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Words do matter in the immigration debate

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—Ediberto Román and Bobby Joe Bracy

[This post originally appeared on the Latinovations blog. Read it here.]

After decades of inaction, this week’s unveiling of the Senate’s “Gang of Eight” immigration proposal suggests that Congress may finally be prepared to reform our immigration system. It is of no surprise that this renewed vigor comes on the heels of a presidential election where an overwhelming majority of Hispanic voters rejected the Republican solution was self-deportation. Yet, despite this crucial and potentially transformative moment, Republican leaders, such as Senator John McCain, one of the Group of Eight, has continued to use of ‘illegal immigrant’ when addressing the subjects of reform. He and many other Republicans who oppose immigration reform continue to use the more provocative yet inaccurate term–“illegal alien”(a term still used by the federal immigration agency, ICE). Conservative Senator Jeff Sessions for his part derided the Gang of Eight’s efforts as “making nearly impossible for ICE officials to distinguish between ‘illegal immigrants’ eligible for legal status and those simply asserting they are amnesty eligible.”

Notwithstanding the insistence to label human beings as “illegal” merely because they have committed what under federal law is a misdemeanor, other important avenues of communication and education are beginning to change the heretofore tone of the debate. Just over a week ago the Associated Press (AP) came to a decision that has gone virtually unnoticed in legal and political circles. Yet the decision was profound. The AP “no longer sanctions the term ‘illegal immigrant’ or the use of ‘illegal’ to describe a person. Instead, it tells users that “illegal” should describe only an action, such as living in or immigrating to a country illegally.”

A week later, USA Today made a similar decision to refrain from using the term, concluding that: “the term illegal immigration is acceptable, but do not label people as illegal immigrants, except in direct quotes. Undocumented immigrant, undocumented worker and unauthorized immigrant are acceptable terms — depending on accuracy, clarity and context… Do not use illegal or illegals as a noun. It is considered pejorative by most immigrants.”

While Fox News subsequently accused the AP of trying to influence immigration debate, the fact is the AP and the USA Today decisions were sound on several fronts, not the least of which is the accurate use of the English language as well as the legal and social impact of a discrediting imprecise term such as “illegal immigrant.”

Legal scholars have long recognized the inappropriateness of the use of the term. University of California, at Davis, Dean Kevin Johnson, for instance, observes: The most damning terminology for noncitizens is “illegal alien…‘Illegal aliens’ is a pejorative term that implies criminality, thereby suggesting that the persons who fall in this category deserve punishment, not legal protection.” Johnson further notes, “The illegal alien label…suffers from inaccuracies and inadequacies at several levels. [In fact,] many nuances of immigration law make it extremely difficult to distinguish between an ‘illegal’ and a ‘legal’ alien.”

Leading linguists agree, and last year a group of 24 scholars criticized the Associated Press’ previous assertion that the term “illegal immigrant” was accurate and neutral. These experts noted: “This misleading construction of illegality is tied to the circulation of troublesome stereotypes about the migration status of different ethnoracial groups. Specifically, assessments of illegality are often associated with unreliable signs of one’s migration status, such as language, religion, and physical appearance. These presumptions lead not only to law enforcers’ regular misidentification of people’s migration status based on wrongful assumptions about ethnolinguistic markers, but also to the broader public stigmatization of those markers.”

As the leading law dictionary, Black’s makes clear, no person, including an alien, is “illegal.” The word “illegal” is an adjective, or “a word … typically serving as a modifier of a noun to denote a quality of the thing named.” Thus, no person, including an alien, is illegal. Accordingly, an alien is “a person resident in one country, but owing allegiance to another.” In other words, our laws regulate the legality of the “conduct” of persons, but do not attempt to classify human beings in such a manner. We do not, for instance, classify a seven year old that steals something as an “illegal child.” Such a label would not only be deemed absurd, but also morally bankrupt. Our laws have never gone as far as to make the persons involved “illegal.” The idea that a person might be “illegal” is thus not only inhumane; it is also grammatically inaccurate, as well as legally incoherent. There are simply no laws adequately governing the issue of “illegal personhood.” As Johnson points out, although “alien” appears repeatedly in the Immigration and Nationality Act, the term “illegal alien” is not once defined.

In sum, substances and other objects can be illegal, and conduct can be illegal—but a person cannot. As Nobel Laureate and Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel aptly noted years ago, “No human being is illegal.”

The AP’s decision is couched in bedrock ethical and professional concerns about accuracy in reporting. As AP’s Kathleen Carroll explains…”Will the new guidance make it harder for writers? Perhaps just a bit at first. But while labels may be more facile, they are not accurate.”

