This week, thanks for indulging my personal obsession that goes back decades: the Supreme Court. One thing I want to note: as much power as the Supreme Court seems to have, every major case they’ve faced was the result of usually years of organizing outside the court room. That’s true for the awful stuff, and it’s true for the amazing stuff. As we think about the court, let’s remember we have more power than we think we have…including the power to demand reforms of a court functioning in bad faith. And now, on to the content.
Supreme Court shenanigans today
If you’ve ever attended an anti-racism workshop I helped facilitate, you may have noticed there was a LOT of Supreme Court history integrated into it. There’s two reasons for that:
1) the courts have shaped how we practice justice or injustice for centuries. and
2) most of us don’t pay much attention to the Supreme Court, even though it determines so much of how we function as citizens of this country, from whether we can be enslaved to whether we can be searched without a warrant to whether we have to treat our employees equally even if we don’t like the group of people they belong to.
There’s a group of corporate bosses, though, who figured out how powerful the Court is and how unaccountable it is, and they realized they could use that to their political advantage. They founded the Federalist Society, which takes a lot of credit for at least five of the current justices sitting on the bench.
And here’s a fun fact I just learned from ProPublica: the current head of the Federalist society, Leonard Leo, wants to return this country to what he defines as its “natural order,” and: Leo has the money to match his vision. In 2021, an obscure Chicago businessman put Leo in charge of a newly formed $1.6 billion trust — the single-largest known political advocacy donation in U.S. history at the time.
With those funds, Leo wants to expand the Federalist Society model beyond the law to culture and politics.
So as you think about where to focus your attention as we approach the November election, think a little bit about the America Leonard Leo wants us to live in, with less secularism, less democracy, and less equality. And think about the America you want us to live in. I’m hoping we can roll up our sleeves in the coming days.
People leveraging the law in history
I want to share one of my favorite cases with you: Yick Wo v Hopkins in 1886, which I wrote about for Inheritance Magazine a while back. It was the first case to test the fourteenth amendment, which guarantees equal protection under the law, and while that amendment was written particularly because of enslaved Black people not being adequately protected by the constitution, Yick Wo v Hopkins was about Chinese laundries. There was a law in California that laundries could not be made out of wood. But the only businesses ever fined were Chinese; never white laundries.
There are two reasons I love this case:
1) Some scholars say Yick Wo wasn’t even the name of the plaintiff; it was a name the Chinese laundry owners made up to represent them in the aggregate, and there’s some part of me that imagines them saying “It’s not like they ever bother to try to tell us apart anyhow, let’s play a little joke”, and
2) It’s a reminder that no matter how powerful the court, it’s the people who push it to do what’s right. We maybe remember some justices’ names, but those of us who study race in America know Dred Scott, and Plessy, and the Lovings, and Linda Brown (or her father Oliver) in Brown v Board. And even when we’re not sure who Yick Wo was or if that was his real name, we know who and what that name represents. I hope you’ll remember it with me.
More ancestors fight for justice! This time from waaaaaaaay back!
Since we’re focused this week on the Supreme Court, today I want to do a DEEP cut. I usually don’t talk about religious content here, but I was recently invited to write the bible reflections for adult leaders of social justice-focused church camps this summer. My friend and his team assigned me the texts for each of the seven days of camp, and one of them was a SUPER obscure passage about the Daughters of Zelophehad.
It turns out the tribal court used a system of patrilineal inheritance: sons got what the father left behind, and daughters hoped they married someone who could take care of them. Zelophehad didn’t have sons, so his daughters approached the tribal council and said this wasn’t right. Moses checks in with God about this and God says, “oh. yeah. they’re right. they should get the money.”
I LOVE THIS STORY SO MUCH. Because it turns out we had ancestors who went to their supreme court and told them to do their job better, and GOD BACKED THEM UP. There are people today who do that, too—groups you know like the ACLU and NAACP and Public Citizen. And a whole bunch of regular people like you and me, too. Take heart.
