Twitter and the Insidious Role of Institutional Racism and Exclusion in Social Media Companies in the United States

http://www.thenation.com/article/twitters-white-people-problem/

Twitter’s White-People Problem

Will the company become a leader in reforming its workforce, or a case study for how the tech industry’s relentless whiteness destroys innovation, too?

by Donovan X. Ramsey 

Twitter
January 6, 2016
The Nation

(Reuters / Kacper Pempel) 

DeRay McKesson joined Twitter in the spring of 2009 at the insistence of a friend who thought it would help him be more effective in his role as student government president at Bowdoin College. “She said that it was going to be the new wave of communicating with people,” says McKesson. His first tweet—like most of ours—was awkward, directed to a friend telling her she was “pretty great.”

Five years later, McKesson, with about 1,000 followers, was monitoring Twitter from his home in Minneapolis. He was rocked by the news of the killing of Mike Brown and outraged by the police force’s militarized response to protesters. He packed up his car and tweeted, “en route to Ferguson.”

Today, McKesson is a prominent activist in the Black Lives Matter movement, due in part to his adept use of Twitter to report live from the scene of protests and to communicate with media, his more than 272,000 followers, and even presidential candidates.

“I think Twitter is an incredible platform,” says McKesson. “I want to see it succeed.”

McKesson and other users of color have actually done quite a bit to help Twitter succeed. Over the past few years, the company has remained relevant thanks in part to Black Twitter, an informal network of black users whose interaction on the platform broke the news around Ferguson, has been credited with fueling the historic success of television shows like Scandal and Empire, and consistently injects jokes, grievances and issue campaigns from black America into mainstream media. Blacks and Latinos make up around 30 percent of Twitter’s active users, and a recent Pew poll found that both groups use the platform at higher rates than their white peers.

But while Twitter the platform is bustling with all types of racial diversity, Twitter the company is alarmingly white.

“The central issue is the tenacious myth that Silicon Valley and tech more broadly are perfect meritocracies.”

Twitter isn’t alone. Most of the biggest tech companies in Silicon Valley are overwhelmingly white and male. While blacks and Latinos comprise 28 percent of the US workforce, they make up just 6 percent of Twitter’s total US workforce and six percent of Facebook employees. The number drops to five percent at Google. The statistics are startling considering the increasingly important role the technology sector plays in the American economy. Tech firms employed nearly six percent of private sector workers in 2014 and the industry is responsible for a little more than seven percent of the US GDP.

When diversity activists began campaigning a few years ago for tech companies to disclose their employee demographics, the truth was revealed. What resulted was a lot of handwringing over the state of diversity in tech and some commitment from companies, including Twitter to do better. Sadly, few companies have moved the needle. But for Twitter, that failure could be its undoing. Worse, for would-be tech workers, if a company with Twitter’s user profile can’t get diversity right, there’s little hope for the sector overall.

When Leslie Miley left his job at Twitter last year, the company’s number of black employees fell by two percent. That’s because Miley, as Twitter’s only black engineering manager, was one of just 49 black members of the company’s nearly 3,000-person US team. 

On his way out, Miley made it clear that the tech company’s resistance to cultivating a more diverse workforce, one representative of the country and its users, was indeed a major factor in his decision to leave. He refused a non-disclosure agreement, along with a sizable severance package, so he could speak out on the tech giant’s internal struggles with racial diversity. In a November post to Medium, Miley detailed his efforts to convince Twitter higher-ups to hire more black engineers, and the pushback he received.

Miley says hiring-committee meetings became contentious when he advocated for candidates of color. According to Miley, he and other members of Twitter’s black employee group, Blackbirds, were also kept out of meetings between the company’s executives and diversity advocates like Jesse Jackson and former NAACP head Ben Jealous. A particularly low point of his time at Twitter, Miley wrote, was during a conversation regarding diversity with Alex Roetter, Twitter’s senior vice president of engineering, in which Roetter allegedly told him, “Diversity is important, but we can’t lower the bar.” Roetter has since publicly apologized for the comment.

“Not only were we as a company not doing things about diversity, but the employees who did want to take a more active role were denied the resources to actually make anything happen,” says Mark Luckie, another black Twitter employee. Luckie, who worked for three years at Twitter as the manager of the journalism and media department, says he witnessed virtually no executive buy-in for diversity initiatives.

“A lot of the diversity initiatives—community service, guest speakers—originated from within the employee resource groups,” Luckie says. “In some cases, there was executive support, but not many of the initiatives came from the top down. To me, that sends a message to the company that diversity isn’t a priority.”

“I’ve learned that a person’s personal conviction doesn’t always translate to how they lead a company.”

Miley argues that the company’s homogeneity is stunting its growth. Twitter has a reported 320 million active users in comparison to Facebook’s 1.5 billion and Instagram’s over 400 million, and user growth at Twitter has been growing slowly. As a result, the company’s value has dropped from $31.4 billion in 2013 to about $20 billion currently. To reverse the trend, experts say Twitter needs to either find more users or increase engagement by the users it has now.

“Twitter is an excellent case of finding product-market fit, then losing it,” says Miley. “Twitter found it because it served a purpose, and it’s lost it, I think, because it doesn’t have diversity in who’s building the product. You end up with groupthink, where everybody is from the same background, thinks they’re brilliant and have roughly the same ideas.”

Miley was a part of a diverse team at Twitter that he says proves his point. His first project as the engineering manager was to fix Twitter’s “mute” option, a feature that allows users to filter from their timelines unwanted tweets, such as the kind of harassment and personal attacks that many prominent women have experienced on the platform.