Social justice and civil rights advocates have long fought similar battles over truth and accuracy, which is not an easy battle when facility makes ignorance so appealing. As the AP now calls for: Specify wherever possible how someone entered the country illegally and from where. Crossed the border? Overstayed a visa? What nationality?

In other words: do your homework, and describe the action or conduct that is illegal.

The decision is the only fit response to critics who dismiss this issue as “political correctness” or “censorship.” The aim evidently was not to “censor” ideas or speech, but to be critical of terms that bury a great deal of important information. In almost any context, these questions are not only significant for reporting, but legally significant. People’s rights are in the balance. As a federal court recently observed in U.S. v. Cruz-Padilla, where the court held that the defendant was entitled to a new trial because the prosecution relied on the term “illegal alien” in their closing arguments in front of a jury. Citing the Supreme Court’s earlier decisions (holding that the Constitution’s “due process” clause prohibits the use of “racially biased prosecutorial arguments”), the Cruz-Padilla Court characterized the “improper” use of the term “illegal alien” as a “foul.”

Law and psychology experts likewise have long recognized, markers or labels, especially politically loaded negative labels, have the ability to shape public policy and laws. Such labels help shape what is described as implicit bias, or mental shortcuts that allow us to make negative associations of groups that are undeserving of such negative categorizations. Stereotypes, for instance, allow society to use mental shortcuts, or schema, to associate individuals with a discrediting quality. These discrediting qualities in turn make it easier for policy makers to enact laws that seek to protect us from those with such qualities.

Sadly, history is replete with such efforts. For instance, one of the first and easiest ways for the Third Reich to enact its laws and policies was to stigmatize the Jewish community with similar discrediting qualities. These efforts paved the way to pass laws and enact horrific policies to allegedly protect society from these dangerous contagions. The use of the label illegal alien has a similar social effect. It has labeled a group of persons, who under our criminal and immigration laws have committed typically nothing more than a misdemeanor, as a group of hardened criminals that we should fear and exclude. As more and more Americans are realizing, and opinion polls reflect such realization, this label conflicts with reality.

With the recent announcements by the AP and the USA Today, we hopefully begin a path of engaging in narratives based on accurate depictions, and not stigmatizing labels. No longer is it ethical or responsible to use the discrediting marker “an illegal human being”—if indeed it ever was.

Ediberto Román is a nationally-acclaimed scholar and an award-winning educator with broad teaching interests and an extensive scholarship portfolio. He is the author of several books, including Citizenship and Its Exclusions: Classical, Constitutional, and Critical Race Perspectives (NYU Press, 2010) and Those Damn Immigrants: America’s Hysteria Over Immigration (NYU Press, 2013).

Bobby Joe Bracy is a law student at Florida International University and an immigrant rights advocate. He is currently a research assistant for Ediberto Román, and the President of the National Lawyers Guild at FIU Law.

All Tomorrow’s Parties

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Peter Coviello’s new book, Tomorrow’s Parties, launches an innovative (and often
unexpected) exploration of nineteenth-century American sexuality through the lens of literature. Here, we talk with him about Joseph Smith, the Velvet Underground, and how he came about his cover image. 

NYU Press: Tell us a bit about your book.

Peter Coviello: Tomorrow’s Parties considers the strange forms pleasure, desire, and carnality could take in the writing of the American nineteenth century, just before these aspects of sex came to be reassembled under the sign of something called “sexuality.” It looks closely at imaginings of erotic life that can seem, to modern eyes, weird and unlikely, hard even to recognize as sex at all.

So I’m interested – when I’m reading Henry James or Harriet Jacobs or Joseph Smith – in
what a modern notion of sexuality might prevent us from seeing clearly, might mute or distort. In this way I think of the book as in dialogue not only with scholarship about sex in the American nineteenth century but with new queer work that worries over the adequacy of “sexuality” itself as a cherished bit of conceptual terminology. It’s my sense that a lot of us doing queer work today are wondering afresh at the misapprehending, sometimes colonizing tendencies of “sexuality” even in its queerest registers; so Tomorrow’s Parties tries to tell a story about how the emergence of that sexuality came to happen, and at what cost.

NYUP: Why the title, Tomorrow’s Parties? Are you a Velvet Underground
fan?

