Is Sotomayor a Racist?

A quick point on the debate these days within Republican ranks as to the approach their opposition should take to the nomination of Sonia Sotomayor. Part of the debate pivots off of the statement she made in a speech: "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." According to Rush Limbaugh, Tom Tancredo and others on the right, the quote clearly shows that Ms. Sotomayor is a racist and they counsel Republicans to make this charge loud and clear. Others (most vocally, be it noted, Democrats and Liberal commentators) insist that such shrill ad hominem attacks will only turn the public off and chase away any hope that the Republicans can re-capture any portion of the Hispanic vote come next year and 2012.

I am probably closer to the Limbaugh/Tancredo camp. However even they seem to miss (or are too quick to gloss over) the central point. What Ms. Sotomayor was elaborating on is, quite frankly, all too common an assumption in most major and minor law schools, legal journals and even court opinions. It comes from a class-based sociological analytic tradition, with certain classes being eo ipso virtuous and other classes being eo ipso bad. White males, of course, are the ultimate symbol of the bad classes, because they have systematically oppressed all of the other good classes, and it is this very legacy of living under oppression that gives the "wise latina woman (a redundancy by the way)" the rich experiences in life that the white male cannot have had.

The point is, the conservative critique of this entire tradition has been consistent from the 60's to today that it is racist to the core. "White oppressors" is a gross stereotype of white people in general, as gross in its way as any racial epithet directed against blacks. And the policies which grow from this ideology are infected with the same core racism, i.e. affirmative action which explicitly divides people up into racial groups and assigns benefits or burdens to them solely on the basis of their race. Republicans cannot, without sacrificing whatever identity as a party they have left, sacrifice one of the central critiques they have against Liberal Leftist ideology, and the nomination battle of Sonia Sotomayor presents an important public forum for them to make such a critique.

Is Ms. Sotomayor a racist? Not in the sense that the Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan is a racist, because he and his followers are cultural clowns who don't deserve to be part of an important public discussion in our Republic. But she is a racist in the same sense that a significant and vocal part of the American electorate are racist, the Left Liberal ideologues who espouse racial equality while systematically empowering ethnic groups to the detriment of their fellow citizens. And the Republicans need to make the point, again and again, that this kind of racist thinking has no place on the Supreme Court or in any other branch of government entrusted with the responsibility of upholding the Constitution.

As Ronald Reagan would have put it: If not Republicans, who? And if not now, when?