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Sotomayor and the Politics of Public Humiliation
The hearing was a performance of a broader set of social rules that govern race and gender interactions in American politics. Women, and most especially black and brown women, have to prove their fitness for public life by demonstrating the ability to endure harsh brutality without openly fighting back. The ability to bear up under public degradation is a test of worth. America's favorite black woman heroine is Rosa Parks, a woman who is remembered as silently enduring the humiliation of being ejected from a public bus for refusing to comply with segregated seating.
Sotomayor passed the test. She met the Senators' questioning with thoughtful responses. Her voice did not quiver. Her face did not scowl. Many women of all races feel inspired by her. But I wonder about this lesson that continues to teach women that we can only have space in the public realm as long as we control all emotion.
Sotomayor: A lot of 'splainin' to do | rabble.ca
Note that she refers to the richness, not the harshness, of the life. It doesn't only embitter, it can enlarge. On a private level, most of us have been through things we'd never have chosen but -- if we handled them or just survived -- that enriched and improved us, put us more in touch with what it is to be human. In a way, it would have been a shame to miss them (but only in a way; these things are hedged with ambiguity). In the suburban, privileged community where I went to high school, kids often wrote short stories with stark endings, reflecting nothing they'd experienced -- as if they sensed that, while materially advantaged, they might be experientially deprived.
This also applies to our experiences as members of groups. Speaking as a Jew, I think one reason North American Jews identify so powerfully with Israel is a sense that the soulfulness of past Jewish experience is missing in their generally comfortable lives. They'd never want to repeat the horror, but they miss the intensity. This is a familiar enough paradox.
So the southern white senator who whined that if he'd "said something like that or someone with my background," he'd have no chance of reaching the Supreme Court -- was wrong. He'd be fine if he repeated Sonia Sotomayor literally: that a wise Latina is more likely etc. I don't really see why he doesn't agree with her. Perhaps what galls people like him -- and made her back off -- is not the claim that the Latina would make a better judge but the chutzpah to say she has a richer life. Privileged people often share this sense but don't expect to have their noses rubbed in it. It's so uppity.
Hullabaloo > Not Your Grandfather's Bigotry
Liberals who follow politics closely are no doubt disoriented to see someone as accomplished as Sonia Sotomayor attacked for being a bullying racist by a bunch of racist bullies, but I think we should probably get a grip and understand that this is what racism looks like in 2009. The assertion of white male privilege through whining victimization is one of the main ways it will be manifested going forward. And it's quite effective --- it appeals to people's own hidden prejudices in a way that doesn't socially embarrass them and allows them to use fairness as a weapon, which is a great relief to bigots who have been on the defensive for decades.
Testimony
It is fair to inquire into a nominee's judicial philosophy, and we will have serious and fair inquiry. But the pretence that Republican nominees embody modesty and restraint, or that Democratic nominees must be activists, runs counter to recent history.
I particularly reject the analogy of a judge to an "umpire" who merely calls "balls and strikes." If judging were that mechanical, we wouldn't need nine Supreme Court Justices. The task of an appellate judge, particularly on a court of final appeal, is often to define the strike zone, within a matrix of Constitutional principle, legislative intent, and statutory construction.
Truthdig - A/V Booth - Sotomayor According to Colbert
many have even asked their gardener what his name is
Op-Ed Columnist - The Howls of a Fading Species - NYTimes.com
Here’s the thing. Suddenly these hideously pompous and self-righteous white males of the right are all concerned about racism. They’re so concerned that they’re fully capable of finding it in places where it doesn’t for a moment exist. Not just finding it, but being outraged by it to the point of apoplexy. Oh, they tell us, this racism is a bad thing!
Are we supposed to not notice that these are the tribunes of a party that rose to power on the filthy waves of racial demagoguery. I don’t remember hearing their voices or the voices of their intellectual heroes when the Republican Party, as part of its Southern strategy, aggressively courted the bigots who fled the Democratic Party because the Democrats had become insufficiently hostile to blacks.
Where were the howls of outrage at this strategy that was articulated by Lee Atwater as follows: “By 1968, you can’t say ‘nigger’ — that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff.”
Never a peep did you hear.
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There is every reason to hope that we’ve improved as a society to the point where the racial and ethnic craziness of the Gingriches and Limbaughs will finally have a tough time finding any sort of foothold.
Newt Gingrich Doubles Down On Sotomayor Racism Charge - Swampland – TIME.com
From the Desk of Newt Gingrich
"I have a dream: that my four little children will one day live
in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their
skin, but by the content of their character."
- Dr. Martin Luther King
Can you imagine if the President of the United States nominated a judge to the U.S. Supreme Court who said this:
"My experience as a white man will make me a better judge than a Latina woman would be."