“Twitter released a version in the past that did not go over well. They were so badly received by critics and the public that they had to be rolled back. No one wanted to touch the project,” says Miley. So he pulled together a team from across the organization, including women and people of color. “Who better to build the feature than people who often experience abuse online?” he asks. The result was a new “mute” option that was roundly praised as a major step by Twitter to address bullying and abuse.

Research supports the argument that diversity drives innovation. In fact, a study by the Center for Talent Innovation published in the Harvard Business Review found that employees of firms with diversity are 45 percent more likely to report a growth in market share over the previous year and 70 percent more likely to report that the firm captured a new market. Ironically, a 2015 study published by the MIT Sloan School of Management also found that ideas submitted by Twitter users with more diverse Twitter networks rated higher than those of users with more homogeneous followings.

To be sure, Twitter has been engaged in a lot of conversation around diversity, and some modest action. The company released its workforce representation statistics in 2014 in a blog post aptly titled, “Building a Twitter we can be proud of.” The post, by former Twitter Vice President of Diversity and Inclusion Janet Van Huysse, outlined the company’s efforts, which included recruiting at historically black colleges and universities and partnering with organizations that promote diversity in tech. Van Huysse’s 2015 follow-up post added actual diversity goals: increase “underrepresented minorities” to 11 percent of their overall US workforce; nine percent in tech roles and 6 percent in leadership roles.

Twitter executives were all unavailable for comment. A press representative did, however, offer a statement. “We’re committed to making substantive progress in making Twitter more diverse and inclusive,” it reads. “This commitment includes the expansion of our inclusion and diversity programs, diversity recruiting, employee development, and resource group-led initiatives.”

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But many believe that the best chance for a change at Twitter is a change of leadership, in particular the return of its co-founder Jack Dorsey, who recently came back to the company to take the helm as CEO after being fired in 2008. It’s rumored that Dorsey is planning to retool Twitter with a focus on diversity all the way up to its eight-member board of directors, which happens to include just one woman and one person of color but six white men, three of whom are named Peter. More than anything, it’s Dorsey’s individual commitment to racial equity that gives some hope. “In my conversations with Jack, he comes across as authentic and authentically interested in Twitter’s black users,” says Miley.

“I met Jack on West Florissant last fall,” says DeRay McKesson of encountering the Twitter co-founder during the Ferguson protests. “In all of the conversations I’ve had with him, it’s been clear to me that he both understands issues of racial equity and justice and that he’s committed to acting on these issues.”

In November, after Miley’s departure, McKesson was invited to Twitter by Blackbirds. He joined the group for a lunch meeting. “It felt like family,“ he says. “In many of my conversations,” he adds, “people expressed their struggle with how the company has done some things, mixed with their faith in Jack now that he’s returned.”

After lunch, McKesson sat down for a Q and A session with Dorsey, which the BlackBirds also organized.

“I can’t explain it. But when I hear Jack talk about the platform, about the core of Twitter, it reminds me of why I love Twitter so much,” McKesson says. “This is more than a tool to him, there’s a magic in his voice when he talks about it. And I know that sounds cheesy, but it’s real.”

Twitter parted ways with Janet Van Huysse, its VP of diversity, after six years. She’s been replaced by a white man.

Not everyone is sold, though. When asked about the potential for a more diverse Twitter under Dorsey, Luckie says, “Maybe.” “It’s a weak ‘maybe,’” he adds. “I’ve learned that a person’s personal conviction doesn’t always translate to how they lead a company. So, we’ll just have to wait and see if Jack will be the savior of diversity at Twitter.”

Freada Kapor Klein has been working for many decades to increase diversity in corporate America. As the founder of the Level Playing Field Institute, she’s consulted throughout the tech industry. She has given presentations at Twitter on the topic of hidden bias and even attended some of the meetings to which Miley says he and the Blackbirds weren’t invited. “Let me just say, having done three talks there, I never met Dick Costolo,” says Kapor Klein of Twitter’s recently departed CEO. “I’ve also presented at Square, and Jack Dorsey not only attended, but he sat through the whole thing, in the first row and asked questions,” she says. “From everything I’ve heard about Jack and experienced, I think he’ll have a different stance.”

That stance, she explains, has to be rooted in an understanding that the challenge of diversifying a workforce does not typically reside in candidates and employees of color, but in the bias of those in charge. “The central issue to the lack of diversity in tech is the tenacious myth that Silicon Valley and tech more broadly are perfect meritocracies,” says Kapor Klein. “The implication of that is that there’s something wrong with African Americans, Latinos, and women from all backgrounds, as opposed to there being something deeply biased about tech.”

The data suggest she’s right. There are plenty of qualified candidates of color, despite assumptions that hiring them would mean “lowering the bar.” Eighteen percent of all computer-science graduates in 2012 were black or Latino, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. Further, 11 percent of all recipients of bachelor’s degrees in computer science or computer engineering from prestigious research universities are black or Latino, according to data from the Computing Research Association. Still, those groups constitute, on average, just 5 percent of technology workers in Silicon Valley.

Kapor Klein, for one, says she’s cautiously optimistic that big tech companies like Twitter will make much-needed changes, but believes that ultimately most of the progress in the industry will come from start-ups and smaller, scrappier companies.

One company that has taken an aggressive approach to diversity is Pandora Media, the folks behind the music streaming service. The Oakland-based company valued at $4 billion puts up slightly more representative racial diversity numbers than Twitter, but leads the tech industry in gender diversity with a near 50-50 split between male and female staff.