PC: I am. So there’s that. I also found a curious commonality across a lot
of the writers I was reading: a tendency to transform their own uneasiness with the
cramped, narrowing conceptual languages of erotic life that were available to them
into this ardent, yearning investment in futurity, and what might be possible there.
Again and again I encountered authors who, when gripped by one or another kind
of sensual intensity or bodily captivation, would begin dreaming of the future, of
some as yet unripened set of conditions under which those pleasures might find for
themselves a different kind of legibility, and perhaps even a way of living them out
in concert with a range of other people. The more I thought about that – and I do a
lot of my thinking surrounded by music – the more the phrase “tomorrow’s parties”
became inevitable.

NYUP: How did you find such a captivating image for the cover?

PC: This would’ve been in Brooklyn, I’m guessing, in the early 2000s. I was being led around a mazy gallery and feeling, I confess, a little out of my depth. Then I turned a corner and found myself abruptly transported.

Julie Heffernan’s paintings are strange without being surreal, classical but not imitative, painterly without being ironic. You look at them and feel unnerved, as though you’re seeing not a deft citation of classical style but that style as appraised
at a somehow estranging distance. There’s an eerie kind of rupture being staged in Self-Portrait in the Bedroom by the central figure – painted in outblown nonrealist extravagance – but of what? And by what? Of the antique Tintoretto-esque framing gestures by a present, or a future, that confounds it? Of an inherited order by all that fractures it: bodiliness, imagination, their pairing in sex?

Tomorrow’s Parties is about rupture: about all that might be lost – all the
extravagant ways of imagining the very parameters of sex – with the ascent of
modern languages of sexuality and sexual identity. So when my great editor Eric
Zinner asked about images for the cover, I didn’t hesitate: I could think of no image
that performed that interplay between capture and excess, legibility and erotic
obliquity, more beautifully than Heffernan’s. I’m delighted to have it for the book

Peter Coviello is Professor of English at Bowdoin College, where he specializes in nineteenth-century American literature and queer studies, and where he has served as Chair of the departments of English, Africana Studies, and Gay and Lesbian Studies. His book, Tomorrow’s Parties: Sex and the Untimely in Ninteenth-Century America is out now from NYU Press.

Marriage equality and the law, 1967 and 2013

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—Howard Ball

In 1967, when a good cigar only cost five cents, a very different U.S. Supreme Court, led by a very different Chief Justice (Earl Warren), faced a choice between a states rights and an equal protection of the laws argument. The same choices face the Justices this term, but I am fearful that the outcome will be very different in 2013.

In 1967, the case Loving v. Virginia came to the Court because Virginia (and 15 other states) enforced its anti-miscegenation statute prohibiting marriage between Caucasians and blacks. At this time, the jurists formed an exceedingly diverse group, much more so than the sitting Court. For one thing, the majority of them had political careers prior to joining. Thus, this intimate contact with politics gave them a much greater sense of the real world than the cloistered world of arcane legalism would have.

Also of note was that the Court was mostly composed of either moderate or liberal jurists; there were no arch conservative “originalists” such as Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, and Samuel Alito sitting as we see in the current Court. And the Loving decision was but one example of the Court’s rock solid commitment to civil rights and civil liberties in the mid-20th century (1953-1969).

Virginia’s lawyers argued that in a federal system, the state has the power in the 10th Amendment to establish rights and limits regarding marriage. The lower federal courts accepted this argument, yet without a dissent, Chief Justice Warren categorically rejected it. He wrote that “the 14th Amendment requires that the freedom of choice to marry not be restricted by invidious racial discrimination. Under our constitution, the freedom to marry, or not marry, a person of another race resides with the individual and cannot be infringed by the State.” The Court’s commitment to racial marriage equality in Loving came even though 72% of the American public opposed inter-racial marriage that year. (In 2011, 97% of persons under 30 years approved of inter-racial marriage. Clearly, values evolved towards equality.)

In 2013, two cases are in the Supreme Court. One, U.S. v. Windsor, the plaintiff, an octogenarian lesbian whose wife of more than four decades died and who had to pay over $300,000 to the IRS because the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) denied federal benefits to same-sex married couples, argued that the law was an unconstitutional violation of the right of gay and lesbian couples to marry. In the second case, Hollingsworth v. Perry, lawyers challenged the constitutionality of Proposition 8, passed in 2008 by the voters in California. It invalidated an earlier California Supreme Court decision that allowed same sex marriage. The arguments by the lawyers for the gay and lesbian petitioners are based on the concept of equality in the Constitution and are reminiscent of the Loving decision.

