Why France Needs to Collect Data on Racial Identity... In a French Way

French constitutional law, which embraces equality as a founding principle, prohibits the state from collecting data about race, ethnicity or religion, and French culture is deeply averse to the legitimacy of racial identity. France is thus, in American parlance, officially color-blind. But in France, as in the United States, the principle of color-blindness masks a deeply colorconscious society, in which race and ethnicity are closely linked to discrimination and disadvantage. French law, and Frenchincorporated European law, requires the state to prohibit discrimination, including indirect discrimination. But in the absence of racial identity data, it is difficult for the state to uncover such discrimination. This paper examines how discrimination is measured in the United States, and suggests that some of the methods used in the United States are available in France despite the limitations imposed by French law. In some cases, these methods are already in use. I conclude that France must broaden its use of existing methods for measuring discrimination, and must adopt new methods, in order to comply with its obligation to address the problem of racial and ethnic inequality

California\u27s Anti-Discrimination Legislation, Proposition 14, and the Constitutional Protection of Minority Rights: The Fiftieth Anniversary of the California Fair Employment and Housing Act

Fifty years ago, in 1959, the State of California outlawed racial discrimination in employment. But it took the California Legislature four more years to prohibit racial discrimination in private housing, and the immediate response was a successful campaign by the real-estate industry to repeal the law through a voter initiative. This essay tells the story of that campaign and the courageous judicial decisions that nullified the initiative

The Photon Underproduction Crisis

We examine the statistics of the low-redshift Lyman-alpha forest from smoothed particle hydrodynamic simulations in light of recent improvements in the estimated evolution of the cosmic ultraviolet background (UVB) and recent observations from the Cosmic Origins Spectrograph (COS). We find that the value of the metagalactic photoionization rate required by our simulations to match the observed properties of the low-redshift Lyman-alpha forest is a factor of 5 larger than the value predicted by state-of-the art models for the evolution of this quantity. This mismatch results in the mean flux decrement of the Lyman-alpha forest being underpredicted by at least a factor of 2 (a 10-sigma discrepancy with observations) and a column density distribution of Lyman-alpha forest absorbers systematically and significantly elevated compared to observations over nearly two decades in column density. We examine potential resolutions to this mismatch and find that either conventional sources of ionizing photons (galaxies and quasars) must be significantly elevated relative to current observational estimates or our theoretical understanding of the low-redshift universe is in need of substantial revision.Comment: Submitted to ApJ Letters; 6 pages including 3 figure