“My approach to diversity is about cultivating mindsets within the company wherein diversity can be seen as an opportunity to be a much better business,” says Lisa Lee, Pandora’s senior diversity manager. “We are working for diversity in the company, not just because it’s a nice-to-have thing, but because it’s a part of what we have to do as a business if we want our product to actually reach everyone.”

Without some drastic intervention, it seems diversity will remain just a buzzword at companies like Twitter. When it comes down to brass tacks, the reality is that in order to make any significant strides in increasing the racial diversity of its workforce, Twitter would have to spend money to grow the staff, with a focus on hiring people of color, or let some of its white employees go. Neither of those options seems likely at this point.

At the end of the year, Twitter parted ways with Janet Van Huysse, its VP of diversity, after six years with the company.* She’s been replaced by Jeffrey Siminoff, a white man.

Correction: A previous version of this story stated incorrectly that Janet Van Huysee had been VP of diversity for six years. Rather, that is the term she had been at Twitter.

Donovan X. Ramsey is a multimedia journalist whose work puts an emphasis on race and class. Donovan has written for The New York Times, The Atlantic, The New Republic and GQ, among other outlets. He's currently a Demos Emerging Voices Fellow.

President Obama Continues His Failure To Create An Equally Representative Cabinet in His Second Term

 

 President Obama has put together an even less diverse Cabinet than in his first term. | AP Photo

http://www.politico.com/story/2013/05/obama-diversity-disappoints-again-90922.html

All,

This is yet another very bad sign that the President lacks the necessary vision and courage to do the right thing with regard to women and people of color in his administration.  Obama's decided indifference to properly defending and promoting not merely more 'diversity' (a much better phrase in this context would be true equality) in his cabinet but  also failing to properly promote the kind of truly progressive political talent among his senior advisor and White House  administrative staff positions as well--especially in the crucial areas of major public policy in both the domestic and foreign policy spheres--is downright indefensible at this point in his now clearly stalled second term Presidency.  There's simply no excuse for giving over 90% of these major positions to white males only.  In addition considering that only 39% of the white electorate voted for him in 2012 (a whopping 88% of Romney's final tally of 59 million votes--a grand total of 52 million white votes overall vs. the 34 million white votes that Obama received--created a massive landslide margin of 18 million more votes for Romney/Ryan that would have been absolutely devastating for this President if not for  the extraordinary support of African Americans (who voted nationally at a higher electoral rate than their demographic share of the national vote than white voters for the first time in American history in 2012!  and 94% overall with the highest share of the electorate in the entire country being cast by black women who voted 96% in favor of Obama.  Yet there are NO black females (and only two black men--Attorney General Eric Holder a carryover from 2008 in the Justice Department and the selection just last week of Anthony Foxx a 42 year old ex-mayor of Charlotte, North Carolina in the relatively insignificent position of--as far as creating meaningful and substantive public policy is concerned--of Secretary of Transportation in this 'new' cabinet and only two new women period--both white as well.  And this is in spite of the fact that nationally Obama beat Romney among women by a whopping 11 points, 55%-44%.  But what's strange about these very favorable stats for Obama is that even white women voters voted 56%-44% for Romney(!).   So it was black (96%), Latina (80%), and Asian American female voters (85%) who voted overwhelmingly for the President by a margin of 80% to 20% nationally which more than made up for and erased the big national advantage that Romney enjoyed among white female voters.  One would think that with these kind of huge numbers among people of color generally and especially women of color that Obama would feel some major responsibility toward these indispensable constituencies to make sure their demographic and ideological representatives were in important positions in his government's second term.  After all it would have absolutely impossible for Obama to win both in 2008 (where McCain/Palin received over 55% of the national white vote--as well as over 65% among white men) and re-election in 2012 at all without the huge voting blocs in his favor of people of color and women who were  collectively directly responsible for Obama being only the fourth President in the past one hundred years to win two terms for the Presidency with more than 50% of the national electorate both times  (the others are FDR, Eisenhower, and Reagan!).  One would have thought just from the perspective of practical political strategy--not to mention a genuine sense of political loyalty, consideration, and trust--that Obama who is opposed vociferously ON EVERYTHING by the entire Republican Party and the large  venomous Tea Party caucus in Congress which is made up of 99.9% whites (over 90% of whom are--like the overwhelming majority of Obama's cabinet members in both terms--white men) that he would finally act boldly and decisively on behalf of those who actually elected him...

So the real bottomline here as this and many other appropriately critical articles pointed out this week  is  that there is no excuse for Obama "failing" or rather choosing not to select black, Latino, and Asian American men and women for his cabinet and senior advisory staff--which contains only ONE black woman, Valerie Jarrett, and two other white women among a large group of white men who outnumber them 3-1 in these coveted and important positions in the White House as well.  What's even more pathetic is that as usual far too many liberals, progressives, and leftists alike have made too many indefensible excuses  for and  given servile "passes" to the President in the name of some distorted and badly misguided sense of racial or even gender "loyalty" that turns a blind eye to this kind of political and personal indifference and dismissal of the most important, necessary, and indispensable segments of his national constituency that had in two major presidential elections organized one of the most disciplined and successful campaigns in U.S. history.  But like always, once any politician begins blithely compromising, undermining, and routinely violating even their most basic and elementary principles (in this case Obama's often stated rhetorical desire in his political career--especially during his two unprecedented runs for the Presidency!--to have far more inclusion, equality, and "diversity" generally in government), one can safely and even cynically  surmise that his more general political and ideological agenda--and all that it allegedly stands for--isn't very far behind...Stay tuned...  

