T

he 
Equal 
Rights 

Amendment was first 
introduced to Congress 

in 1923 by suffragists Alice 
Paul and Crystal Eastman. In 
1972, it passed in Congress, 
but the necessary number of 
states failed to ratify it by 
the 1982 deadline. Since then, 
it has incited a great deal of 
debate on both sides of the 
aisle. In the revolutionary and 
arguably electric atmosphere 
we’re living in, the Equal 
Rights 
Amendment 
should 

finally be ratified and added to 
the Constitution. 

The 
Equal 
Rights 

Amendment is a proposed 
amendment broken down into 
three sections. The sections 
read 
as 
follows: 
“Section 

1: Equality of rights under 
the law shall not be denied 
or abridged by the United 
States or by any State on 
account of sex. Section 2: The 
Congress shall have the power 
to enforce, by appropriate 
legislation, 
the 
provisions 

of this article. Section 3: 
This amendment shall take 
effect 2 years after the date 
of ratification.” Supporters of 
the ERA argue its necessity 
is borne out of a lack of 
Constitutional interpretation 
of the rights of women as 
an 
identity 
deserving 
of 

equality even within the 14th 
Amendment. 

Further, the ERA is meant 

to 
clearly 
codify 
women 

and men as of equal class — 
guaranteeing “equal justice 
under law” on the basis of sex. 
Section 1 of the ERA would be 
the first explicit mention of 
“women” in the Constitution. 
Many who disagree with the 
ERA use the 14th Amendment 
and the Equal Pay Act to argue 
that it would be a superfluous, 
even redundant, amendment. 

This is not the case. The 

14th Amendment was ratified 
after the Civil War and was 
meant to specifically address 
the immense racial injustice 
in 1868. If it had effectively 
acknowledged women as an 
equal sex, women (at least 
white women, considering that 
most women of color were not 
granted suffrage until decades 
later) would have been granted 
suffrage then as opposed to 
52 years later with the 19th 
Amendment in 1920. Without 
the Equal Rights Amendment, 
current legal protections, like 
that of the Equal Pay Act, can 
theoretically be removed by a 
single vote. Delving even deeper, 
ratification of the ERA would 
emphasize the consideration and 
protection 
against 
sex-based 

discrimination legally. We must 
secure a better foundation of 
constitutional equality through 
explicitly stating the necessity 
of legal equity; without the ERA, 
this cannot happen.

Judge Amy Coney Barrett’s 

confirmation 
as 
a 
Supreme 

Court Justice was met with 
unease and apprehension from 
many pro-choice women (and 
men). In the already turbulent, 
near-apocalyptic 
atmosphere, 

the possibility that the progress 
made by determined feminists — 
such as the late Associate Justice 
Ruth Bader Ginsburg — could 
potentially be undone is enough 
to pass an amendment that will 
protect the major advances in 
women’s rights. 

Despite 
having 
received 

ratification by the required 38 
states, the ERA has been met 
with many legal challenges that 
have prevented its certification 
as an official part of the United 
States Constitution. While it 
gets a bit complicated the more 
that you attempt to untangle this 
political and legal conundrum, 

it gets boiled down to this: 
there are two strategies for the 
ratification of the ERA. The first 
is through the Constitutional 
Ratification Process in Article V 
of the Constitution; a two-thirds 
majority vote in the Senate and 
the House of Representatives 
is required before it is sent 
for 
three-fourths 
of 
state 

legislatures 
to 
ratify. 
The 

second mode is known as the 
“Three-State Strategy” which 
emphasizes that only three more 
states were needed in addition 
to the 35 existing ratifications 
that supporters argue should be 
deemed legally viable. 

It is imperative that we ratify 

this amendment. By declaring 
a “zero tolerance” message, the 
Equal Rights Amendment gives 
a megaphone to the millions of 
activists who have fought for 
and passed the legislation that 
has continued to work toward 
equality for all people. 

Since its inception in 1923, 

the ERA has remained an active 
component 
in 
the 
political 

conversations 
of 
equality 

and 
feminism. 
President-

elect Joe Biden — an avid 
supporter of the ERA — has 
personally 
co-sponsored 
the 

ERA ratification nine times. 
Directly 
on 
his 
campaign’s 

website, 
Biden 
includes 

extensive 
information 
about 

his agenda for women; within 
this agenda, it explicitly states: 
“as President he will work with 
advocates across the country to 
enshrine gender equality in our 
Constitution” in reference to 
passage of the ERA. With our 
first female Vice President-elect 
Kamala Harris alongside Biden, 
it is time to learn more about 
the ERA and finally see it in our 
Constitution.

Wednesday, November 18, 2020
Opinion
The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com

The terrifying world of ants puts 

humans in perspective

MARGARET RUDNICK | COLUMN

Affirmative action is here to stay

JESSIE MITCHELL | COLUMN

It’s time to pass the ERA

D

onald Trump may be 
on his way out, but 
the war on affirmative 

action 
remains 
ongoing. 

