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Monday April 26, 2021 vol. CXLV no. 41
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Special Opinion Edition
Designed by: Giao Vu Dinh
Major League Baseball was right to condemn Georgia’s voting law. It shouldn’t have left the state.
By Allen Liu
Contributing Columnist
Georgia’s new voting law, Senate Bill 202, has received well-deserved backlash from voting rights advocates, politicians, and business executives. By cutting early voting hours, creating new restrictions on absentee voting, and asserting the legislature’s control over elections, the law disproportionately threatens voting access for voters in densely populated areas and voters of color. The most visible response came from Major League Baseball (MLB). In a decision that drew widespread support, including from President Biden, MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred announced that he would move the MLB All-Star Game from Atlanta, Ga. to Denver, Colo. I give MLB, an organization not known for its political statements, credit for taking a stand on Senate Bill 202. As Senior Columnist Julia Chaffers argued last week, MLB has every right to get involved in politics. However, if it truly wanted to stop the attack on voting rights — which is not just limited to Georgia — it should not have relocated. If MLB’s objective in leaving Georgia was to pressure the legislature and governor into repealing the new voting restrictions, it will most likely fail in achieving this goal. State boycotts by athletic organizations and corporations succeed when the economic costs of a boycott force legislators to reconsider controversial legislation. For example, North
Carolina repealed its controversial “bathroom bill” after the NCAA, musicians, and businesses canceled events or reversed plans to expand into the state, decisions that were estimated to cost the state $3.7 billion over 12 years. However, Georgia’s voting law is fundamentally different from the laws that state boycotts have historically targeted. The law, enacted by a Republican state government almost immediately after narrow Democratic wins in the state, is at its core an attempt to hold onto political power in a state with rapidly changing demographics and politics. While Georgia lawmakers might be concerned about the economic impacts of a boycott, ceding the electoral advantage they created for themselves — and risking being swept out of office — is far worse. Georgia lawmakers’ response to corporate backlash demonstrates this reality. Rather than take responsibility for the potential economic costs of the new law, they have attacked voting rights advocates and corporations that have criticized Senate Bill 202, going as far as voting in one house to revoke Delta’s $35 million jet fuel tax break when the CEO Ed Bastian came out against the law. Governor Brian Kemp, under pressure from members of his own party to crack down on elections after being accused of insufficient loyalty to former President Donald Trump following Trump’s defeat in Georgia last year, accused MLB of caving to pressure from “Stacey Abrams,
“BASEBALL DIAMOND” BY GEOFF LIVINGSTON / CC BY-SA 2.0
Joe Biden, and the left” and promised a “fight.” Given this behavior, it seems unlikely that any boycott, at least under the state’s current leadership, will force a reconsideration of the law. In addition to failing to reverse Georgia’s voting restrictions, MLB’s decision to leave the state will harm the people it intends to help. The departure will cost the state $100 million in lost revenue, according to Holly Quinlan, chief executive of Cobb Travel and Tourism. This will hit the state’s hospitality industry and Metro Atlanta, which is 34 percent Black, the hardest — all during a pandemic that has already disproportionately impacted low-income and minority
workers. Governor Kemp has cited these figures to attack voting rights advocates and opponents of the law (neglecting his own responsibility for this harm). However, vocal opponents of the law, including Stacey Abrams and Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms, have also noted the significant effects that the MLB’s decision will have on vulnerable communities. True, effective advocacy necessitates some pain — Stacey Abrams, who opposes MLB’s decision, recognizes this. However, this pain has to accomplish the advocacy’s goal, and it must be absolutely necessary. MLB’s decision does not meet either of these criteria. If MLB simply wanted to
create awareness about the harms of the Georgia voter legislation by moving the AllStar Game, then they should have just stayed in Georgia, where they could have drawn national attention to the state during the game and used its platform to make a statement against a nationwide attack on voting rights. They could have promoted the work of organizations such as Fair Fight Action that are fighting voter suppression and supported candidates in Georgia who would expand voting access. By leaving Georgia, the MLB relinquished its best opportunity to wield its influence as an athletic organization to support voting rights. See OPINION for more
Let us be the generation that ends exclusionary zoning By Matt Mleczko Graduate Student Columnist
If you venture to the south side of campus near Poe Field, you’ll likely see the construction of Princeton’s two newest residential colleges. Notably, if you approach the chain link fencing from the north, you’ll see a banner declaring that these new residential colleges are meant to “expand our enrollment and bring opportunities to more students.” As far as I can tell, few, if any seem to take issue with this notion. Yet, if Princeton students adopted the attitudes of vocal homeowners in the country’s
most advantaged communities, a parade of criticism would encircle these developments. There would be claims that additional enrollment will increase Princeton’s acceptance rate, thereby making the University less prestigious, or increase student to faculty ratios to the detriment of incumbent students, or even negatively alter the character of the university campus. Readers would likely find such arguments both misguided and elitist and they would be right. Nevertheless, these are the very same arguments that a typically unrepresentative group of homeowners use to
CANDACE DO / THE DAILY PRINCETONIAN
Construction continues on the two new residential colleges next to Poe Field.
delay or disrupt almost any kind of development, including desperately needed affordable housing. To achieve this, these actors rely on excessively complex and restrictive zoning laws and procedures — often referred to as exclusionary zoning. Regardless of their intentions, these actors help achieve ends similarly accomplished by a myriad of past, racially discriminatory policies, all with an ostensibly race-neutral cover. Zoning laws — the earliest of which were explicitly racist in intent and implementation — generally assign certain uses to land, such as residential, commercial, industrial, and so on. Though they are seen as arcane and wonky by most, these laws have critical implications for urban inequality, as they ultimately determine who gets to live where. Instead of specifying a certain area of a municipality for residential use, imagine restricting that area exclusively for detached single-family homes, which are more expensive and take up more land per unit than multi-family (apartment) housing. Most won’t need to imagine this: it’s by far the most common type of housing arrangement in the United States and widely mandated throughout the country. See OPINION for more
In Multimedia
Over the past two weeks, spring flowers bloomed as magnolia petals fell. Sophomore students celebrated declaring their concentrations with Declaration Day photos, and Divest Princeton hosted a rally at Nassau Hall.
SYDNEY PENG / THE DAILY PRINCETONIAN
Thus Spoke the Undergrads: On being a filthy cheater By Andi Grene, Claudia Frykberg, and Ethan Magistro Columnists
You are not the first, and nor will you be the last, to be confronted with this question. The answer to it, however, is not as straightforward as you might think. Because of that, the three ethicists disagreed on what was ultimately morally permissible. That’s a free extra dose of drama on top of this already contentious scenario. We can say right off the bat that, should you choose to expose your friend, your friendship with them and their girlfriend will be at best in turmoil, and at worst, terminated altogether. Not only did you disobey your friend’s trust, but you also directly caused an end to what the girlfriend assumed
was a beautiful, healthy relationship, assuming that happens. This does not make you blameworthy, of course. Your friend’s cheating has caused this entire problem; you are not the reason for the bitter end of their relationship. Still, what you do will have pretty big repercussions. And you thought you could stay out of this. Nice try. So, is losing these friendships a cost worth incurring? Despite your desire to preserve the status, your friend’s girlfriend still has a right to know this information about her own relationship. If you choose not to tell her, you are making a decision (whether to stay in the relationship or not) that belongs to her. This is a decision you have no right to make. You may, in fact, See OPINION for more
This weekend, the U.S. finally pledged support for India as they go through one of the world’s worst surges of COVID-19 cases since the pandemic began.