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.
So says Sonia Sotomayor, President Barack Obama’s nominee for the Supreme Court. She said that a woman like herself would make better decisions in court cases than white men, and, by implication, that sex and ethnicity should factor into court decisions.
Such a woman, if all goes swimmingly with her nomination, will sit on the highest court in the land.
The ultimate irony is that our Constitution is supposed to guard against writing laws and making decisions that take race or sex into account. Original intent and meaning, equal justice – these aren’t abstract concepts. They are (or should be) the lifeblood of our system of justice. It doesn’t matter whether the Constitution’s drafters owned slaves or believed blacks were subhuman. It really doesn’t. What matters is the U.S. Constitution, as ratified, provides the best protection against discrimination based on the color of one’s skin.
But Sotomayor believes one’s skin color should influence how one interprets the Constitution. Chilling, and so is the double standard that allows her to say it and get away with it. The National Journal‘s Stuart Taylor said this about Sotomayor’s statement:
So accustomed have we become to identity politics that it barely causes a ripple when a highly touted Supreme Court candidate, who sits on the federal Appeals Court in New York, has seriously suggested that Latina women like her make better judges than white males…Indeed, unless Sotomayor believes that Latina women also make better judges than Latino men, and also better than African-American men and women, her basic proposition seems to be that white males (with some exceptions, she noted) are inferior to all other groups in the qualities that make for a good jurist.
Any prominent white male would be instantly and properly banished from polite society as a racist and a sexist for making an analogous claim of ethnic and gender superiority or inferiority…Imagine the reaction if someone had unearthed in 2005 a speech in which then-Judge Samuel Alito had asserted, for example: “I would hope that a white male with the richness of his traditional American values would reach a better conclusion than a Latina woman who hasn’t lived that life” — and had proceeded to speak of “inherent physiological or cultural differences.”
(The double standard is maddening. Try this: “I would hope that a wise white man with the richness of his experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a Latina female who hasn’t lived that life.”)
Identity politics, as Taylor says, is so strong in our mind-numbingly politically correct atmosphere that Sotomayor’s remarks will do nothing more than make headlines. They will have little impact on the confirmation process.
Taylor goes down the list of similar statements attributed to Sotomayor, statements useful for columnists, commentators, and bloggers. The best ammunition confirmation opponents will have against Sotomayor, if they choose to use it, is the Ricci v. DeStefano case, in which she supported discrimination against whites and lower standards for blacks.
(Photo credit: AFP)
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