Despite the fact that lawsuits 
against universities for their 
admissions policies have been 
largely unsuccessful, both the 
Department of Justice and 
private conservative activist 
groups continue to file them. In 
early October, the Department 
of 
Justice 
filed 
a 
lawsuit 

against Yale for race-based 
discrimination, adding another 
high profile affirmative action 
case to the mix. Though the 
Supreme Court has ruled four 
times in the last forty years 
that 
affirmative 
action 
is 

constitutional, Harvard, the 
University of Texas at Austin 
and the University of North 
Carolina at Chapel Hill are all 
fighting similar suits. 

The fight for schools to 

remain race-conscious in an 
effort to maintain diversity 
and reach their educational 
goals has been fought and won 
many times in the nation’s 
highest courts. While every 
new 
lawsuit 
alleges 
that 

taking race into account is 
discriminatory and ruinous 
to the meritocratic principles 
of this nation, time and time 
again, the data does not bear 
this out. It makes me wonder if 
Students for Fair Admissions, 
one of the primary groups 
bringing these lawsuits, has 
heard of legacy preference.

A 
lawsuit, 
brought 
by 

Students for Fair Admissions 
against 
UNC’s 
admission 

criteria, is continuing to a 
federal trial this week. The 
suit alleges that race is used 
“at every stage” of determining 
the admission decisions of 
Black and Hispanic students. 
However, statistical analyses 
of the admissions decisions 
differ substantially, showing 
that race accounts for under 
1% of decisions to up to 42% of 
in-state Black applicants. UNC 
denies that race is more than 
one of a multitude of factors 
used in admissions. 

Though the Supreme Court 

has held that racial quotas are 
unconstitutional, affirmative 
action 
and 
admissions 
or 

hiring practices that consider 
race as one of many factors 
were deemed permissible. 

Students
for
Fair 

Admissions 
argue 
that 

diversity could be achieved 
by concentrating admissions 
decisions around geography 
or 
socioeconomics 
instead 

of race — a “race-neutral” 
approach. UNC and Harvard, 
who has also dealt with 
recent 
challenges 
to 
its 

consideration 
of 
race 
in 

admissions, both claim this 
proposed change would only 
serve to reduce diversity. 

There is plenty of evidence 

to suggest that UNC and 
Harvard are correct. Chicago 
Public Schools used race-
based admissions as a way 
to diversify its test-in high 
schools until 2009, when it 
turned 
to 
socioeconomic-

based 
admissions 
after 
a 

court mandate to integrate 
students 
based 
on 
race, 

defining 
them 
as 
either 

“‘white’ or ‘minority,’” was 
lifted. Socioeconomic status 
as a factor for admissions 
to 
these 
selective 
high 

schools was intended to help 
maintain the racial diversity 
of the schools. 

Socioeconomic factors are 

applied to census tracts in the 
city, designating each census 
tract tier 1-4. Schools then 
take a certain percentage of 
their 
student 
populations 

from each tier, with 30% of the 
seats going to the top scorers, 
regardless of their tier. From 
2009 to 2019, the percentage 
of white students at Walter 
Payton College Preparatory 
High School, one of the city’s 
top public high schools, has 
increased from 36% to 44%, 
while the percentage of Black 
students has decreased from 
26% to 11%. For context, the 
district was about 11% white 
in 2019, compared to almost 
36% Black. 

Not only are “race-neutral” 

approaches 
to 
achieving 

racial 
diversity 
in 
schools 

ineffective, 
they 
are 
also 

nonsensical. As argued in the 
“Journal of Law Reform” at 
the University of Michigan, 
“a ‘race neutral alternative’ 
only makes sense when the 
goal itself is race neutral.” For 
as long as schools hold racial 
diversity as important to their 
educational mission, it makes 
sense to be race conscious 
during the admissions process. 

But what about the poor 

victims of affirmative action? 
Depending 
on 
where 
you 

are and who you ask, these 
are usually either white or 
Asian 
American 
students. 

At 
Harvard, 
where 
the 

affirmative action suit hinges 
around 
admissions 
policies 

that are allegedly unfair to 
Asian 
American 
students, 

even if all Black and Latinx 
applicants were eliminated, 
the 
percentage 
of 
Asian 

American students admitted 
would rise by only about 1%. In 
California — where affirmative 
action has been banned in 
the University of California 
university system since 1998 
— the share of Asian students 
has declined, suggesting that 
they were beneficiaries of 
affirmative action. 

In the case of UT-Austin, 

the white plaintiff in Fisher v. 
The University of Texas was 
denied admission, but so were 
168 Black or Latinx students 
with grades as good or better 
than hers. Affirmative action 
has been a huge boost to 
white women specifically, and 
it is also worth noting that 
at elite colleges, preference 
for legacy admits plays a far 
larger role than race and 
disproportionately 
favors

white 
students. 
In 
other 

words, if you didn’t get into 
your dream school, it’s far 
more likely that a white kid 
took “your” spot.

Jessie Mitchell can be reached at 

jessiemi@umich.edu.

MADELYN VERVAECKE | CONTACT CARTOONIST AT MIVERVAE@UMICH.EDU

JESS D’AGOSTINO | COLUMN

Jess D’Agostino can be reached at 

jessdag@umich.edu.

