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It was more than her food. It was her voice, with that easy Southern twang, her megawatt smile, her self-deprecating sense of humor, and her feistiness. She embodied the best of the White South. Her home base may have been Savannah, Georgia, a city with a history of discrimination, but I never saw any indication of the racism so stereotypical of Southerners. She often had black guests on her show, and she was on Oprah more times than I can remember. I cursed Anthony Bourdain when he attacked her fat-laden recipes -- calling her “the worst, most dangerous person to America” (a little extreme, no?). So last week, when I read that she admitted to using “the N-word,” I was more than a little disturbed.

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Immediately, I heard newscasters referring to her prior testimony, which I had watched on video, as combative and aggressive. And I felt my pressure start to rise.

These kinds of terms – combat, aggression, anger – stalk black women, especially black women who are dark-skinned and plus-sized like Rachel, at every turn seeking to discredit the validity of our experiences and render invisible our traumas. By painting Rachel Jeantel as the aggressor, as the one prone to telling lies and spreading untruths, it became easy for the white male defense attorney to treat this 19-year-old, working-class black girl, a witness to the murder of her friend, as hostile, as a threat, as the one who needed to be regulated and contained and put in her place.

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Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 imposed a special coverage formula on jurisdictions with particularly bad histories of racial discrimination in voting, including nine states—Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, Texas and Virginia—and dozens of county and municipal governments, including the Bronx, Brooklyn and Manhattan. Section 5 authorized the Justice Department to require “pre-clearance” of proposed changes in electoral laws in these jurisdictions. The pre-clearance requirement has been used in recent years to thwart attempts by the ethnocentric non-Hispanic White Right to engage in voter ID laws or redistricting plans that were evidently motivated by the desire to indirectly eliminate or dilute the votes of nonwhite citizens or poor citizens.

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On Wednesday prosecution witness Rachel Jeantel, who was on her cellphone with Martin while he was being pursued by Zimmerman, actually testified that Martin told her he was being followed by “a creepy ass cracker." But it wasn’t until Thursday that it blew up the right wing of the Internet – when Jeantel offered the badgering defense attorney Don West her opinion that the term isn’t racist.

From Glenn Beck’s the Blaze to the Breitbots to smaller right-wing shriekers to Twitter trolls everywhere, white grievance-mongers seemed less bothered by the fact that Martin allegedly used the term, than by Jeantel saying it wasn’t a slur.

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On Tuesday, a 5-4 decision struck down Section 4 of VRA, which determines which states are covered by Section 5, and which are not – meaning certain areas of the U.S. which previously had to submit changes to their voting rules to the Department of Justice for approval, now can pass laws without it. (However, that doesn't mean people won't be watching, so expect more lawsuits in the wake of new voter ID requirements, registration rules and reapportionment, among other voting issues.)

In writing for the majority, Chief Justice Roberts said, "[racial] conditions that originally justified these measures no longer characterize voting in the covered jurisdictions." The crux of his opinion was that the coverage formula used in Section 4 to identify these conditions was 50 years out of date. Therefore, Justice Roberts lobbed a pass to Congress to develop a coverage formula using contemporary data.

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Ironically, as anyone paying attention knows, that turnout surge was driven by anger over a wave of GOP efforts to suppress black votes in those and other states – and it was helped along by Section 5, which requires states with a history of voting rights suppression to pre-clear any voting changes with the Justice Department (Justice struck down 21 such proposals since 2006). Still, despite new voter identification laws, restrictions on early voting and Sunday voting and other barriers, African-Americans voted at unprecedented rates in 2012 – and that helped give Roberts an excuse to strike down a section key to enforcing the law.

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In the majority opinion for the case, called Shelby County v. Holder, Chief Justice John Roberts made it clear that the Court's ruling would not affect the nationwide ban on racial discrimination in voting laid out in Section 2 of the VRA, but only the VRA's preclearance requirement. He also specified that the court was not ruling on the constitutionality of Section 5, the part of the VRA that requires those parts of the country covered by Section 4's formula to get preclearance before making changes to their voting regulations. The ruling is limited to Section 4, which simply lays out the formula that determines which specific areas are required to get that preclearance. Of course, without the Section 4 formula, Section 5 is effectively inoperable for the time being, because it has no application to any particular state. As a remedy, the Court noted that Congress could "draft another formula based on current conditions," but there will likely be big political hurdles to overcome for that to happen.

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The case, called Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin, involved a white woman who sued the school after it rejected her in 2008, arguing that the school’s affirmative action policy violated the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment. In a 7-1 decision, the Court found that in this case, the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals improperly applied the "strict scrutiny" test, and gave undo deference to the "good faith" of the University of Texas when it ruled in the school's favor.

Strict scrutiny is the highest possible standard that the courts apply when reviewing laws that either discriminate on the basis of race, gender or some other characteristic, or directly interfere with a constitutional right. In order to determine whether a law stands up to strict scrutiny, the court will ask whether the government has a compelling interest for creating the policy, and whether the law is “narrowly tailored” to that particular interest. Here, the Court found that the 5th Circuit had not adequately applied that test.