Kofi

Obama diversity disappoints again
By: Jennifer Epstein
May 5, 2013 

POLITICO

President Barack Obama completed his second Cabinet this week with a nod that might have been expected to delight women’s groups: he picked longtime supporter Penny Pritzker to serve as Secretary of Commerce, selecting yet another woman for a high-profile executive branch position.

Instead, the National Organization for Women’s response sounded a relatively ambivalent note. “Penny Pritzker Appointment is Good, But Still Not Good Enough,” the group said in its first statement. “More Women Should be in the Cabinet.”

There were, after all, just eight women among the 23 Cabinet-level officials in Obama’s first term. And that number will be even lower in his second.

After picking an all-white, all-male slate to fill departures at key departments including State and Treasury, Obama urged critics to be patient. Given time, he promised just before his second inauguration, he’d erase concerns sparked by an entirely white and male group of top picks.

“I would just suggest that everybody kind of wait until they’ve seen all my appointments — who is in the White House staff and who is in my Cabinet — before they rush to judgment,” he said. “Until you’ve seen what my overall team looks like, it’s premature to assume that somehow we’re going backwards. We’re not going backwards, we’re going forward.”

Now the second term Cabinet is complete, with final selections that include both Pritzker and Anthony Foxx, an African American, for Transportation secretary. Still, Obama’s put together a less diverse Cabinet than in his first term, when his picks were criticized for being too white and male. And quite a few of the people Obama had asked to hold off until the picture was complete say they they’re not so sure it was worth the wait.

Diversity woes may seem an unlikely headache for the nation’s the first black president. After all, Obama has appointed two women to the Supreme Court, including the first Latino justice, and his current Cabinet choices are only slightly less diverse than in the first term — itself second only to President Bill Clinton’s “Cabinet that looks like America” in terms of representation. Just a few months ago, the president made no secret of his interest in nominating Susan Rice, an African-American woman, to succeed Hillary Clinton as secretary of state.

And there’s no denying the president’s picks for some of the Cabinet’s most visible roles — such as Secretary of State John Kerry and Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel — come to their jobs after long and distinguished careers that make them logical picks for a Democratic president looking to stock his team with top talent.

But overall, there’s no denying the group he wound up with isn’t just less diverse than the current demographics of the country, and far less representative of the coalition of voters that got Obama reelected. It even falls short in virtually every category of the marks he set in his first term.

The failure of his quest to nominate Rice has resulted in an Obama Cabinet with no women serving in its top ranks — State, Defense, Justice, Treasury. With the exceptions of Valerie Jarrett, Jennifer Palmieri and Lisa Monaco, his senior advisers are nearly all white men. And so a group which had already been criticized for being too white and too male is about to become even more so.

If Foxx is confirmed, there will be three African Americans in the Cabinet, one fewer than before. The number of Asian Americans has dropped from 3 to just 1: first-term holdover Eric Shinseki, the Secretary of Veterans Affairs. And if Labor Secretary-designate Thomas Perez is confirmed, the number of Latinos will have officially made an identical slide.

A White House official told of this story responded by sending dozens of statements from women’s, Latino and African-American groups that applauded individual picks. Those statements made no mention of the bigger diversity picture in the whole Cabinet, though some of those same groups have voiced concerns on that front.

Some advocacy groups admit that they’re holding the president to a higher standard, given who he is. Still, few of them are willing to let him off the hook, even with this week’s diverse picks still fresh in the headlines: it hasn’t escaped their notice that Obama’s inner circle and top officials have remained so consistently, predominantly white and male that it’s become the easiest punch line in town.

“I at least expected that more than a third of the jobs would go to women,” NOW’s president, Terry O’Neill told POLITICO. “Women should be half the Cabinet. We’re 51 percent of the population, and more than half of us voted for the president’s reelection.” Instead, women have been picked for just seven of 23 Cabinet posts.

O’Neill had asked the White House to appoint at least three women to occupy the Cabinet’s top spots and chair the Council of Economic Advisers. Women held two of the key four Cabinet roles when Hillary Clinton was secretary of state and Christina Romer led the CEA.

“This is about who walks into the Oval Office every day and speaks to the president about policy, and the answer to that question is not that many women,” O’Neill said. “The people who have that level of access are almost exclusively male and that is a huge problem.”

Some African-American leaders echo those complaints. They point out that Obama isn’t just falling short of the standard he set during his first term — he’s failing to meet the mark set by President Bill Clinton 20 years ago, when African-Americans held five positions, including the then Cabinet-level post of drug czar.

“What we’re looking for is a government that at a minimum has been better than any other president has ever been on diversity,” said Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.), a member of the Congressional Black Caucus. “He’s not there yet, even though he’s African American.”

The nominations this week of Foxx and Rep. Mel Watt (D-N.C.) to head the Federal Housing Finance Agency — not a Cabinet-level position — were reassuring, Thompson said, but still not enough.

Leaders of some Hispanic and Latino groups, who have widely applauded the Perez nomination and are working to make sure the Senate confirms him, express similar frustration.

“It’s safe to say we’re a little disappointed by this new Cabinet,” said Rafael Collazo, director of political campaigns for National Council of La Raza, which also wanted to see three Latinos nominated to Cabinet positions. “It doesn’t look like there’s going to be an increase in diversity, and that’s what we wanted to see.”

Hector Sanchez, president of the National Hispanic Leadership Agenda, said he’s “a little bit concerned” that only one Latino has been nominated. White House aides, he said, had promised that the president would ultimately nominate two Latinos to Cabinet-level posts.