Design courtesy of Yassmine El-Rewini

A

nts are small, numerous 
and have taken over the 
surface of the world. 

These seemingly innocuous, tiny 
creatures are deadly in their 
world of thievery, conquest 
and warfare. In a way that 
corresponds to human nature, 
some species of ants beg, borrow 
and steal from neighboring 
colonies to survive. Argentine 
ants, in particular, have spread 
throughout the world to every 
continent except Antarctica in 
a global imperialistic invasion. 
Many parallels can be drawn 
between the behaviors of ants 
and humans that can allow us 
to examine our own behavior in 
a new light. We can and should 
learn from the inner workings 
of ant society.

Animals 
in 
nature 
often 

commit what we today would 
view as war acts without 
remorse, tearing other animals 
limb from limb and eradicating 
neighboring tribes or nations; 
ants are no exception. They 
pillage rival anthills, killing 
millions of their kind almost 
every day. Some ant species 
resort to downright exploding 
themselves to take down foes. 
This kills not only the larger 
attacking ant but the attacker 
themselves. This ant’s only 
purpose at this moment is to 
die for its tribe, despite its 
lifelong work of collecting food, 
sustaining itself and being 
useful to its colony. The ant’s 
sacrifice will benefit the colony 
but at the extreme expense of 

taking its own life. 
Ants commit the ultimate 

individual sacrifice for the 
sake of the colony without 
hesitating 
or 
knowing 
the 

enormity of their actions to 
their community. We like to 
think that humans are strong 
and brave for rising above 
our built-in selfish natures 
by committing small acts of 
altruism, but this perception 
needs 
reconsideration. 
The 

average human isn’t selfless 
when compared to almost any 
ant in existence. 

Another 
perception 
that 

needs changing: Humans are 
the ultimate social creature on 
Earth, collaborating to erect 
massive works of architecture 
and 
complex 
intellectual 

theories. You guessed it. Ants 
are one of the most social 
creatures on Earth — more so 
than humans. In fact, they’re 
hive creatures (the scientific 
term for this is eusociality). They 
do things for their colonies that 
most humans wouldn’t dream 
of doing for their own countries 
without major consideration.

There are more than 16,000 

different ant species on the 
planet today. In fact, scientists 
estimate 
a 
total 
of 
20,000 

species of ants in existence 
on Earth, which means about 
4,000 species have yet to be 
discovered. 
Behavior 
varies 

between the different species 
(e.g. some ant species focus on 
foraging for plants while others 
almost exclusively raid other 
nests and insects). Despite great 
physiological diversity among 
species, almost all individual 
ants exhibit a willingness to 
sacrifice for the entire nest more 
than an individual human would 
for a town or country, bringing 
us back to the point that human 
selflessness as a construct lags 
behind that of ants.

As well as being more selfless 

and more social than humans, 
ants do war better than we do. 
Among the 16,000 total ant 
species discovered, there is an 
“army ant” sect that consists of 
200 ant species. These aggressive 
species raid other animals to 
obtain food, attacking prey with 
enormous 
numbers. 
Warrior 

ants such as the Argentine ant 
and the red imported fire ant 
are waging wars daily, killing 
and consuming hundreds of 
thousands of prey animals per 
day. Humans have taken over the 
world in the sense that we have 
conquered most of the available 
land on Earth, and it’s interesting 
to think that ants have already 
done this; after all, they’ve had 
160 million years of existence to 

spread themselves around the 
world. This is the consequence of 
perfectly synchronized sociality 
and sacrifice.

We praise the qualities of 

social achievement and altruistic 
behavior, but from ants we have 
learned that these qualities are 
not good for an animal in the 
extreme. If groups of humans 
were fully social or completely 
altruistic, we could have mass 
war on our hands — and everyone 
can agree that that is not a good 
thing.

Army ants have very few 

means of communication relative 
to humans. Visually, they can tell 
night from day and distinguish 
almost nothing more than that. 
They can’t even form an image of 
the world around them, relying 
on their senses of smell and touch 
for detecting vibrations. Their 
only tool for communication is 
the use of pheromones. However, 
warrior ants are still capable of 
amassing huge groups for raids, 
sometimes 
even 
more 
than 

100,000 individuals — amazing 
given how difficult it is for 
humans to organize ourselves 
with all five of our senses. Their 
behavior can even inform how 
computers should be organized, 
because it’s miraculous that they 
can successfully function socially 
given their limited forms of 
communication. 

The world of army ants and 

their ant neighbors is vicious. We 
should care about ants because 
their behavior so closely mirrors 
our 
own. 
War, 
cooperation, 

sacrifice: Ants do each of these 
things better than humans ever 
have. Ants are the meta-social 
epitome of what we don’t want 
human society to become. Every 
day, thousands of ants die as 
their colonies bring chaos and 
violence upon other unassuming 
prey. Their environmental niche 
drives them to kill millions of 
other animals weekly. This is the 
terrifying world that exists under 
the feet of our civilization.

Margaret Rudnick can be reached 

at rudnickm@umich.edu.

