court that would determine the future of election law and, by extension, American democracy. That case, Moore v. Harper, was decided yesterday. I talked with my colleague Russell Berman, a staff writer on our Politics team, about what the decision means, and whether it shifts the dominant narrative about the Roberts Court.

Elaine Godfrey: Russell! I’m so glad we get to talk about this. Yesterday was a big SCOTUS day. In a 6–3 vote, the Court rejected the independent state legislature theory in a case called Moore v. Harper. What is that theory—and why were people so anxious about it?

Russell Berman: The theory basically interprets the Constitution as giving near-total authority over elections to state legislatures, over and above state courts, election administrators, secretaries of state, and even governors. What this means in practice is that because Republicans have overwhelming majorities in many of the closest presidential swing states, including Wisconsin, Georgia, and North Carolina, the adoption of this theory by the Supreme Court would have allowed GOP lawmakers in those states to overrule or simply ignore election decisions they didn’t agree with.

Democrats believed that Republicans would then have used that power to overturn close elections in 2024, just like former President Donald Trump tried to get his allies to do in 2020.

Elaine: Thanks to Trump, there were all kinds of Republicans denying the outcome of the 2020 election, as well as sowing doubt ahead of the midterms. A lot of those candidates lost in the midterms, though, including Kari Lake in Arizona. Is this SCOTUS decision the final coda on the election-denial fight? Are we finally done with that stuff now?

Russell: Not so fast, Elaine. As Rick Hasen points out at Slate, the Supreme Court’s decision doesn’t totally quash the opportunity for election-related shenanigans in the courts. Although the Court declined to give state legislatures unfettered power over elections, it simultaneously warned state courts that federal courts—including the Supreme Court—could still overrule them on cases involving federal elections. That’s what happened in Bush v. Gore, when a conservative majority on the Supreme Court essentially decided the 2000 election in favor of George W. Bush. And let’s say that in 2024, the Democratic-controlled state supreme court in Pennsylvania issues a ruling on a big election case in favor of Joe Biden. The Court’s decision today served as a reminder that its members could still have the final say.

Elaine: Two Trump-appointed justices, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett, joined three liberal justices in the majority decision in this case. That felt surprising to me. Was it to you?

Russell: Not entirely. Although both Kavanaugh and Barrett joined the majority overruling Roe v. Wade in the Dobbs abortion decision last year, they have not always joined what is now the Court’s far-right wing in election cases: Justices Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas, and Neil Gorsuch, who all dissented from yesterday’s decision. Kavanaugh voted with the majority earlier this month in upholding a key part of the Voting Rights Act, while Barrett joined the dissent.

Elaine: So what does this mean for our understanding of the Court at this moment? Is it more liberal-leaning than Dobbs might have suggested?

Russell: It’s a stretch to call it more liberal. But these decisions suggest that there is a limit to the Court’s rightward shift of the past several years. Chief Justice Roberts in particular continues to resist efforts to upend decades of judicial precedent, and he has had some success in persuading newer justices like Kavanaugh and Barrett to join him. If anything, the Court’s decisions over the past few years suggest it’s conservative but not MAGA. Its ruling in Dobbs was a victory for conservatives, but Trump’s own commitment to the anti-abortion cause has wavered. And in addition to this state-legislature ruling, the Court ruled against Trump several times toward the end of his presidency—and, of course, rejected him in his Hail Mary bid to overturn his defeat in 2020.

Elaine: So you’re saying that Democrats shouldn’t start buying those celebrity prayer candles with Roberts’s face on them?

Russell: Only if they also start buying candles with Mitch McConnell’s face on them. Roberts is playing a role similar to the one McConnell has played in the Senate over the past few years. Roberts either wrote or joined several opinions that have been devastating to liberal causes. He’s helped to eviscerate Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act, dramatically expand the scope of the Second Amendment, and limit Congress’s ability to enact campaign-finance regulations. But he’s obviously attuned to public attitudes toward the Court and to that end has tried, with limited success, to restrain the most aggressive impulses of his more ideological colleagues.

Elaine: There are a few other really important cases coming down the pike, including one about college affirmative-action programs and another related to President Joe Biden canceling student debt. If there’s a limit to the Court’s rightward shift, does that tell us anything about how these cases will go? Should progressives plan to be happy?

Russell: Probably not. If the pattern of recent years holds, the relief that progressives are experiencing following their victories in this case and in the voting-rights decision will give way to more anger and disappointment when the Court releases its final opinions of the term. Most legal observers expect the Court to deal a fatal blow to affirmative action after a series of decisions that limited its use in college admissions. And they also believe the Court will rule against President Joe Biden’s effort to unilaterally forgive up to $20,000 in student debt for millions of borrowers.