His group led a campaign after Labor Secretary Hilda Solis and Interior Secretary Ken Salazar announced their resignations to call on Obama to take “an historic step” and nominate Latinos to three of the 15 “traditional cabinet” positions. (The president’s nominee for energy secretary is Ernest Moniz, whose parents were from Portugal and who doesn’t consider himself Hispanic.)

There is still a bit of hope — Obama will need to make one more Cabinet-level nomination in the weeks ahead, for a new head of the Small Business Administration, and is expected to pick a Latino candidate. Still, “the window of opportunity is almost closed,” Sanchez said. “And we’re worried that we’re not going to have a fair representation of the Latino community in this administration.”

Rep. Judy Chu (D-Calif.), chairwoman of the Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus, said she was thrilled to see three Asian Americans in Obama’s initial first-term Cabinet — but had hoped that the president would nominate another Asian American to join Shinseki.

“Seventy-three percent of Asian-American Pacific Islanders voted for the president, they came together to support him and we just want to make sure that his Cabinet reflects that support and is as diverse as possible,” Chu said. The challenge for Asian Americans reaches deeper, she said, noting that by her count there are none serving as deputy secretaries or undersecretaries in the Obama administration.

One of the president’s most enthusiastic voting blocs would have been happy with even a lone representative in his second-term cabinet. Instead, gay groups say they are discouraged that no one who is openly gay has gotten a Cabinet-level post.

“It seems crazy to me that we have never in our history had an openly gay person in the Cabinet,” said Richard Socarides, who served in a range of Clinton administration posts, including outreach to gay groups. “It seems long past due. Second-term Cabinets are often an opportunity to go back and fix some of these injustices that are obviously not entirely President Obama’s responsibility, but that he should still be involved in righting.”

Gay rights advocates had made several recommendations, including two openly gay men already in senior administration posts: Export-Import Bank President Fred Hochberg for Commerce or U.S. trade representative, and John Berry, the former Office of Personnel Management director, for Interior secretary.

“I’m worried that (Obama) is not focused on this, and I hope he will focus on it before too long when there are other vacancies,” Socarides added.

But despite the rumbles of discontent from some advocates, others strike a pragmatic tone: they may not be thrilled, they say — but they aren’t unhappy either.

“Would we have liked an openly gay person in the Cabinet? Absolutely,” said Fred Sainz, vice president for communications at the Human Rights Campaign. “But we understand there are plenty of opportunities for LGBT people to have very prominent leadership roles throughout the administration,” he said, pointing to Hochberg, Berry and several others.

If they can’t get great results, say these advocates, they’ll settle for good enough. “We are moving in the right direction and we hope to see this tradition (of women in the Cabinet) get stronger and stronger with each administration,” said Stephanie Schriock, president of EMILY’s List. “The more women that go through the pipeline of winning elections and having political jobs, the more we’ll see get to high places.”

Read more:

http://www.politico.com/story/2013/05/obama-diversity-disappoints-again-90922.html#ixzz2SWkrKOIJ
 




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Elena Kagan, President Obama, and the Dire Necessity of Integrity and Vision on the Supreme Court

Washington -- President Barack Obama has nominated Solicitor General Elena Kagan to the Supreme Court, saying she will demonstrate independence, integrity and passion for the law.

If confirmed by the Senate, Kagan will become the third woman on the high court. Obama introduced her today in the White House's East Room. He called her "my friend" and one of the nation's foremost legal minds.

The selection of Kagan came after nearly a monthlong process of consideration. Obama always had Kagan on his short list but still considered a broader group of candidates, interviewing four.

The president informed Kagan that she would a Supreme Court nominee on Sunday night. He then called the three federal judges he did not choose for the position, Diane Wood, Merrick Garland and Sidney Thomas.

Never a judge, Kagan is known as sharp and politically savvy and has enjoyed a blazing legal career. She was the first female dean of Harvard Law School, first woman to serve as the top Supreme Court lawyer for any administration, and now first in Obama's mind to succeed legendary liberal Justice John Paul Stevens.

At 50 years old, Kagan would be the youngest justice on the court, which would give her the opportunity to extend Obama's legacy for a generation.

Kagan must first win Senate confirmation. A source close to the selection process said a central element in Obama's choice was Kagan's reputation for bringing together people of competing views and earning their respect.

Republicans have shown no signs in advance that they would try to prevent a vote on Kagan, but they are certain to grill her in confirmation hearings over her experience, her thin record of legal writings and her objections to the military's policy about gays.
When she was confirmed as solicitor general in 2009, seven Republicans backed her: Sens. Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, Susan Collins of Maine, Judd Gregg of New Hampshire, Orrin Hatch of Utah, Jon Kyl of Arizona, Richard Lugar of Indiana and Olympia Snowe of Maine.

Kagan came to the fore as a candidate who had worked closely with all three branches of government, a legal mind with both a sense of modesty and sense of humor. The source spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss factors that led to Kagan's impending nomination.

Kagan has clerked for Thurgood Marshall, worked for Bill Clinton and earned a stellar reputation as a student, teacher and manager of the elite academic world. Her standing has risen in Obama's eyes as his government's lawyer before the high court over the last year.

Yet Kagan would be the first justice without judicial experience in almost 40 years. The last two were William H. Rehnquist and Lewis F. Powell Jr., both of whom joined the court in 1972.

All of the three other finalists she beat out for the job are federal appeals court judges, and all nine of the current justices served on the federal bench before being elevated.
Kagan's fate will be up to a Senate dominated by Democrats, who with 59 votes have more than enough to confirm her, even though they are one shy of being able to halt any Republican stalling effort.