In contrast to the expectations of petitioners in 1967, however, the outcome in 2013 is uncertain. First of all, only one sitting Justice, Elena Kagan, has any prior experience outside of the judiciary (she was the U.S. Solicitor General in the first Obama Administration). Two had prior work on the Senate judiciary committee (Stephen Breyer) and as counsel for the ACLU (Ruth B. Ginsburg). All the other members came to the Court from lower federal appellate courts, having no real political world experiences to draw upon. Furthermore, unlike the Warren Court, there is a hard and fast ideological split on the Court: five very conservative jurists and four moderates. And there has been, for more than a decade, an “appreciation” by the conservative majority of the primacy of states’ rights vis-á-vis federal power, a general wariness about the Court moving too hastily when deciding controversial social issues, and an originalist commitment to the historic values and traditions of the American society.

There are only a few options available to the Court in deciding the same-sex cases:

  1. Dismiss the cases as improvidently granted, which would leave DOMA in place and have the 9CA overturn of Proposition 8 restored,
  2. (a) Overturn DOMA, ending a federal imposition and enabling, in the 9 states and the D.C. that allow same sex marriage, all married couples to receive federal benefits, and (b) validate California’s Proposition 8, enhancing, in both cases, the principle of states’ rights in the face of federal laws.
  3. Overturn Proposition 8 and DOMA on individual rights, privacy and “equal protection” grounds, using Loving as precedent.

I am not holding my breath that the last option will be the majority’s choice. It will be one of the first two possibilities; either one will sadden but not surprise me and most Court observers. Paradoxically, unlike public opposition to racial intermarriage in 1967 rejected by a unanimous Court, in 2013, although 58% of Americans support same-sex marriage, it may be rejected by a five person majority. Oh, for the return of a good five cent cigar and the Warren Court!

Howard Ball is Emeritus Professor of Political Science and University Scholar at the University of Vermont and Adjunct Professor of Law at Vermont Law School. He is the author of At Liberty to Die: The Battle for Death with Dignity in America (NYU Press, 2012) and The Supreme Court in the Intimate Lives of Americans (NYU Press, 2002).

Our designs at the 2013 New York Book Show

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On April 9, 2013, the Book Industry Guild of New York held its annual New York Book Show celebrating excellence in book design and production. NYU Press went home with three awards and a copy of the show’s catalog, where our books shared the spotlight with many of the year’s best in book-making from publishers, large and small.

Below is a glimpse at an interior page from the 2013 New York Book Show catalog showcasing the First Place Winner in the Scholarly Series category: our very own City of Promises.

View more of our designs in the 2013 New York Book Show catalog here.

UB Law’s Higginbotham takes on the lingering effects of Jim Crow

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[Note: This article originally appeared in the Daily Record here. ]

In May 2004, University of Baltimore School of Law professor F. Michael Higginbotham gave a speech to mark the 50th anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education, the Supreme Court’s historic ruling that found segregated public schools were inherently unequal.

Despite the dismantling of the Jim Crow laws, “people need to clearly understand that there are separations that still exist in society,” F. Michael Higginbotham says.

“I started to think about how far we have come and how much progress we have made, but also how much further we needed to go,” Higginbotham said.

That was the spark that led to an almost nine-year journey culminating with the publication of his new book, Ghosts of Jim Crow: Ending Racism in Post-Racial America.

At the core of the book is the existence of what Higginbotham called a “racial model” — created during slavery and nurtured by the segregationist Jim Crow laws and practices after the Civil War — that still exists in our society, with many people of both races still desiring isolation.

“What I am trying to do is get those individual people with those views to begin a conversation about how to recognize those views and how to end this racial model,” Higginbotham said.

There is also an element of racial victimization — both internally, among African-Americans, and externally, in laws and practices that discriminate against them, said Higginbotham, who served as the law school’s interim dean last year.

“It’s a failure of blacks themselves to value education and other upward-mobility vehicles and they turn to crime because of these perceived notions,” Higginbotham said.

Higginbotham has been at UB Law for about 25 years and teaches a class on race law. He grew up in Ohio and Beverly Hills, Calif., and attended Brown University for his bachelor’s degree before Yale Law School.

Some of the ideas in the book stem from his childhood in Beverly Hills. In the book’s preface, he recounts an evening riding his bike home as a 13-year-old when he was stopped by police. He was told he was out after curfew, but later discovered from friends that there was, in fact, no curfew in the neighborhood.

Higginbotham published his first and only other book in 2010. The textbook, Race Law: Cases, Commentary, and Questions explores race in the legal process from 1787 to the present.

“The difference in writing this one was I was able to put more of my own opinions into Ghosts,” Higginbotham said. “[Ghosts] was more of a reflection of what I believe from a personal standpoint, whereas a textbook must be a reflection of others.”