Related:

The Roberts Court draws a line. The Court eviscerates the independent state legislature theory.

Today’s News

Wildfire smoke from Canada has blanketed large portions of the United States, leading more than a dozen states to issue air-quality alerts. Former President Trump countersued E. Jean Carroll for defamation after being found liable for sexually abusing her. Carroll’s attorney said that Trump’s counterclaim is “nothing more than his latest effort to delay accountability.” Daniel Penny pleaded not guilty in the killing of Jordan Neely on the New York City subway after being indicted on counts of second-degree manslaughter and negligent homicide.

Evening Read

(Illustration by The Atlantic. Source: Getty.)

The Harry and Meghan Podcasts We’ll Never Get to Hear

By Caitlin Flanagan

The Meghan Markle and Prince Harry content farm is facing contradictory supply and demand challenges. On the one hand, Netflix is reportedly threatening that the couple had better come up with some more shows, or $51 million comes off the table. On the other, Spotify has found that the 12 episodes of Markle’s podcast, Archetypes, were 10 episodes too many (the Serena Williams and Mariah Carey interviews were blockbusters, but after that: crickets). And—in a mutual decision! mutual!—it has cut the couple loose from their $20 million deal. Together, the news stories formed a classic example of the macroeconomic principle of too much, too little, too late.

In rapid response to the Netflix needling came word that the couple was working on a possible prequel to Great Expectations, centered on the life of a young Miss Havisham. It was exactly the kind of project you could imagine them dreaming up and an improvement, perhaps, on one of Harry’s earlier pitches, “Jude the Obscure, but in Vegas.”

Read the full article.

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P.S.

I am turning the big 3-0 this summer, and the milestone has triggered a mixture of all the usual emotions associated with aging: relief at having survived this long, despite my clumsiness and bad sense of direction; anxiety about not having accomplished enough; and horror at the fact that I’m edging toward the end of it all. You know, normal stuff. I feel happy but also in need of closure, some sort of commemoration of this moment. To that end, I’m seeking the wisdom of our (older-than-30) readers: What are the best books, articles, poems, or podcasts you might recommend to someone on the precipice of their 30s? What advice would you like to go back and tell your 29-year-old self? I want to hear it all! Email egodfrey@theatlantic.com.

— Elaine

Katherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.

War with Mexico? It’s on the 2024 ballot, at least if you believe the campaign rhetoric of more and more Republican candidates.

In January, two Republican House members introduced a bill to authorize the use of military force inside Mexico. They were not know-nothings from the fringes of the MAGA caucus. One was Dan Crenshaw of Texas, a former Navy Seal who received a master’s degree from Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. The other was Mike Waltz of Florida, a former Green Beret who served as the counterterrorism adviser to Vice President Dick Cheney and was a successful entrepreneur before he entered Congress.

Military operations inside Mexico have been endorsed by Republican senators too. Last September, Tom Cotton of Arkansas published an op-ed that proposed:

We can also use special operators and elite tactical units in law enforcement to capture or kill kingpins, neutralize key lieutenants, and destroy the cartel’s super labs and organizational infrastructure. We must work closely with the Mexican government and ensure its continued support in this effort—but we cannot allow it to delay or hinder this necessary campaign.

At a committee hearing in March, South Carolina’s Lindsey Graham also favored military operations: “America is under attack. Our nation is being attacked by foreign powers called drug cartels in Mexico.” He concluded: “They are at war with us. We need to be at war with them.” That was not a figure of speech. Along with fellow Republican Senator John Kennedy of Louisiana, Graham has repeatedly urged military operations against cartels backed by the “fury and might of the United States.”

[Anne Applebaum: How do you stop lawmakers from destroying the law?]

Also in March, Rolling Stone reported that former President Donald Trump—who is once again the Republican presidential front-runner—has asked advisers for war plans and has speculated about deploying Special Operations teams into Mexico.

At a campaign event in Eagle Pass, Texas, Trump’s closest rival, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, proposed a selective naval blockade of Mexican ports.

“These precursors are sent into Mexico,” he said, referring to chemicals used in the production of fentanyl. “The cartels are creating the drug. And then they’re moving the drug into the United States of America. We’ll mobilize the Coast Guard and the Navy to interdict precursor chemicals.”

Sometimes the proponents of military operations inside Mexico add a caveat about cooperating with the Mexican government, as Cotton did in his op-ed and as DeSantis does in the written supplement to his naval blockade proposal.