For the second straight summer, the nation can expected an intense Supreme Court confirmation debate even though, barring a surprise, Kagan is likely to emerge as a justice.

Supreme Court justices wield enormous power over the daily life of Americans. Any one of them can cast the deciding vote on matters of life and death, individual freedoms and government power. Presidents serve four-year terms; justices have tenure for life.

Democrats went 15 years without a Supreme Court appointment until Obama chose federal appellate judge Sonia Sotomayor last year to succeed retiring Justice David Souter. Just 16 months in office, Obama has a second opportunity with Kagan, under different circumstances.

Obama's decision last year centered much on the compelling narrative of Sotomayor, the first Hispanic Supreme Court justice, who grew up in a housing project and overcame hardship.

This year, Obama particularly wanted someone who could provide leadership and help sway fellow justices toward a majority opinion. The president has grown vocal in his concern that the conservative-tilting court is giving too little voice to average people.

Kagan is known for having won over liberal and conservative faculty at the difficult-to-unite Harvard Law School, where she served as dean for nearly six years.

Her background, including time as a lawyer and a key domestic policy aide in President Clinton's White House, would give the court a different perspective.

The White House is expected to frame Kagan's lack of service as a judge in upbeat terms, underscoring that there are many qualified routes to the top of the judiciary.

Kagan, who is unmarried, was born in New York City. She holds a bachelor's degree from Princeton, a master's degree from Oxford and a law degree from Harvard.

She served as a Supreme Court clerk for one of her legal heroes, Justice Thurgood Marshall. And before that, she clerked for federal appeals court judge Abner Mikva, who later became an important political mentor to Obama in Chicago.

Kagan and Obama both taught at the University of Chicago Law School in the early 1990s.

In her current job, Kagan represents the U.S. government and defends acts of Congress before the Supreme Court and decides when to appeal lower court rulings.
Kagan has the high task of following Stevens, who leaves a legacy that includes the preservation of abortion rights, protection of consumer rights and limits on the death penalty and executive power. He used his seniority and his smarts to form majority votes.

Rick Garnett, a professor of law and associate dean of University of Notre Dame Law School, voiced the concern of many conservatives.

"Future elections might undo some of the president's policies, but his more liberal views about the Constitution, the powers of the national government, and the role of unelected federal judges, are now being locked in securely," Garnett said in a statement.

Kagan would be the fourth woman to serve on the Supreme Court, following current Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sonia Sotomayor and retired Justice Sandra Day O'Connor.

She would be the third Jewish justice along with six Catholics. With Stevens' retirement, the court will have no Protestants, the most prevalent denomination in the United States.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/14/us/politics/14diversity.html?nl=us&emc=politicsemailema1

All,

Whoa folks...WAIT a damn minute here...let me get this straight: Does Obama and the African American supporters of Ms. Kagan who "just happen to be" some of the President's oldest black friends and colleagues at Harvard Law School (like Professor Charles Ogletree who taught Obama at the Law School during his time there as a student in the late 1980s) really, seriously think that they can get away with their strong and emphatic endorsements of Kagan's clearly abysmal record of hiring African American law professors for tenured positions at Harvard Law just because the President likes her and she too is a longtime friend and colleague of his? This position is absolutely bogus and quite absurd on its face. Kagan is on record of hiring ZERO African Americans (as well as Latinos) while Dean of Harvard Law School during her tenure there out of 32(!) positions. Nor did she hire any blacks of Latinos in her position of Solicitor General which she was selected for by Obama last year. NONE, NADA, ZILCH..C'mon! Let's get real--these numbers are atrocious and frankly indefensible. The President, his black cronies and associates at the Law School, and others who support her in her nomination for the Supreme court must be JOKING if they actually think this record is in any way acceptable. What kind of ludicrous standard for "diversity" is this? If a Republican or southern democratic nominee had this kind of insulting record of (not) hiring African Americans and Latinos at Harvard Law would we give that person a pass the way that the President and her personal friends are asking/demanding that we do on Kagan's behalf? Would this record be considered OK and worthy of support by Professors Ogletree and Kennedy? OF COURSE NOT! In fact they and Obama would be the first to publicly and quite justifiably raise very serious questions and objections if this were the case. So let's not play stupid little games here and give Ms. Kagan, the President, and their supporters at Harvard Law School a pass for pretending that this is fine just because the President is her personal friend...Nah... No way! That would not only be intellectually and morally dishonest but very irresponsible to say the least. Ms. Kagan and the President must be held publicly accountable for this serious problem and critical questions should and must be raised about this with regard to her general nomination, Merely refusing an endowed chair tainted with the blood money of slavery and taking one instead with the great Charles Hamilton Houston's name on it (the legendary Houston was Thurgood Marshall's mentor at Howard University and in his general legal career during the the 1930s and '40s) is simply not enough by a long shot.. Like both Houston and Marshall did during their extraordinary careers as courageous and stalwart legal protectors of social and economic justice Ms. Kagan AND President Obama must PUT UP OR SHUT UP on these crucial matters of genuine public diversity and equal employment opportunities for African Americans and Latinos in our higher education institutions and professions. In other words: NO ONE GETS A PASS ON THAT-- not even the President and a Supreme Court nominee. The ball (and the fate of the Supreme Court) is now in their hands...I sincerely hope they don't blow it...

Kofi



Nominee Scrutinized for Hiring on Race

By KATHARINE Q. SEELYE
May 13, 2010
New York Times

BOSTON — When Elena Kagan became dean of Harvard Law School in 2003, she could have taken the endowed chair named for Isaac Royall Jr. The Royall family had donated more than 2,100 acres to Harvard in the 1700s, but the family had earned its fortune on the backs of the slave trade.