In the first part of the book, Higginbotham maps out these ideas, supported with historical and recent examples.

“I thought we had dealt with this,” Higginbotham said. “People need to clearly understand that there are separations that still exist in society that reflect what we think [happened] in the Jim Crow days,” Higginbotham said.

Once he decided to write the book, what followed was extensive research: reading cases, legislation and historic documents, Higginbotham said.

The writing, he said, he tried to make clear and concise, steering away from complicated legal prose. Higginbotham said he wrote mostly during winter and summer breaks and on weekends during the school year.

“I tried to break cases and legislation down so that anyone interested in race relations today and racial inadequacies, whether it’s junior high students, high school students or simply people who personally enjoy reading, that this would be something they could enjoy,” Higginbotham said.

Higginbotham went through several drafts, which he had colleagues read and edit, then sent it to publishers in early 2008 — about eight months before the presidential election. A publisher who was interested told Higginbotham the company liked the book, but told him he needed to factor in then-presidential hopeful Barack Obama.

Higginbotham spent the next several years weaving the effects of Obama’s presidency on race relations into his book, which was published by NYU Press and released on March 18.

The last part of the book focuses on Higginbotham’s ideas on how to shepherd in a new era of racial relations. Higginbotham suggests that people need to recognize there is a problem, empower the black community and equally integrate society.

“I’m not suggesting I have all the answers,” Higginbotham said. “I am saying the solutions I put forward would help eliminate the racial paradigm.”

Digital journalism and the end of church and state

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—Michael Serazio

For generations of journalists, the separation of “church and state” referred not just to First Amendment protections for secular Americans. It was also the metaphorical way of phrasing an enduring ideal: that the business side of a news outlet would not encroach on the autonomy of the editorial side.

For advertisers, however, this was always an uneasy bargain. Audiences, they’ve long known, fundamentally mistrust advertising. For this reason, as I show in my new book, Your Ad Here, advertising often gets created to blend in, “guerrilla-style,” with contexts that don’t look like advertising.

In the case of newspapers, this explained those full-page “articles” written by a brand or marketer that affected the appearance of editorial content without the pretense of objectivity about the subject. Given the choice, the marketer surely wouldn’t have opted for “Advertisement” to run in small letters atop the piece, as it usually did – the newspaper’s equivalent of handling such content with Hazmat gloves.

Alas, newspapers have been in steady decline for the better part of a decade, as audiences consume more and more content through online sources. And, as the New York Times reported this week, a new set of norms for handling that sponsored material may well be taking shape.

It turns out that press venues both new and old – including The Washington Post, The Atlantic, Huffington Post, and Buzzfeed – have increasingly been accommodating brand-backed articles or, as I call it, “advertainment.” Because advertisers are discovering online – as they long knew of their print-based output – that banner ads are often annoying, irrelevant, and ineffective, alternatives must be considered.

“It is, in fact, content,” defended one representative at Forbes Media, which has experimented with these partnerships. “It’s not advertising.” One of the hallmarks of guerrilla marketing is precisely that self-effacement of the sales component in favor of something more desirable: here, journalistic reportage.

But for either the advertiser or the press representative to pretend that being “indistinguishable” is not their goal here – well, I’ve got a nice bridge connecting Brooklyn and Manhattan that they might be interested in buying.  Perhaps their reporters could do a “sponsored story” helping me make the sale.

Michael Serazio is Assistant Professor of Communication at Fairfield University and the author of Your Ad Here: The Cool Sell of Guerrilla Marketing (NYU Press, 2013). You can follow him on Twitter @michaelserazio.

Warren Jeffs’ total control over followers from prison questioned

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—Stuart A. Wright

The April 4 news story by ABC News regarding the imprisoned leader of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (FLDS), Warren Jeffs is misleading in several respects. The reporter, Amy Robach, asserts that “there are some people who believe that he is more powerful now that he is behind bars than he was when he was living in that community.” Played to the listening audience, a Texas Department of Corrections (TDC) official’s statement (recorded by telephone) implies a sense of helplessness: “If somebody comes in and visits with [Jeffs] and he gives them instructions and they take them back by word of mouth, there’s just nothing we can do to control that.” In the closing segment, ABC anchor Diane Sawyer asks Robach if the young girls are still in danger. Robach responds by stating that “according to every ex-FLDS member we’ve spoken to, the answer is unfortunately yes. The police say they have very little authority at this point because the parents of these young girls and children are relinquishing the control over to other adults as has been dictated by Warren Jeffs and police say without a witness, there is very little they can do.”