But DeSantis did not mention the caveat in his spoken remarks yesterday, and the caveats get dropped when the idea is promoted on television and in social media. The Fox News star Greg Gutfeld argued on his program in December 2022 that it didn’t matter whether Mexico agreed or not:

It’s time to take out cartels in Mexico, bomb the bleep out of them. It’ll be over in minutes … And it doesn’t matter if Mexico won’t agree, when their cartels are free to invade us anyway. We didn’t ask Pakistan if we could drop in and kill bin Laden.

Probably very little of this talk is meant to be taken literally. Much of it functions as a rhetorical escape from the political dilemma that Republicans and conservatives face.

Synthetic opioids are inflicting death and suffering across the United States: 70,000-plus Americans died of overdose in 2021. The Republican brand is to sound tough, to promise decisive action. In the past, that impulse led Republicans to vow a war on drugs inside the United States: harsher penalties for users and dealers, more powers for police to search and seize. But this time, the users are Americans whom Republicans regard as their own. Five out of every eight victims of opioid overdose are non-Hispanic white people. Whereas historically, fatal overdoses have been an urban problem, synthetic opioids have been taking lives almost exactly equally between urban and rural areas. In deep-blue states such as California and New York, the death rates from synthetic opioids are even worse in rural areas than in the cities.

Republican lawmakers have little appetite for a domestic crackdown that would criminalize so many of their own constituents and their constituents’ relatives. At the retail level, many a “dealer” is also a user, a member of the community seeking to finance his or her own addiction by spreading addiction to others. Contemporary conservatism tells a fable about virtuous middle-Americans beset by alien villains. Apply that fable to the fentanyl crisis, and you arrive where Fox’s Gutfeld did at the conclusion of his December monologue: “So that’s my plan, bomb the supply, reduce harm among the demand by availing safer, clean alternatives.” Compassion for us. Violence for them.

But even if bomb-Mexico talk is intended only to shift blame—to redirect anger toward politically safer targets—the talk carries real-world political dangers.

The first danger of these calls for unilateral U.S. intervention is that it alienates opinion inside Mexico. Trump, DeSantis, Graham, and the others are speaking to Americans. But Mexicans can hear too. Are Americans dying because of Mexican drug sales? Mexicans are dying because of American drug purchases. Mexico has about one-third the population of the United States, but four times the homicide rate. Many, if not most, of those homicides are casualties of the battles for market share set in motion by American drug demand. Does Mexico do too little to halt the flow of opioids northward? The United States does nothing to halt the flow of guns southward.

Mexican resentment of U.S. hypocrisy has weakened Mexican leaders who want to strengthen the partnership with the United States—and empowered exploiters of anti-American sentiment, including the current president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador. As American politicians shift from merely blaming Mexico to outright threatening Mexico, the resentment will only intensify.

[David Frum: The autocrat next door]

The second danger is an even more sinister effect within Mexico: American threats of war upon Mexico will enhance the political power of criminals against the Mexican state.

Criminals have often benefited from nationalism in protecting and supporting their operations inside Mexico. One notorious example: In 1985, Mexican cartel criminals abducted, tortured, and murdered a Drug Enforcement Agency officer, Enrique Camarena. The crime boss Rafael Caro Quintero was identified by the United States as the “intellectual author” of the murder. He was immediately arrested, but never extradited. Caro Quintero was rearrested by Mexican marines in July 2022. But President Lopez Obrador took exception at his daily morning press conference to reports that the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency had located Caro Quintero, suggesting the Americans had overstepped. The Mexican courts meanwhile seemed to interpret U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland’s request for “immediate extradition” of Quintero as a potential infringement of the accused’s rights as a Mexican citizen. Nor unfortunately is this a unique case of Mexican officials using nationality as a justification to protect criminals from American justice. If Republican politicians revive ancient memories of past U.S. aggression against Mexico, it will make any such justifications more plausible and acceptable to Mexican opinion.

A third danger of the war talk is that Republican politicians are radicalizing their own voters. Three years ago, proposals to bomb Mexico would have sounded crazy. But if enough people repeat the talk—if it is debated, amplified, and validated by trusted commentators—the talk gains power. It becomes thinkable, sayable, and then ultimately doable. “Doable” is not the same as “done.” But an atmosphere is being created in which Republicans who do not speculate about war with Mexico may be perceived as weak.

DeSantis may imagine that his call for a naval blockade offers a moderate alternative to outright war. But he is still training Republican primary voters to expect a promise of some kind of military action against Mexico. It could be conducted beyond Mexican waters, farther from cameras that could record images of explosions or injured civilians. But think harder, and it’s actually an even more invasive idea than air strikes, because the blockade would need to continue for months, years, maybe forever.