Ms. Kagan declined to take the Royall professorship. Instead, she chose a new chair in the name of Charles Hamilton Houston, the first African-American on the Harvard Law Review and a crusader against Jim Crow laws.

Ms. Kagan’s history on race issues at Harvard has come under scrutiny since President Obama nominated her to the Supreme Court on Monday. Critics say that she did not create enough racial diversity at Harvard, and that in the absence of any writings or opinions, her hiring practices serve as a clue to her thinking. Her supporters counter that she demonstrated a commitment to equality; her claiming the chair in the name of Mr. Houston, they said, is but one example.

In the nearly six years that Ms. Kagan was dean, from 2003 to 2009, she hired a total of 43 permanent, full-time faculty members, 32 of whom were tenured and tenured-track. Of those, 25 were white men, 6 were white women and one was an Asian-American woman. Of the other 11, 6 were white men, 2 were women and 3 were minority men (2 black and one Indian), according to a law school official.

Law school officials said the numbers did not reflect the whole story because offers were made to other minority and women scholars; some were declined and some still open. But others said the record spoke for itself.

“Kagan’s performance as dean at Harvard raises doubts about her commitment to equality for traditionally disadvantaged groups,” Guy-Uriel Charles, a black law professor at Duke, wrote last month in an oft-cited post.

During roughly the same period that Ms. Kagan was at Harvard, Mr. Charles wrote, Yale Law School hired just 10 faculty members; 5 were women, and only one was a minority.

Ms. Kagan’s track record on diversity improved during the last year when she became solicitor general. In that office, she has hired six people — three women and three men (one white, one Asian and one Indian).

Lester K. Spence, a political scientist at Johns Hopkins University, wrote on theroot.com, a Web site devoted to black issues, that Ms. Kagan appeared to be more concerned with ideological diversity than with diversity of race or gender.

“President Obama wants us to support his choice not because she’s got a strong record, not even because she has a particularly visible record, but because he knows her,” Mr. Spence wrote. “I’m not buying it,” he added. “And even if Kagan ends up being the best justice this side of Thurgood Marshall, you shouldn’t either.”

After it was clear that Mr. Obama, the first black president, would nominate Ms. Kagan, several black women wrote to him saying they were disappointed that he had not nominated a black woman.

The women, who included Melanie Campbell of the National Coalition on Black Civic Participation, also said they wanted to learn more about Ms. Kagan’s record on civil rights.

The administration has been pushing back against any suggestion that Ms. Kagan has been insensitive on racial matters, as have some of her black supporters.

Ronald S. Sullivan, a black law professor whom Ms. Kagan recruited to Harvard, wrote on thegrio.com, another site devoted to black issues, that “no elite law school has done enough” with respect to minority hiring. But, he noted, her spurning of the Royall chair “was a significant statement made by the dean of one of the nation’s top law schools.“

And, he said, Ms. Kagan had expanded the clinical teaching program at Harvard so that “thousands of indigent and under-represented citizens received quality legal services that they otherwise would not have been able to afford.”

Randall L. Kennedy, another black professor at Harvard Law, also strongly defended Ms. Kagan’s hiring practices. He said in an article in The Huffington Post that no dean was solely responsible for hiring faculty, with each one requiring a majority if not a supermajority of votes. This, he said, gets to be a complicated proposition.

Still, he said, Ms. Kagan supported programs that have helped advance minorities, and she helped form a committee to identify promising racial minority candidates.

While she was dean, an average of about 30 percent of the entering classes were minorities, up from about 25 percent in the previous six years, according to a Harvard official.

One of Ms. Kagan’s strongest backers has been Charles J. Ogletree Jr., perhaps the most prominent black law professor at Harvard. He has noted in interviews and articles that she has been supportive of men and women of color among both students and faculty.

“If you look at her whole record, ” Mr. Ogletree said in an interview on Thursday with Essence.com, “I think it tells you that she worked diligently to make opportunities available for others. The questions about who she recommended and who was tenured are fair, and I think she’ll be able to respond to them.”



http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/13/us/politics/13marshall.html?nl=us&emc=politicsemailema1


Kagan’s Link to Marshall Cuts 2 Ways

By CHARLIE SAVAGE
May 12, 2010
New York Times

WASHINGTON — In the spring of 1988, Justice Thurgood Marshall assigned a clerk, Elena Kagan, to write a first draft of his opinion in a case considering whether a school district could charge a poor family for busing a child to the nearest school, which was 16 miles away.

















Associated Press

Thurgood Marshall at his Supreme Court confirmation hearings in 1967. Elena Kagan clerked for him 20 years later

A majority on the Supreme Court ruled that the busing fee was constitutional. Justice Marshall, who was 80, was incensed and wanted a fiery dissent. But the 28-year-old Ms. Kagan, now a Supreme Court nominee, thought her boss’s legal analysis was wrong.

Ms. Kagan, recalling the incident in a 1993 tribute after his death, wrote that after she told him that “it would be difficult to find in favor of the child” under legal doctrine, he called her a “knucklehead.” He “returned to me successive drafts of the dissenting opinion for failing to express — or for failing to express in a properly pungent tone — his understanding of the case,” she wrote.

Because Ms. Kagan has never been a judge and has produced only a handful of scholarly writings, clues to her philosophy are rare. In that vacuum, liberals and conservatives alike are attributing special significance to her clerkship year with Justice Marshall, who led the civil rights movement’s legal efforts to dismantle segregation before becoming a particularly liberal Supreme Court justice.

