What Judge Sotomayor said at Berkeley in 2001:
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.
Many on the right – Rush, Newt, Shelby Steele, Pat Buchanan, etc – have jumped on this as racist. After all, look at how it sounds when you use the old change-the-races-in-a-statement trick:
I would hope that a wise white male with the richness of his experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a Latina woman who hasn’t lived that life.
Sounds bad.
Most on the left defend her by saying that if you read the whole 4000-word speech you will find that that is not quite what she meant.
Well, no: that is what she meant. The speech in fact is about just that point: how her colour and sex affects her judgement of the law. She noted how few judges were female, black or Hispanic and how courts on the whole will make better decisions the more such judges they have.
She points out that Oliver Wendell Holmes, a very wise white man who was one of the greatest judges America has ever known, still for all that upheld laws that were unfair to blacks and to women. A mistake she would not have made simply because, unlike Justice Holmes, she knows first-hand what it is like to be a woman and not to be white.
Judges try to be as fair-minded as possible, of course, but they are only human, as was Justice Holmes. White male judges are affected by their colour and sex too. To think otherwise is to throw history and common sense out the door.
What about those white firefighters Sotomayor ruled against in Ricci v DeStefano? Well, what about the many times she has ruled against blacks and Hispanics? You do not hear about that because the loudmouths on radio and television are mostly white men who do not care about those cases. Nor do they fit the “empathy” image the left pushes.
So was her statement racist? Maybe in letter but not in spirit. But if America had been ruled by Latina women for over 300 years and if all but four of the justices on the Supreme Court during the past 200 years were Latina women, so that the law favoured them over everyone else, then, yes, it would have been racist – and boneheaded.
And it would have also been untrue: the powerful are largely blind to the bad they do; they believe in self-serving lies. The powerless and the outsider, on the other hand, have every reason to see things as they are.
The change-the-races-in-a-statement trick, while it appeals to common sense and colour-blind fairness, overlooks how history, power and racism itself have made the races unequal, so much so that when a white man says something it means something different than when a Latina woman says it.
See also:
The short answer to the question posed at the beginning of this post is, “No.” Agabond’s discussion is spot-on.
I would add something, though relative to this part of Agabond’s post:
“The change-the-races-in-a-statement trick, while it appeals to common sense and colour-blind fairness, overlooks how history, power and racism itself have made the races unequal, so much so that when a white man says something it means something different than when a Latina woman says it.”
In our nation’s past, say, 50 or so years, we have willingly adopted a number of legal and social structures designed to address the structures and historical artifacts of our racist past. These structures include things like affirmative action and an acceptance of certain types of expressions of ethinic identity or pride.
While these structures have been necessary and important, it is also important to keep in mind that they do in fact create double standards. “It’s okay to discriminate against one group in favor of another.” “It’s okay to proclaim the inherent, genetic superiority of a member of one ethnicity over that of another.”
At one time in our nation’s history, voices of anger over racism against blacks and other ethnic minorities were considered fringe or outsider. Yet it was the outrage in those voices that ultimately lead our nation down the path we took in the civil rights and post civil rights era.
Similarly, at some point, it will be time to stop. The voices nowadays raising the “race switching” argument remind us of the double standard. They are important.
Thus, though I agree that, for the time being, what Sotomayor said was legitimate and important and well within the realm of acceptable speech, I am glad that we live in a nation where scolds can publicly decry this state of affairs and urge a post-racial or race-neutral standard of public discourse.
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That is interesting: what she said was racist but allowable under the current racial dispensation.
I am not sure about Newt Gingrich, but I have heard and read enough of what Pat Buchanan and Rush Limbaugh have said to know they are just plain old racists. They are not gadflies pushing America forwards to a more honest, post-racial future.
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I agree with your opinion of Buchanan and Limbaugh, and would add Gingrich to that same group. It’s not the individuals expressing the opinions that I value. It is the expression of those opinions.
Certainly at this point in US history there will only be a limited number of people voicing those opinions — racists, bi-racial activists, maybe some libertarians. My point is that one of the things that makes our nation work is the freedom for those voices to be uttered at all. If they were silenced entirely, we’d risk descending into a sort of PC reverse-racist facsism.
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How are Pat Buchanan and Rush Limbaugh racist? You think anyone who doesn’t kiss blk peoples ass is a racist.
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