The fourth danger is that the Republicans have ceased to consider even the most obvious risks. Despite Lindsey Graham’s vivid language, the Mexican criminal cartels are not in fact at war with the United States. They are doing business with the United States—a lethal business, but business all the same. As rational profit-maximizers, they take care to avoid direct confrontations with American power. In March, criminals abducted four Americans in Matamoros, Mexico, killing two. After the survivors were released, the local cartel issued a public letter of apology and surrendered five men whom it blamed for the abduction. “We have decided to turn over those who were directly involved and responsible in the events, who at all times acted under their own decision-making and lack of discipline,” the letter stated. Whatever was really going on in this murky story, clearly the cartel was worried about consequences for the murders.

But what if the U.S. begins bombing and rocketing cartel operations? Will the old restraints still apply? What would then deter the cartels from extending their violence across the border? “The enemy gets a vote,” goes an old warning. If the United States opts to escalate a law-enforcement challenge into a military conflict, it must prepare for its well-financed, well-armed antagonist to respond in kind. And unlike previous irregular antagonists, such as al-Qaeda or the Islamic State, this is one that intimately understands and has deeply penetrated U.S. society.

The risks to the United States extend beyond U.S. and Mexican territory. Right now, the United States and its allies are assisting Ukraine against a Russian invasion. What happens to the consensus behind that effort if, 18 months from now, the United States has bombed, invaded, or blockaded its own neighbor? What if U.S. forces unintentionally inflict civilian casualties or destroy the property and livelihoods of nearby innocents? The U.S. military campaigns in Afghanistan in 2001 and against Iraq in 2003 were joined by global coalitions and supported by United Nations resolutions. There will be no such international legitimation for a U.S. attack inside Mexico, or blockade of Mexico, without the consent of the Mexican government.

There have been occasions in the past when the threat of unilateral U.S. action has pressured Mexican authorities to step up to their responsibilities. But in those cases, the threat was delivered behind closed doors, such that the Mexican side could yield without public humiliation. Today’s threats are creating the opposite pressure—so much so as to raise the question, disturbing on both sides of the border, “Is public humiliation maybe the real point of this otherwise futile exercise?”

The toll of opioids upon American life and American homes is indeed horrific. The cooperation of the Mexican state has been unsatisfying, as López Obrador has proved an especially unreliable and double-sided partner. U.S. frustration with Mexico has a valid basis, and nobody should pretend that the Mexican government is innocent amid the fentanyl traffic. The point is that the American government should not act brutishly, stupidly, and self-defeatingly.

[From the November 2021 issue: ‘I don’t know that I would even call it meth anymore’]

Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who advised President Nixon on domestic affairs, told the following story in The American Scholar about his attempts to curb drug abuse by squeezing supply. In the late ’60s, the drug of concern was heroin; an important source of supply was via the port of Marseilles in France—the fabled “French Connection.” Over many months, Moynihan negotiated agreements to stop the flow through Marseilles, mercifully without the threat of rockets or Special Forces operations.

I found myself in a helicopter flying up to Camp David to report on this seeming success. The only other passenger was George P. Shultz [then the secretary of labor ], who was busy with official-looking papers. Even so, I related our triumph. He looked up. “Good,” said he, and returned to his tables and charts. “No, really,” said I, “this is a big event.” My cabinet colleague looked up, restated his perfunctory, “Good,” and once more returned to his paperwork. Crestfallen, I pondered, then said, “I suppose you think that so long as there is a demand for drugs, there will continue to be a supply.” George Shultz, sometime professor of economics at the University of Chicago, looked up with an air of genuine interest. “You know,” he said, “there’s hope for you yet!”

Drug interdiction has not worked in Southeast Asia, in Afghanistan, in Andean South America. American demand and American wealth will summon supply from somewhere, and if one channel of commerce is stopped, another will open. The drug problem is located here, and the answer must be found here. Belligerent snarls and growls may excite American emotions, and they may win some American votes. But if those snarls and growls are acted upon, they will plunge the United States into troubles compared with which the fentanyl problem of today will seem the least of evils. Unfortunately, it’s too late to silence the threats. They have become the price of entry to Republican politics. But it’s not too late to challenge and rebut them—and to elect leaders who understand that Mexico will be either America’s partner or America’s disaster.

Four-time Olympic gold medallist Simone Biles is set to make her return to competitive gymnastics at the 2023 US Classic in August.