I would like to counter the first claim that Jeffs is somehow more powerful than ever in his incarcerated state. While Jeffs is still issuing edicts from prison, there are approximately 1,500 members who are not in compliance with his demands. Simply put, the community is in disarray. Several hundred members have left and hundreds more are following another rival leader, William E. Jessop, who was a former FLDS bishop and who rejects the authority of Jeffs. In contrast to Jeffs, Jessop has liberalized gender roles, condemned underage marriage, and promoted high school and college education. Therefore, it is clear that Jeffs does not have “complete control” over the FLDS. And since Jeffs is never likely to leave prison, his authority will likely wane, not increase.

In terms of the second claim that the police has little authority in FLDS cases concerning young girls, I would like to demonstrate that the state actually has considerable space to intervene. The District Court in Texas, in vacating its conservatorship over the FLDS children at the YFZ Ranch in 2008, mandated that each parent, child, or other person, could not interfere with the ongoing supervision of the children by the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services. In other words, the state may visit the home of the children to interview and even examine (medically or psychologically) at any time, without announcing the visit ahead of time. Thus, there is extensive state control over the young FLDS girls in Texas. Moreover, the families and children are not allowed to leave the state, further underscoring its authority in a space that media discourse has claimed it has had none. As well, I question whether family and children protective services in southern Utah or Northern Arizona, where the main communities are located, are as powerless as implied.

Finally, let’s draw attention to reporter Robach’s preface to the claim that the young girls are in danger. She states, “According to every ex-FLDS member we’ve spoken to….” There are volumes of research literature to show that the accounts of ex-members of controversial religious groups such as the FLDS are notoriously unreliable. My book (co-edited with James T. Richardson) on the FLDS raid, specifically addresses this unreliability. I am not discounting all of these accounts, but it’s important for us to consider the sources and recognize that some ex-members are disgruntled and may have an axe to grind; they are not purely objective or impartial sources, and accordingly inflect our understanding of the events with their biases.

Stuart A. Wright is Professor of Sociology and Chair of the Department of  Sociology, Social Work & Criminal Justice at Lamar University.  He is the co-editor (with James T. Richardson) of Saints Under Siege: The Texas State Raid on the Fundamentalist Latter Day Saints (NYU Press, 2011).

Outlawing abortion won’t help children with Down syndrome

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—Alison Piepmeier

My daughter, like all kids, is a delight and a lot of work. Now 4, she talks nonstop, although her speech isn’t always comprehensible. She reads. She performs class conversations for me: “What does a cow say? Moo. Great work, Maybelle!” This evening she sang me “I’m Just a Girl Who Can’t Say No” from “Oklahoma!” (a song that, in my daughter’s case, is clearly untrue because she excels at saying no).

Maybelle has Down syndrome, a condition I knew almost nothing about before she was born. During the four years she has been alive, I have been repeatedly surprised by her curiosity, her individual sense of humor and how much she has accomplished. She doesn’t fit the stereotypes at all. For this reason, it is troubling to me that rates of termination for pregnancies where Down syndrome is identified are extremely high. The most recent researchsuggests that for every child born with Down syndrome, another is terminated. With the increasing availability of noninvasive prenatal tests that can take place within the first few weeks of pregnancy, many in the Down syndrome and disability rights communities fear that abortion rates will skyrocket, that a process often identified as eugenic will escalate, and that Down syndrome will essentially be eliminated — at least among those with the resources for prenatal testing and the desire to terminate.

That is why some parents of children with Down syndrome are celebrating the news that North Dakota has become the first state to outlaw abortion for fetal conditions like Down syndrome. One parent wrote that “it felt like a small victory seeing that abortions based on Down syndrome were banned — like saying, see, individuals with Down syndrome are valued and protected.”

But outlawing abortion is not a reasonable response to this situation. A woman who does not want to be pregnant won’t stay pregnant if there are any mechanisms in place for her to have an abortion.

As part of my research for a book on prenatal testing and reproductive decision-making, I have talked with women who terminated their pregnancies when they learned that the fetus had Down syndrome. For most of these women, abortion was an incredibly painful decision. These were wanted pregnancies in which the fetus was already identified as a child, and often even named.

Repeatedly women told me that they ended the pregnancy not because they wanted a “perfect child” (as one woman said, “I don’t know what ‘perfect child’ even means”) but because they recognized that the world is a difficult place for people with intellectual disabilities.

