Marriage as Black Citizenship?

The narrative of black marriage as citizenship enhancing has been pervasive in American history. As we mark the fiftieth anniversary of the Moynihan Report and prepare to celebrate the 150th anniversary of Thirteenth Amendment, this Article argues that this narrative is one that we should resist. The complete story of marriage is one that involves racial subordination and caste. Even as the Supreme Court stands to extend marriage rights to LGBT couples, the Article maintains that we should embrace nonmarriage as a legitimate frame for black loving relationships—gay or straight. Nonmarriage might do just as much, if not more, to advance black civil rights. Part I explores marriage’s role in racial subordination by looking at the experiences of African Americans, as well as Native Americans, Puerto Ricans, and Asian Americans. Drawing on institutional structure analyses, it then considers how legal marriage has “married” Blacks to second-class citizenship. Part II explores the current place of marriage in African America. It argues that, while the regulation of black loving relationships today differs dramatically from what we saw in earlier times, family law often has a punitive effect on such American families. Part III contemplates the benefits of adopting a focus on nonmarriage. It contends that meeting black families where they are holds the most potential for progress in addressing the structural barriers to success faced by those families. The Article ends with a “call to action” for legal scholars and others concerned about black families and citizenship. It maps a broad agenda for exploring in earnest the potential that supporting and valuing the existing networks, arrangements, and norms regarding gender and caretaking in African America has for promoting black citizenship and equality in the twenty-first century

Parenting While Black

Changes in law and policy—not to mention developments such as the COVID-19 pandemic and its devastating effects on families—raise important questions about how to define parental rights and how to best support parents and children during these challenging times. The Symposium also presented important questions about issues of race, gender, sexuality, and class in our modern context. Even more salient in this space are issues of race. Here, as in other contexts, Black families, like my grandmother’s and so many others, are the “canaries in the mine.” Their experiences provide us with important insight into the signs of danger facing Black and Brown families. To that extent, the concerns of families, like my grandmother’s, should be at the center of our discussion around families and the challenges they face in this moment. This Essay intervenes in the conversation hosted by the Fordham Law Review by focusing on issues of race, which, as I have indicated elsewhere, remain underexplored in family law scholarship.1 More specifically, it endeavors to give greater context to the term “parenting while Black,” which I utilized in the narrative that launched this iniquity. In the wake of George Floyd’s death at the hands of police in 2020,2 people of all walks of life are all too familiar with the phrase “driving, or even walking, while Black.”3 These phrases reference the scores of Black and Brown people killed or badly injured at the hands of white law enforcement officers, often when the need for such action was plainly unwarranted.4 In deploying the term “parenting while Black,” I mean to invoke not only the criminal justice context, but also all the systems that inform the functioning and well-being of families of color. Enumerating such systems provides us with a deeper appreciation of the obstacles that parents of color must navigate in trying to provide for their children

The combination of ground-based astrometric compilation catalogues with the HIPPARCOS Catalogue. II. Long-term predictions and short-term predictions

The combination of ground-based astrometric compilation catalogues, such as the FK5 or the GC, with the results of the ESA Astrometric Satellite HIPPARCOS produces for many thousands of stars proper motions which are significantly more accurate than the proper motions derived from the HIPPARCOS observations alone. In Paper I (Wielen et al. 1999, A&A 347, 1046) we have presented a method of combination for single stars (SI mode). The present Paper II derives a combination method which is appropriate for an ensemble of 'apparently single-stars' which contains undetected astrometric binaries. In this case the quasi-instantaneously measured HIPPARCOS proper motions and positions are affected by 'cosmic errors', caused by the orbital motions of the photo-centers of the undetected binaries with respect to their center-of-mass. In contrast, the ground-based data are 'mean values' obtained from a long period of observation. We derive a linear 'long-term prediction' (LTP mode) for epochs far from the HIPPARCOS epoch T_H ~ 1991.25, and a linear 'short-term prediction' (STP mode) for epochs close to T_H. The most accurate prediction for a position at an arbitrary epoch is provided by a smooth, non-linear transition from the STP solution to the LTP solution. We present an example for the application of our method, and we discuss the error budget of our method for the FK6 (a combination of the FK5 with HIPPARCOS) and for the combination catalog GC+HIP. For the basic fundamental stars, the accuracy of the FK6 proper motions in the LTP mode is better than that of the HIPPARCOS proper motions (taking here the cosmic errors into account) by a factor of more than 4.Comment: Slightly revised version. Accepted for publication in Astronomy and Astrophysic

Earth Science Informatics Community Requirements for Improving Sustainable Science Software Practices: User Perspectives and Implications for Organizational Action

Science software is integral to the scientific process and must be developed and managed in a sustainable manner to ensure future access to scientific data and related resources. Organizations that are part of the scientific enterprise, as well as members of the scientific community who work within these entities, can contribute to the sustainability of science software and to practices that improve scientific community capabilities for science software sustainability. As science becomes increasingly digital and therefore, dependent on software, improving community practices for sustainable science software will contribute to the sustainability of science. Members of the Earth science informatics community, including scientific data producers and distributers, end-user scientists, system and application developers, and data center managers, use science software regularly and face the challenges and the opportunities that science software presents for the sustainability of science. To gain insight on practices needed for the sustainability of science software from the science software experiences of the Earth science informatics community, an interdisciplinary group of 300 community members were asked to engage in simultaneous roundtable discussions and report on their answers to questions about the requirements for improving scientific software sustainability. This paper will present an analysis of the issues reported and the conclusions offered by the participants. These results provide perspectives for science software sustainability practices and have implications for actions that organizations and their leadership can initiate to improve the sustainability of science software