Or could you imagine if that same judge ruled from the bench to deny 18 African-American firefighters a promotion just because of their skin color?
That judge would be called a bigot -- and in my judgment, rightly so! Would there be any doubt that he would be FORCED to WITHDRAW his nomination for the Supreme Court?
Gingrich calls Sotomayor a racist. Bloomberg, Klein and Sharpton welcome him as an education reformer. « Fred Klonsky’s blog
Who was surprised that former GOP Speaker of the House and son of the Confederacy would attack Supreme Court Nominee Sonia Sotomayor on the basis that she’s a Puerto Rican woman who has a history of ruling in favor of equal rights?
But how ironic that just a week ago the same Gingrich was welcomed to speak at the rally sponsored by the Education Equality Project, the self-named education reformers organized by NY Mayor Bloomberg, NY school chief Joel Klein and the Reverend Al Sharpton. This group also counts among its supporters the EdSec himself, Arne Duncan.
I’m sure Gingrich felt right at home with this bunch. And they with him?
Twitter / Newt Gingrich: White man racist nominee w ...
White man racist nominee would be forced to withdraw. Latina woman racist should also withdraw.
Newt Gingrich Reaches His Sell-By Date
Gingrich tweeted off the deep end Wednesday when he jumped over the cliff of responsible Republicanism and into the chasm of right-wing talk-radio delusion.
Responding via Twitter to the nomination of Federal Appeals Court Judge Sonia Sotomayor to fill the vacancy that will be created by the retirement of Justice David Souter, Gingrich did not think. He took his talking points from Limbaugh, who has been trying to foster the fantasy that the nominee is some kind of "reverse racist."
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Had Gingrich bothered to read Judge Sotomayor's speech, rather than simply take a talking point from Gingrich, he would have quickly realized that the jurist was ruminating on how to assure that biases do not unfairly influence decisions or undermine justice.
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Newt Gingrich's tweets mark him as the outlier.
Instead of calling for Judge Sotomayor to withdraw her nomination, the former speaker might want to consider whether it time for him to withdraw from the public debate he disminishes and dishonors by repeating the crude fantasies of a talk-radio ranter.
Sam Alito, Affirmative Action Baby? | Mother Jones
there has been less talk about another Supreme Court controversy that revolved around race and gender politics at Princeton University. In November 2005, a few weeks after George W. Bush nominated Samuel Alito, documents emerged showing that in a 1985 application for a job in the Reagan Justice Department, Alito had listed under his “personal qualifications” the fact that he was "a member of the Concerned Alumni of Princeton University, a conservative alumni group."
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As Princeton admitted a growing number of minority students, Concerned Alumni charged repeatedly that the administration was lowering admission standards, undermining the university's distinctive traditions and admitting too few children of alumni....A pamphlet for parents suggested that "racial tensions" and loose oversight of campus social life were contributing to a spike in campus crime. A brochure for Princeton alumni warned, "The unannounced goal of the administration, now achieved, of a student population of approximately 40 percent women and minorities will largely vitiate the alumni body of the future."
Op-Ed Columnist - The Empathy Issue - NYTimes.com
David Brooks: The crucial question in evaluating a potential Supreme Court justice, therefore, is not whether she relies on empathy or emotion, but how she does so.
t r u t h o u t | Empathy, Sotomayor, and Democracy: The Conservative Stealth Strategy
There are several fronts: empathy, feelings, racism, activist judges. Each one has a hidden dimension. And if progressives think conservative attacks are just about Sotomayor, they may wind up helping conservatives regroup.
Conservatives believe that Sotomayor will be confirmed, and so their attacks may seem irrational to Democrats, a last gasp, a grasping at straws, a sign that the party is breaking up.
Actually, something sneakier and possibly dangerous is going on.
Hullabaloo
As always, the working class white guys Limbaugh is enlisting in his posse are being duped. The enemy is the fellow who's telling them they should fight all the women and minorities who are coming to "return the country's wealth to its rightful owners" instead of looking to the old boys network that pays that same blowhard hundreds of millions of dollars to misdirect their legitimate anger away from the people who are bleeding the country dry.
Right wing populism always comes down to demagoguing on race, religion or some such which always ends up serving the wealthy interests very nicely. Complaining that a Latina judge is both a racist and an "affirmative action" hire for the court is an excellent phony symbol of the change that inspires the anger and insecurity so many people feel out there --- including the anger and insecurity of the villagers, who are feeling that the riff-raff are coming to town to trash the place --- and it's not their place.
Hullabaloo
Conservatives want their justices to empathize with the religious, the unborn, and powerful corporate interests. Liberals want their justices to empathize with women and minorities, workers and the downtrodden.
