For This Wise African American, Sotomayor Hearings Reveal the Heart of Race Conflict in America
Never have I wanted more to throw a brick through the screen of my television.
Watching Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor sit stoically through a succession of white men, perched at the head of the whitest, malest, most powerful political institution in the country -- the U.S. Senate -- telling a Latina from a New York housing project that her Hispanic heritage should mean nothing in her work as a judge, was heartbreaking.
"Our legal system is at a dangerous crossroads. Down one path is the traditional American system, so admired around the world, where judges impartially apply the law to the facts without regard to personal views," said Republican Sen. Jeff Sessions (left) during the first day of Sotomayor's hearings Monday. "Down the other path lies a brave new world, where words have no true meaning, and judges are free to decide what facts they choose to see... I reject that view, and Americans reject that view."
Or Sen. Charles Grassley from Iowa: "Judge Sotomayor, you are nominated to the highest court of the land, which has the final say on the law. As such, it's even more important for the Senate to ascertain whether you can resist the temptations to mold the Constitution to your own personal beliefs and preferences. It's even more important for the Senate to ascertain whether you can dispense justice without bias or prejudice."
For anyone who knows how the pointedly conservative views of justices such as Antonin Scalia and Clarance Thomas have shaped their decisions, this posturing was worse than disingenuous. It was a neon sign which said: judges get to use their personal backgrounds to decide cases when they're conservative.
GOP legislators have worked themselves into a lather over Sotomayor's comment about a "wise Latina" making betters decisions than a white male. However true that might be regarding discrimination cases, it's the kind of in-your-face racial absolutism that was a perfect softball for conservatives bent on twisting her original meaning.
But consider what then-nominee Samuel Alito told the Senate during his confirmation hearings back in 2005: "But when I look at those cases, I have to say to myself, and I do say to myself, 'You know, this could be your grandfather, this could be your grandmother. They were not citizens at one time, and they were people who came to this country' . . . When I get a case about discrimination, I have to think about people in my own family who suffered discrimination because of their ethnic background or because of religion or because of gender. And I do take that into account."
Anyone who is paying the barest attention knows that this is when Supreme Court rulings count most; when issues of law are debatable and all that's left is what each justice believes in their heart is right.
But yesterday's cavalcade of conservative GOP Senators decrying Sotomayor's statements about her heritage and the role of judges in making law -- boldly honest statements she had to know would come back to bite her someday -- also reinforced that age-old Republican canard, that conservative and white people don't make decision based on their culture.
It's what I have often called the privilege of being generic. When Chief Justice John Roberts reaches back to his heritage and personal values to make decisions, he's simply allowing timeless principles to guide his thinking. But Sotomayor using the experience of being the first and the only in so many places of power is shrugged off as bias -- an unforgivable unfairness for GOP Senators, mostly because it doesn't benefits their causes.
(Indeed, as blogger Glenn Greenwald points out, nobody asked Alito whether his Italian American heritage influenced his vote upholding claims by Italian American firefighters in overturning a Sotomayor-decided affirmative action case.)
Still, this is the beating heart of most conflicts over race in America. People of color fear decisions made by institutions still largely controlled by white culture and white people, while those white people in power often insist they are just doing "what is right" or "what is just" -- unable or unwilling to admit the role their culture plays in their own decision-making.
What we're really seeing, of course, is an elaborate Kubuki theater, in which Republicans complain loudly about a jurist everyone knows is really a centrist -- though you never can tell, once they get that lifetime appointment -- so that when Obama advances a real liberal justice in his next appointment, that person will look even more radical by comparison.
Sototmayor proved Monday she's going to play along, offering a short statement that focused mostly on the facts of her biography and promising "fidelity to the law." It's the Obama strategy -- don't engage these sticky race issues if you don't have to, dodge them.
Along the way, we're treated to another high profile instance where some people get to pretend they don't have an agenda while others are accused of nothing but.
Follow Eric Deggans on Twitter: www.twitter.com/Deggans
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I had to turn off the television after watching Lindsay Graham call Judge Sotomayor a bully with a smile on his face. The hypocrisy was astounding...
Questions for judge Sotomayor:
Do you believe that the Bill of Rights in its entirety, the first ten Amendments to our Constitution, is incorporated against the States by the Fourteenth or any other Amendment to the Constitution or by any other binding legal precedent?