But while Ms. Kagan, a former board member for the Thurgood Marshall Scholarship Fund, clearly relished the experience and admired the justice as a historic figure, she appears to have had a far more ambivalent attitude toward his jurisprudence, according to a review of his papers at the Library of Congress, her comments over the years about him and interviews with her fellow clerks and colleagues.

In analyzing why Justice Marshall was adamant about siding with the poor family in the busing fee case, for example, Ms. Kagan explained in her tribute that he “allowed his personal experiences, and the knowledge of suffering and deprivation gained from those experiences, to guide him.”

But Ms. Kagan did not share those experiences, notes Charles J. Ogletree, a Harvard law professor who heads an institute named after Justice Marshall’s mentor, Charles Hamilton Houston, and who has talked over the years with Ms. Kagan, a former Harvard Law School dean, about her clerkship.

“It’s absurd to compare Elena Kagan’s judicial philosophy to Thurgood Marshall’s philosophy,” Professor Ogletree said. “Their times and life experiences are different. They lived in different worlds. The reality is that Elena Kagan learned a lot from Justice Marshall, but she will not be overly influenced by Marshall or anyone else. She is her own person.”

Some differences in the views of Justice Marshall — who once described his legal philosophy as, “You do what you think is right and let the law catch up” — and of his former clerk are striking. For example, he believed that the death penalty was always unconstitutional. But during the confirmation process when she was named solicitor general last year, Ms. Kagan said she had no quarrel with the death penalty.

“I am not morally opposed to capital punishment,” Ms. Kagan wrote to a senator, adding that she “accepted” the Supreme Court’s precedents upholding “the death penalty as constitutional in a wide variety of cases and circumstances.”

Nevertheless, the political dynamics of Ms. Kagan’s nomination have led figures on the left and the right to gloss over such differences.

After some liberal commentators questioned whether Ms. Kagan could be trusted, President Obama declared that Justice Marshall’s “understanding of law, not as an intellectual exercise or words on a page, but as it affects the lives of ordinary people, has animated every step of Elena’s career.”

Conservative critics, too, have sought to link Ms. Kagan closely to Justice Marshall. Among them, Curt Levey of the Committee for Justice has decried a supposed “Kagan/Marshall judicial philosophy,” noting that in her tribute she described as a “thing of glory” her former boss’s view that courts should show special solicitude for disadvantaged parties.

By 1987, as the Rehnquist court was moving to the right, Justice Marshall was “in his decline and alienated, marginalized” and, in hiring clerks like Ms. Kagan, “looking for really bright people to kind of put a new charge in him” and to help him write dissents, said Juan Williams, a Marshall biographer.

“She didn’t come to him because she was necessarily of like mind, although she was coming out of the same political milieu,” Mr. Williams said.

Justice Marshall nicknamed Ms. Kagan “Shorty” and sometimes referred to her as “Little Bits,” though they all got called “knucklehead” from time to time, recalled Harry Litman, another clerk that year. The musty chambers were crammed with books, African artifacts, red Naugahyde chairs and ungainly desks.

Justice Marshall did a lot of work in an anteroom to his main office. There, he sat in a comfortable chair across a large table from his clerks to discuss cases, sessions that inevitably digressed into stories the justice would tell about his life.

“You’re at the same time laughing because he’s such a great raconteur and also thinking it’s unbelievable that these things happened in the lifetime of this person in whose presence I’m sitting, and their life made such a difference in re-creating a South where he had to be out of town by sunset or his life was in danger,” recalled Carol Steiker, another clerk that year.

One task of the clerks was to write brief memorandums evaluating the thousands of cases appealed to the Supreme Court. Most written by Ms. Kagan are straightforward, but some caution against taking a case because of how the conservative justices might rule or elevate outcomes over the law.

For example, on Oct. 7, 1987, she analyzed a case in which a judge dismissed an immigrant’s guilty plea over a minor infraction because it could jeopardize his application for permanent residency. The Justice Department appealed, saying the district court had exceeded its authority.

Ms. Kagan wrote that the Justice Department’s view was “almost certainly correct.” Still, she recommended against taking the appeal because the judge had “ensured an equitable result” at “no great cost to the Republic.” Justice Marshall scrawled “D” for “deny” at the top of her memorandum.

In her hearing last year, Ms. Kagan distanced herself from those writings, saying her job was to “channel” Justice Marshall’s mind-set.

A clerk to a justice is “trying to facilitate his work, and to enable him to advance his goals and purposes as a justice,” she said, adding: “He knew what he thought about most issues. And for better or for worse, he was not really interested in engaging with his clerks on first principles.”

Indeed, while her 1993 tribute is couched in fond terms, the bulk of her remarks about cases that arose in her clerkship year concerned their disagreements.

In one case, he voted not to let a man pursue a discrimination claim because his lawyer, who was blind, accidentally left his name off an appeal, and a deadline expired. Ms. Kagan and fellow clerks sought to persuade Justice Marshall to change his vote until he grew annoyed and, pointing to his framed judicial commission on the wall, asked them whose name was on it.

But the case Justice Marshall cared about the most that year, she wrote, was the school bus dispute in which she had trouble justifying his dissent. The final draft seems to implicitly acknowledge that his vote rested less on legal doctrine than on his notion of social justice.

The case, it says, asked “whether a state may discriminate against the poor in providing access to education,” adding: “I regard this question as one of great urgency. As I have stated on prior occasions, proper analysis of equal protection claims depends less on choosing the formal label under which the claim should be reviewed than upon identifying and carefully analyzing the real interests at stake.”