One woman told me, “The thing is I could not, in good conscience, from the get-go, know that my child has these setbacks in life.” Another identified adulthood as the challenge: “There is no part of caring for an infant or school-aged child with Down syndrome that we didn’t think we could handle. We chose to terminate mostly on the basis of our understanding of the challenges and quality of life he and our family would face if/when he lived to be over age 21: his middle age, and end of life.”

Another woman talked quite a bit about rape. She was assaulted as a child, she knew that the statistics for sexual abuse were high for people with intellectual disabilities, and she was determined that her daughter would not experience that, so that was one of the reasons she terminated her pregnancy. She referred to her abortion several times as “the protective choice.”

All these women grieved, but did not regret, their abortions. A state law banning abortion would not have stopped them from terminating their pregnancies, it would just have made an incredibly difficult process even more difficult for them. Indeed, more than one mother I spoke with traveled out of state for her abortion because the pregnancy was too advanced for her to have an abortion in her home state.

If North Dakota really does want it to be “a great day for babies in North Dakota” and wants to prove that “a civil society does not discriminate against people … for their sex or for disability,” it should make the state a welcoming place for people with disabilities. The state could take the cash reserves it has put aside for legal challenges to its laws and use those funds to train public schools to be meaningfully inclusive (as all the best research shows is the way to go). It could provide easily accessible medical care and early intervention. The state could develop independent — but supported — housing for adults with intellectual disabilities so that there are not waiting lists years long. It could improve criminal justice responses to rape — indeed, North Dakota could become a state that works to prevent rape by training men not to be rapists.

Let women have abortions for whatever reason they choose, but make it a world they would like to bring a child into — even a child with an intellectual disability.

Alison Piepmeier is the director of the women’s and gender studies program at the College of Charleston in South Carolina and the author of Girl Zines (NYU Press, 2009).

[This article originally appeared on the New York Times Motherlode blog. Read it here.]

Defining the “cool sell”

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Newsflash, Internet friends and media lovers!
Your Ad Here, a new addition to our stellar Postmillenial Pop series, publishes this Friday, April 5.

The book explores the rise of guerrilla marketing (think: covert, even creepy, commercial persuasion)—and what author Michael Serazio calls the “cool sell” approach, defined for us below.

cool sell [kool-sel]
noun, verb, pranks, stunts

  1. A way to cut through the clutter of competing information.  
  2. By definition, an allusion to McLuhan. 
  3. A financial model that could save/destroy the media industries. 
  4. The reason Heineken paid $45 million to get in the hands of James Bond. 
  5. As Kalle Lasn suggested, the opiate of our time. 
  6. How Pabst Blue Ribbon hooked the hipsterati. 
  7. Corporate street art and branded flash mobs. 
  8. Why your buzz agent friends might sell you out for a free sample. 
  9. Manufacturing authenticity; AstroTurfing the grassroots. 
  10. Scheming memes for your tweets and status updates. 
  11. The pretense of populism that comes with “going viral.” 
  12. How Blair Witch became the most profitable movie ever. 
  13. Rethinking the medium itself used for advertising. 
  14. A new book from NYU Press available April 5.

Two covers for Two Presidents?

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NYU Press takes a different path to publishing a book on the political gridlock in Washington DC

When NYU Press decided to publish a provocative new book, Two Presidents Are Better Than One: The Case for a Bipartisan Executive Branch, by David Orentlicher, arguing in favor of two Presidents, rather than one, it had a number of major challenges, according to Steve Maikowski, Director of NYU Press. “First, we had to ensure that the final manuscript made a very convincing and well-grounded case for such a controversial idea, and the author, a Professor of Law at Indiana University, did indeed ground his argument forcefully in both law and American history. Otherwise, we feared the book would be dismissed out of hand as implausible by pundits and the review media.”

The Press saw the book, which advances this idea of a bipartisan executive branch, as a way to break the political gridlock between the Republicans and Democrats—and especially timely and worthy of serious review attention, given the endless budget impasses and the ongoing fiscal cliff negotiations in Washington.

A far-fetched argument? Not according to the author, or to the early reviewers of the book, including Sanford Levinson, an acknowledged expert on constitutional law and professor of government at the University of Texas School of Law. Levinson wrote, “Can Orentlicher be serious in calling for a plural executive? The answer is yes, and he presents thoughtful and challenging arguments responding to likely criticisms. Any readers who are other than completely complacent about the current state of American politics will have to admire Orentlicher’s distinctive audacity and to respond themselves to his well-argued points.”