For all the pearl-clutching horror coming from the right, the conservative legal movement has picked its plaintiffs carefully, with an eye toward catching the winds of public opinion through sympathetic plaintiffs such as Frank Ricci, the white firefighter who was denied a promotion, or Terri Schiavo's parents, Robert and Mary Schindler, who sought to keep Schiavo on life support despite her husband's claim that she expressed a desire not to be kept alive in a persistent vegetative state. Empathy is an important element of the conservative legal movement on both sides of the bench. Most recently, it's been conservatives who have been arguing for empathy for the architects and perpetrators of torture on the grounds that they broke the law ostensibly in the interest of the country, while liberals have called for rigidity in upholding laws against torture.
A revealing anecdote about Sonia Sotomayor - Glenn Greenwald - Salon.com
Sotomayor methodically recounted the evidence of discrimination and, in as cold and legalistic a manner as possible, concluded that Norville "produced insufficient evidence at trial to show that the hospital" discriminated against her. She thus affirmed the trial judge's dismissal of Norville's claims of race and age discrimination.
False excuses for anonymity and irrationality on affirmative action - Glenn Greenwald - Salon.com
It's hard to imagine anything more contradictory than (a) the right-wing argument that empathy and political opinions have no place in judicial decision-making and (b) the right-wing argument that Sotomayor wrongly decided the Ricci "firefighters" case because what happened to Frank Ricci was terribly unfair and because affirmative action is a bad policy.
Inveighing against Sotomayor's Ricci decision by touting all the sad things that happened to Frank Ricci (Krauthammer: "he spent $1,000 on books, quit his second job so he could study eight to 13 hours a day and, because of his dyslexia, hired someone to read him the material") is to demand that Sotomayor do exactly that which they claim is so inappropriate and which they accuse Sotomayor of doing: namely, deciding cases based on emotion, empathy and political views about affirmative action rather than the law and judicial precedent.
I literally can't fathom a more glaring self-contradiction than those who are simultaneously objecting to the use of "empathy" in judicial decision-making and arguing that Sotomayor's Ricci decision was bad because of all the unfair things that happened to Frank Ricci or because of how bad affirmative action is. Anyone arguing that Sotomayor wrongly decided Ricci by playing up the emotions of the case -- rather than by citing law and binding judicial precedent, including Second Circuit and Supreme Court cases on the topic -- is, by definition, advocating that judicial decisions be made based on empathy and/or the substitution by a judge of her own political views for those of the democratically elected officials in New Haven.
'Empathy' Is Code for Judicial Activism - WSJ.com
"Empathy" is the latest code word for liberal activism, for treating the Constitution as malleable clay to be kneaded and molded in whatever form justices want. It represents an expansive view of the judiciary in which courts create policy that couldn't pass the legislative branch or, if it did, would generate voter backlash.
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There is a certain irony in a president who routinely praises America's commitment to "the rule of law" but who picks Supreme Court nominees for their readiness to discard the rule of law whenever emotion moves them.
Op-Ed Columnist - Rogues, Robes and Racists - NYTimes.com
Someone pinch me. I must be dreaming. Some of the same Republicans who have wielded the hot blade of racial divisiveness for years, are now calling Sonia Sotomayor, the Supreme Court nominee, a racist. Oh, the hypocrisy!
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Earl Wilson/The New York Times
Charles M. Blow
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The same Newt Gingrich who once said that bilingual education was like teaching “the language of living in a ghetto” tweeted that Sotomayor is a “Latina woman racist.” The same Rush Limbaugh who once told a black caller to “take that bone out of your nose and call me back” called Sotomayor a “reverse racist.” The same Tom Tancredo, a former congressman, who once called Miami, which has a mostly Hispanic population, “a third world country” said that Sotomayor “appears to be a racist.”
This is rich.
Harpooning the Great White Wail: Racism, the Supreme Court and Right-Wing Buffoonery | Red Room
Truth and Consequences: Race, Identity and the Myth of Objectivit
In any event, with all the asininity floating around the AM dial, and however tempting it might be to restrict oneself to the much-deserved ridicule that conservatives have invited on this subject, an even modestly honest examination of her words indicates the unfairness of the attacks upon Sotomayor. Likewise, such an interrogation points out the depths of white racist thinking in this, the so-called "post racial" age of Obama.
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what confirms Sotomayor's presumably racist comment as glaringly and obviously accurate--is that all of that old racism was given the cover of law by white male judges, who because of their personal biases, shaped by their identities as privileged group members who had the luxury of seeing nothing wrong with the social order from which they profited, could shrug in the face of institutional white supremacy. In other words, that white men for over 150 years rendered one after another opinion dispensing with the rights of blacks, Indians, Asians, and all other non-whites, demonstrates the fundamental truth of what Judge Sotomayor is suggesting: identity matters.
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