Racy
[2009-06-08 23:15]
President Obama announced Judge Sonia Sotomayor as his Supreme Court nominee on May 26, 2009. Opposition to this candidate seems to be pretty mild, substantively speaking, but charges of racism have cropped up with some frequency over the past few weeks. The charge of racism is based on the following statement made by Judge Sotomayor:
I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn't lived that life.
Some conservatives/republicans have decried this statement and Sotomayor as racist. Liberal talk show hosts, in turn, have portrayed the conservatives/republicans as being stupid or hypocritical. From a non-white male's point-of-view, I think both are right and both are wrong.
I wouldn't go so far as to call Judge Sotomayor racist based on this one statement, but I think white folk have the right to be offended by the remark. Consequently, conservatives and republicans (and anyone else, really) have the right to raise the WTF flag. To dismiss their concerns would be as racially insensitive as ignoring Native Americans' objections to the Cleveland Indians' mascot or the "tomahawk chop".
Only Judge Sotomayor can accurately explain what she meant by the statement, and it is quite possible that she harbors deep-seeded bigotry against white people (white males, especially). But I suspect that this is mostly a case of very poor wording. Like Reverend Jeremiah Wright's controversial "God Damn America" sermon, the biggest problem is probably grammatical.
The problem with Sotomayor's statement is that it contains a lot of ambiguous prepositional phrases and adjectives. How does a "wise Latina" differ from a regular Latina? What exactly does "richness of her experiences" mean? What is a "better conclusion" better than, and how is it better? And a white male who hasn't lived "that life" hasn't lived what life? Is the determining factor in preventing the white man from reaching the better conclusion the fact that he's white, the fact that he's male or the fact that he hasn't "lived that life"? If it's the latter, then why bring up race and gender at all?
Taken by itself and out of context, the statement is broad and seems to suggest that Latina women come to better conclusions about everything than white men. But that's ridiculous and I can't believe that Judge Sotomayor is that brazenly delusional about the world. Unfortunately, the speech from which the statement was taken doesn't clear things up entirely. However, there's enough reasonable doubt that I can't convict her.
Sotomayor's speech was given at the Honorable Mario G. Olmos Law & Cultural Diversity Memorial Lecture, a permanent lecture series dedicated "to the development of law promoting equality and justice for all people." Sotomayor mentions earlier in the speech that her focus is "to discuss with you what it will mean to have more women and people of color on the bench" and the paragraph before the questionable statement discusses "seminal decisions in race and sex discrimination cases" such as Brown v Board of Education and others dealing with "equality in terms and conditions of employment."
In America, it is true that, generally speaking, women have suffered discrimination more than men, and people of color have suffered discrimination more than white folk. In light of this, it is fair to say that women of color, specifically Latina women, have suffered more discrimination as a whole than white men as a whole. Thus, it's fair to say that Latina women will have a different collective point of view than white men with regards to discrimination issues. But, from a purely logical standpoint, that does not mean that every Latina woman is more informed or more insightful about discrimination issues than every white man. It also doesn't mean that white men are incapable of understanding discrimination issues (all it takes is a little empathy). And it doesn't mean that white people have never felt the stings of discrimination themselves (take gays, Irish and Italians, for example). And if the amount of discrimination suffered by a person is the determining factor in who will make a good judge, then wouldn't a fat African-American lesbian be the best candidate (maybe throw in left-handed and amputee for good measure)?
The saving grace of Sotomayor's speech is when she talks about having "more women and people of color" in judicial positions. She makes a good argument that people have biases based on their experiences. To say that women and people of color would be bad candidates because of their biases, she argues, is to ignore the biases held by white men (or is to assume that the white male bias is the "correct" bias to have).
In light of this, I suspect that Sotomayor meant to make a generalized statement about the quality of rulings made by a diverse judicial body (which includes women and people of color and white men), but also tried to use herself as a specific example, and tried to tie that into the historical context of Brown v the Board of Education (and other pivotal decisions) all at the same time. Unfortunately, the result was a bad statement that doesn't make a lot of sense.
By the way, I think the Comments feature of this blog aren't working anymore (cuz I haven't paid to renew them). So, if you've left a comment recently, it likely went nowhere.