Scalia and I agree (WTF?)

The Supreme Court ruled 5-4 today against programs in two school systems, one in Seattle and one in the Louisville, KY area, created to place students in schools according to the "racial balance."

I don't think I'm breaking any new ground here when I say that race-based classifications for school demographics are overly simplistic, reductionist, and may not fully address all the factors that prevent minority students from succeeding in education. In Justice Robert's opinion, he writes “Classifying and assigning schoolchildren according to a binary conception of race is an extreme approach in light of this court’s precedents and the nation’s history of using race in public schools, and requires more than such an amorphous end to justify it.”

Isn't it rather insulting, as well as the EXACT QUOTA SYSTEM WE SHOULD TRY TO AVOID, to say "oh, you need to go to this school, where they need more kids with your skin tone?"

As a graduate of a landmark school system in racial integration, I can say a few things from lived experience: One, being in a school with kids of different races only impacts students inasmuch as they do not resegregate into tracked classes or different social circles. Two, race is only a superficial indicator of potential influences with regard to the education level of the family, motivation and encouragement to succeed, even a family's ability to choose whether to hold a kid back from kindergarten for a year (thus giving them a greater chance of starting their school career successfully, and continuing that success for life).

As Richard Kahlenberg and many other scholars have said- it's about class, stupid. There are case studies out there, from Wisconsin to Oakland, that demonstrate how balancing schools based on socioeconomic class gives poorer kids the chance to benefit from middle-class values and resources, while allowing higher-income students to learn from and encounter people different from themselves. So, thanks, conservative judges, for demanding that we judge children and strategize for the education success based on multiple complex factors, instead of bigoted shorthand.

Mommy Wars = Halachic Feminism?

The industrial and post-industrial division of labor goes like this: Heterosexual marriage, husband is breadwinner, wife is mother and housekeeper. Men earn money to take care of women- the more money they earn, the closer they get to the ideal of masculinity. The more time and energy a woman spends on her kids and her house, the closer they get to the ideal of femininity.

As I started pondering more closely the psychology behind the phenomenon of highly-educated women choosing to opt out of the workforce, I realized that so much of the presumed hostility on both sides comes from the fact that women perceive other women as being “allowed” to forgo breadwinning responsibilities.

Disclaimer: This is not true in all cases by any means. The vast majority of women work precisely because a second income is necessary to sustain their families. Whether these women feel like they shouldn’t have to work or would rather not work is a totally moot point.

Nevertheless, the gendered public-private schema has a powerful hold on us to this day. The level of frustration and resentment that I read on both sides of the “mommy wars” regarding whether women should work, under what circumstances, etc, sounded somewhat reminiscent of the conflicts in Conservative Jewish communities about women adopting halachic practices (traditions define by Jewish law, which are binding on Jewish men).

“If a woman wants to read from the Torah, she has to cover her head.” “If a woman wants to put on tefillin (ritual leather straps worn during prayer) she has to do it every day.” “If a woman wants to become a rabbi, she has to undertake all of the mitzvot (commandments) that men are obligated to follow.”

The intent of this philosophy is not punitive, but it is one that demonstrates an underlying fear that women always have the option of not doing what is required of men, and could thus destabilize the standard divisions and classifications of what makes a Jew/rabbi/citizen. I think the anxieties are different for women speaking to other women about family/work choices. The concern is that women who opt out of work -- whether because they have kids already or anticipate having kids or simply are content to live on their husbands’ earning power -- maintain the normative assumption that working is not for women, that our jobs won’t necessarily make or break family finances and are somehow waivable, and therefore make it that much easier for sexist assumptions about women’s commitment to work when, say, it comes time for deciding promotions, to fester. Consequently, it becomes that much more typical for women to lower their professional ambitions or not take their future careers seriously.

On the other hand, maybe in the pro-career (NOT anti-family) feminists there’s a whiff of a more visceral jealousy: “I had to play by the rules, which favor men who don’t have household responsibilities – so why do you get to live as though the rules of hard work can be so easily discarded?”