Do you accept the finding of the Court in the case of Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857) that the rights of all citizens of the United States include but are not limited to the following, as redacted from the decision of the Court:
"the right to enter every State whenever they pleased, singly or in companies, without pass or passport, and without obstruction, to sojourn there as long as they pleased, to go where they pleased at every hour of the day or night without molestation, unless they committed some violation of law; and it would give them the full liberty of speech in public and in private upon all subjects upon which its own citizens might speak; to hold public meetings upon political affairs, AND TO KEEP AND CARRY ARMS WHEREVER THEY WENT." [emphasis added]
The Court was of course enumerating rights it deemed could be denied to Black Americans. Today those and other rights must be applied equally to all citizens of the United States.
What is amazing to me is that every minority in this country can see what you're seeing. Women, gays, disabled, Jews, Hispanics, and African Americans, we can all see exactly what the GOP is doing. We all feel like throwing bricks through our TV's. White straight males, OTOH, are utterly confused. "What? What did he say?"
It may be a concerted effort born of a midnight strategizing session, or it may be unconscious, but what the GOP is trying to accomplish here is clear: keep pick, pick, picking away at the uppity woman-slash-Puerto Rican until she finally snaps, then announce triumphantly to all that her temperament is not suited to high office.
Men and whites have been using this strategy for hundreds of years. Ironically, it is only serving to make me ever more bigoted against old, white, southern males. These guys are an excellent argument for their pretend bogeyman, "reverse racism."
I'm so proud of Judge Sotomayor for her raw strength. Not one of those weak, privileged little pinheads could do the same.
This is the kind of crude adolescent nonsense you get with a politicised judicial system.
Why should any of us be subjected to this transparent buffoonery?
The law and its institutions should be above partisan politics.
What you say, Eric Deggans , that the field is laid by white men not having "ethnicity" is so very telling. For those of us, er, whites here, it was a given. Your pointing it out makes me question it. Thank you for a powerful insight. I may be slow, but I'm learning.
Ertic brother you hit it dead on! Great job check out my post which is below your piece on featured blogs. I am now following you on Twitter.
Sophia
I can certainly understand why you would be disheartened. I'm not in a minority & it's heartbreaking to me. It's so, so disconcerting to see these clowns at work. it' definitely a step backward in race relations. But I take heart in some real strides. I think this will be a 2 steps forward, 3 back, 4 forward, etc. for a good long time still. Please know that there are many, a great many, who abhor these tactics. These nunchuks, to coin one of their buzz words used by the pubs against Sotomayor, won't be around much longer. They are dinosaurs and slowly going extinct.
How dare anyone of a minority race be WISE ! How dare !
Racist BS! Let's vote these clowns out of there! We've got a country to run!
I was able to listen to this "circus" at work. I am now able to watch the give and take of the participants. This was worse than I imagined. I am sickened and repulsed at these men who seem to take joy in trying to discredit this woman.
With the absurd so on display here, is it any wonder some people would rather watch the MJ kids custody battle if it were on opposite this charade?
Well said.
ditto
Everything in your article was slanted and bias and is exactly whats wrong with people who live and die playing the race card in everything, it is peolpe like you that will keep race divides alive and well in this country, without it you have nothing to say.
Scott63, wake up and smell the coffee: everyone operates from a perspective gained by living in a particular cultural surrounding. What's being promoted in these hearings is the notion that some people (white conservative males) function in a universe where they're normal and everyone else is "different." The number one cause of unnatural death for black people in America over the past 390 years has been self interest. We still fighting to gain acceptance of the idea that we have legitimate self interests and perspectives. Judging from the Sotomayor hearings and your post, we still have a ways to go.
Scott63, I do understand how the "race card" is wrong; what I also understand is that Mr. Deggans is not playing it. Without realizing it, YOU are the one playing a race card. With the best will in the world, (which Sessions et al do not, in my opinion show), they can not truly understand the stresses and difficulties of a minority woman. My MS is in science, and believe me I know what bigotry is, yet even I did not, until recently, realize how insidious its effects can be. It is like the argument that if black children had the same books, they had the same education--logical on the surface, but actually untrue.
And, by the way, Sotomayor's ruling in the New Haven case was in line with precedent; had she ruled otherwise, she would have been out of order.
Brick through the TV? Is that "wise".
spot on. i find the GOP senators' behavior appalling mostly because they seem to ignore the fact that it has been white men who have decided and written the most discriminatory laws of this nation since its inception. a black person would never have declared blacks as 3/5 of a person, but white men did. a black person would likely never have advocated for "separate but equal", but white men did. i could go on and on, but you get the point. they act as if white men have suffered so many hardships at the hand of minorities and women and frankly its disingenuous and dangerous.
Thank you, Eric!!
Very well said.
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