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The decisions in Vance v. Ball State University (authored by Justice Samuel Alito) and the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center v. Nassar (authored by Justice Anthony Kennedy) each watered down the ability for employees to sue under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, which prohibits employment discrimination on the basis of "race, color, religion, sex or national origin." The first case, in which a kitchen employee of Ball State University said her co-workers had harassed her because she is black, narrowed the definition of a "supervisor" in determining whether an employer is responsible for harassment. (The central question was whether the harasser counted as a supervisor if he or she could assign responsibilities but not hire or fire someone.) The second, in which a doctor said he had been discriminated against for being of Middle Eastern descent and subsequently retaliated against, set a near-impossible standard for what constitutes retaliation after an employee complains he or she has been discriminated against.

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If there is one thing to take away from the Supreme Court’s narrow ruling in Fisher vs. University of Texas, it is that the Court still believes that promoting racial diversity in higher education is a “compelling interest” that justifies affirmative action. The Court previously ruled in Bakke that redressing past discrimination could not count as such a compelling interest, a sentiment the Court unfortunately reinforced in the Fisher ruling. But the Court affirmed in Fisher that there is “one compelling interest that could justify the consideration of race: the interest in the educational benefits that flow from a diverse student body. “

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The case, Fisher V. University of Texas at Austin, was argued in October, and involved a white woman suing the university for rejecting her in 2008, arguing that the school's policy of affirmative action violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.

In its ruling, the Supreme Court found that the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals "did not hold the University to the demanding burden of strict scrutiny" when it ruled in favor of the school, and vacated the lower court's ruling.

Strict scrutiny is the highest standard that courts apply when reviewing a law that either discriminates on the basis of some characteristic (race, gender, etc.), or (as in cases involving abortion laws) interferes with a constitutional right. In these cases, the court typically applies two tests to determine whether or not the law will survive: First, whether the government has a compelling interest for creating a policy (in affirmative action cases this is usually diversity in the classroom), and second, whether the law is "narrowly tailored" to that particular interest (in this case, that would mean there were no other race neutral policies that could accomplish the same objective).

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While waiting to gain entrance to Deen's "Lady and Sons" restaurant, a mostly white group of men and women discussed the network's decision, Deen's comments and their take on race relations in the U.S, as the New York Times reports:

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Paula Deen, who lives in Savannah, Ga., revels in Southern culture and her shows on the Food Network pay decadent and unapologetic homage to all manner of Southern cooking. She is a proud daughter of the South and, apparently, she carries the effects of the South’s complex and fraught racial history.

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The revelations of NSA’s collection of “metadata” -- as cybersecurity expert Susan Landau explained on "Democracy Now" -- is, in fact, even more invasive than actual content collection. She gives an example of how that can be the case: Even if all the NSA does is trace the one or more calls from your home to your doctor on a day when you would normally be at work, followed by one or more calls from your phone that is now located at the doctor’s office to your family, that information strongly suggests that the content of the call was bad news.

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Mounting domestic and international pressure against the PRISM surveillance program has forced the Obama administration to concede that the revelations have sparked “an appropriate debate.” Concern – and in some cases, outrage -- at these measures has been expressed by general members of the public and politicians, many of whom made no secret of their anger or mistrust toward them. Given the seriousness of the allegations, the outrage expressed at such a situation is obviously justified; the courage of the leaker and those taking the fight to government, commendable.

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The difference was tiny -- there were just 12,400 more deaths than births -- but part of a significant trend toward greater diversity in the United States; demographers predict that white Americans will become a statistical minority by 2050.

Growing racial and ethnic diversity means that immigrants and young people of color will be in large part subsidizing America's aging population, as USA Today notes:

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According to the report, 71 percent of fourth-grade teachers surveyed said they had grouped students by reading ability in 2009, up from 28 percent in 1998. In math, 61 percent of fourth-grade teachers grouped students by ability in 2011, a 40 percent increase since 1996.

Teachers using the practice say it's a necessary strategy to manage large classrooms with varying academic strengths and weaknesses represented among students. They also report that these ability clusters are dynamic and change throughout the year to accomodate students' evolving strengths and struggles, as the New York Times reports:

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Disturbing new research suggests the answer to that question may depend on your political ideology.

In three experiments, “we found that conservatives were more likely than liberals to categorize a racially ambiguous person as black than white,” a research team led by New York University psychologist Amy Krosch writes in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology.

Intriguingly, this dynamic disappeared when the study participants—white Americans—were told they were judging Canadian faces. The tendency for those on the right to more quickly categorize someone as “black” only occurred when they were evaluating their fellow countrymen.

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It's an amusing story, so the Daily Caller wrote up a little item on it. What's less amusing is how the conservative news website tweeted its story:

The Caller quickly deleted the tweet, but that screen grab comes courtesy of a self-described "conservative activist," who grabbed it and posted the image on Twitter.

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