The shadow docket strikes again

The Supreme Court made racial profiling okay again in one unsigned ruling.

By Shalise Manza Young

In the 1800s, free Black people, whether they had been born free or had earned or bought their freedom from their slave holder, carried with them papers that attested to their status.

Filed with a county clerk after a white man affirmed their liberated state, freedom papers generally had a record number, the age and a detailed appearance of the individual, and, at least in Virginia, the state seal.

There was always danger enough in being a Black person, but without those documents, a free man or woman could be kidnapped by slave catchers. Sometimes even if they had their papers, a kidnapper would take or destroy them and haul the person away.

Their family would have no idea where they had been taken, or when or if they would be reunited.

On Monday, a majority of the members of the Supreme Court of these United States essentially rewound the clock 175 years to those days and the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act, making freedom papers a necessity again.

Except now—maybe for now is more accurate—it is Latino people who must have their papers with them at all times.

The cowards of the court halted an earlier federal district court injunction in Noem v. Perdomo, filed during the height of the Trump regime’s Los Angeles invasion. In so many words, they declared that racial profiling is a-ok when it comes to rounding up suspected undocumented individuals: If you look Latino and/or you speak Spanish and/or speak English with a heavy accent and/or are standing outside of a Home Depot looking for day work or even waiting at a bus stop, you can be detained, harassed, assaulted and/or disappeared by masked agents of the state–even if you do produce your freedom papers.

Lucky for us, in this situation we got several paragraphs of pablum from Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh to explain away the naked racism.

In this week’s case, the conservative faction—can we even call them conservative anymore? What’s five steps more intolerant than conservative?—used the shadow docket to announce its decision, which means there were no oral arguments and no explanation. It has increasingly become the method by which this craven lot reveals it is stripping away yet another human or civil right.

The shadow docket means justices can just drop the bomb, block their ears, and never justify the damage left in the wake. After detonation, the justices can unwind by enjoying some beers or climbing into a gifted luxury recreational vehicle for a trip to the all-male Bohemian Grove to attend a donor event with billionaires that very frequently have business in front of the bench, or by sitting back at the beach house, the Christian nationalist flag flapping in the breeze drowning out the cries of the plebes who were stupid enough to believe “all men are created equal” included them.

Fourth Amendment protections? Chile, please. Not if your name is Jesús.

Legal commentator Elie Mystal called it the court’s “most racist decision since Plessy,” referring to the 1896 case that legalized racial segregation as long as facilities were equal (wink, wink).

How can it be seen any other way? If, according to the most compromised, partisan jurists in the 235-year history of the court, people who merely appear to be part of a particular ethnic group can be, at best, detained for 30 minutes or, at worst, trafficked to a foreign country, it’s a short walk to that becoming reality for Black people, Asian people, and eventually anyone who doesn’t have blonde hair, blue eyes, and a gaudy cross necklace.

Kavanaugh, using highly disputed numbers from a brief in the administration’s appeal, wrote that there are an estimated 15 million undocumented people in the country, and that “illegal immigration is especially pronounced in the Los Angeles area, among other locales in the United States. About 10 percent of the people in the Los Angeles region are illegally in the United States, meaning about 2 million illegal immigrants in a population of 20 million.”

But in the same way “urban” is used as a stand-in for Black, “illegal” has become a stand-in for Latino. Meaning the chances of a white-appearing person with a British accent in West Hollywood or one with a stereotypically Eastern European look at a downtown coffee shop getting pinned to a brick wall by overweight cosplaying losers demanding to know their citizenship status are nil.

Another Kavanaugh doozy: “If the officers learn that the individual they stopped is a U. S. citizen or otherwise lawfully in the United States, they promptly let the individual go. If the individual is illegally in the United States, the officers may arrest the individual and initiate the process for removal.”

Did I say doozy? I meant abject lie. There is video after video after video of American citizens being assaulted by thugs from one of the myriad agencies now given the green light to terrorize their neighbors.

I’d be remiss if I didn’t remind you, dear reader, that a little more than two years ago, the heinous half-dozen on this court said the race of college applicants from a community that has lived with a boot on its neck for over four centuries can’t be considered during the admissions process.

But race is the perfect pretext for targeting people trying to do the very best they can by their families.

For a little while at least, America lived with the premise that – on paper anyway– a person's skin color could not prevent him or her from getting housing, jobs, or other services.

But to the majority of nine unelected, lifetime-appointed individuals on the court, in a country of 345 million people, on paper means nothing. Freedom papers are the rule of the land once again.

Shalise Manza Young was most recently a columnist at Yahoo Sports, focusing on the intersection of race, gender and culture in sports. The Associated Press Sports Editors named her one of the 10 best columnists in the country in 2020. She has also written for the Boston Globe and Providence Journal. Find her on Bluesky @shalisemyoung.

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