The Press was further encouraged by the very favorable pre-publication buzz the book (or rather, the idea behind the book) received from the Washington Post and Boston Globe. What seemed to be an implausible argument of a plural executive branch was called by the Globe, “a fresh lens on a problem we all complain about—and may offer useful guidance for how we should go about trying to reform our government.” Orentlichter went on to appear on ‘Fox and Friends,’ where he was met with just a twinge of cynicism, but also a whole lot of encouragement.

The book also received several excellent pre-publication reviews, including the following praise from Publishers Weekly: “As unlikely as the thought may sound, Orentlicher makes a surprisingly persuasive case for this radical change. Orentlicher delivers a compelling explanation of how such a system would better align with the framers’ original conception of the executive branch… the author has an incisive eye for the problems of contemporary government.”

With the very positive buzz circulating the book, the next challenge was how best to package and market the book to draw attention to the author’s controversial proposal. The NYU Press design and marketing team met the challenge head on, and immediately found a way to encapsulate the author’s argument in an innovative and exciting design.

In a launch meeting for the book, the discussion turned to how best to evoke visually such a two-headed being. Adam Bohannon, a designer at the Press, and Mary Beth Jarrad, marketing and sales director, decided to publish the book with two different covers—one to appeal to Democrats, and another to appeal to fans of the GOP. The Press then commissioned an illustration that would show the pairing of the Democratic donkey and Republican elephant. The result: two covers that look very much the same, but each features one of the iconic partisan images, the donkey or the elephant.

The book was released to the trade in February, with an equal number of copies of each edition in each carton shipped to wholesalers and retailers. The Press decided it would be too burdensome to track sale of each book, which would have required separate ISBNs and increased management of two titles rather than one. “We’ll probably never know which of the two editions sells the best, and as long as we sell them all, we probably will not care to know,” said Jarrad. “The next big question is, when we publish the paperback in 2014, which of the two covers should we use then.”

Wrapping up Women’s History Month with Jill Norgren

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Over the last few weeks, we’ve invited a variety of authors and thinkers to share their thoughts on Women’s History Month here on our blog—and the pieces have been spectacular!

With the last days of March in sight, we thought we’d end the month not with a final word, but with a reflection on the progress that women have made over the past two centuries, and an invitation to open up the conversation further. For Women’s History Month is not meant to contain the achievements of women within 31 days, but rather, to provide a platform through which these stories can be revived.

On that note, then, we turn to Jill Norgren, who spoke with us about her book, Rebels at the Bar: The Fascinating, Forgotten Stories of America’s First Women Lawyers (NYU Press, 2013). In the video below, Norgren meditates on the shifting landscape of the field of law, which has increasingly allowed space for women—and points to the “bold, feisty” ladies who have served as the rebellious pioneers in the legal arena.

Check it out, and don’t forget to follow our channel!

Crime and (coerced) punishment in domestic violence cases

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—Leigh Goodmark

Worried that your complaining witness won’t follow through with her domestic violence complaint? New York police have a new weapon to use in such situations: running criminal checks on women who allege abuse in order to have “leverage” if they decide not to press charges.

On March 5, NYPD Chief of Detectives Phil Pulaski ordered officers to perform criminal background checks on complaining witnesses as well as alleged perpetrators in domestic violence cases. A police source told the New York Post that reminding women of their open warrants “force[s] them to remain cooperative.” Don’t want to prosecute your partner? You can go to jail instead. Advocates for women subjected to abuse are predictably outraged by the policy, arguing that it will prevent women from seeking assistance from the police. I’m outraged, too, but not surprised—this kind of policy is just another manifestation of the legal system prioritizing its needs and goals over those of women subjected to abuse.

For years, advocates for women subjected to abuse have sought to increase police involvement in domestic violence cases.  Reacting to police directives to essentially ignore domestic violence, advocates fought for mandatory arrest policies, which required police to make arrests in domestic violence cases whenever they had probable cause to do so.

New York City’s new background check policy is the logical outgrowth of such measures. If police are required to intervene, they want those interventions to be “meaningful” in the way that meaning is measured in police practice—that is, through arrest and prosecution.  When women subjected to abuse decline to press charges, they keep police from fulfilling the function that they’ve been asked to play for the last thirty years.

It’s not surprising that police would look for ways to ensure that their efforts come to fruition in some way. And in a system that routinely marginalizes women subjected to abuse by refusing to allow them to decide whether (and how) they want the state to intervene in their lives, it’s not surprising that a policy such as this one emerges.

Leigh Goodmark is Professor of Law, Director of Clinical Education, and Co-Director of the Center on Applied Feminism at the University of Baltimore School of Law. She is the author of A Troubled Marriage: Domestic Violence and the Legal System (NYU Press, 2011).