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?

Lindsay Graham v. Sonia Sotomayor

See our previous post on this issue here.

Uh, oh. When Lindsay Graham (R-South Carolina), a Senator on the Senate Judiciary Committee who will interrogate Sonia Sotomayor in connection with her Supreme Court nomination, started on Chris Wallace of Fox News this Sunday, he sounded pretty good. Without noticeable mushiness, he stated that her 2001 speech extolling the virtues of being a Latina Woman (a redundancy) over being a white male, was unacceptable for a Supreme Court nominee.

But as the show wore on, his actual position gained clarity. What he wants is for her to apologize for her remarks. Apologize, as in, "I'm sorry. I won't say something like that again. I feel awful."

It should be noted that when faced with a choice of apologizing or losing a life-long job with 8 other people who are able to exercise ultimate power in one of only 3 branches of government of the biggest most powerful country in the history of the world, apologizing would be the smart thing to do. So, Ms. Sotomayor will apologize. The question then is: what will that give us?

An apology and nothing else. That and $4.00 will get you a grande latte at Starbucks. It will not get you a person who doesn't believe in the ideology that has formed and informed her life to date.

How could a person apologize for a lifelong ideology? They can't. Evidence of concrete repentance is called for, proof that the inner person has changed and not just the shifting public face of a Supreme Court wannabee. They must offer something else that indicates they no longer adhere to such an ideology.

Our U.S. Senators need to insist on real words, real commitments, that indicate that she understands the error of her thinking in 2001 (which was opposed explicitly and vehemently at the time by at least one Hispanic Democrat appointed by President Clinton in the same Symposium she gave her speech) and also real evidence that she has changed her mind on this issue since 2001, i.e. evidence that has not arisen since she found out she might be nominated for the Supreme Court.

Affirmative Racism

Easy: If I may put my two cents in on the topic of your excellent posts.

The political program known as Affirmative Action is actually two very different things, and this fact confuses the public debate in many ways. Originally, Affirmative Action proper was first articulated decisively by a previously obscure Federal District Court Judge in the case of Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education, 402 U.S. 1 (1971). In a decision I opposed at the time, this personally mild, gentlemanly man of the South affirmed a sweeping Constitutional right of the Federal Courts to mandate racial discrimination in order to remedy past racial discrimination. Judge James B. McMillan thereby entered into legal history, as his opinion was affirmed by the Supreme Court and taken up as the law of the land. But more importantly, he touched off a political movement which styled itself "Affirmative Action."

As I said, I disagreed with Judge McMillan's ruling at the time on many different grounds, but I always granted him the fact that he articulated the one ground upon which explicit governmental racial discrimination might very well be Constitutional: where it is clear that past racial discrimination, violative of the 14th Amendment and the Civil Rights Act of 1964, could only be remedied by favoring the injured parties. A simple example: If a black man is thrown out of his home by a Sheriff because of a government policy excluding blacks from owning homes in certain neighborhoods, then clearly the Federal Courts have the perfect right to reverse this situation and give the black man back his property. No one in their right mind would call such affirmative action by the Federal Courts anything but Constitutional, even though in some daft sense it could be described as reverse racism.

Where it gets a bit more tenuous is where the argument moves away from actual individuals and seeks to apply itself to an entire class of people, i.e. that blacks in general have been deprived of Constitutionally protected rights and the Federal Courts have the right to step in and grant a remedy to put them in the position they would have been in if the initial discrimination had never occurred. This is properly speaking what Judge McMillan ruled.

Now, I say "tenuous," but it is important to note that Judge McMillan's was a solid Constitutional argument, even if you disagree with it. It is a fact that blacks suffered as a race from deprivations of their life, liberty and property in untold and manifold ways since the conclusion of the Civil War, and that the remnants of this unconstitutional behavior in the South did not disappear with Brown v. Board of Education, nor with the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. There are plenty of good faith arguments that Judge McMillan was wrong in his ruling, not least those rooted in the consequence of his decision, which was the degeneration of the Mecklenburg County school system for both blacks and whites (that continues to this day). But it is undeniable that his version of Affirmative Action was rooted not only in the Constitution, but also in the wider and more important ethics and morality of the American culture. Blacks as a race had been discriminated against for many generations; some remedy based on the fact of their race was necessary to make them whole.

That's affirmative action as envisioned by Judge McMillan, the version of Affirmative Action in American culture that I submit is the most persuasive to those people who don't devote their lives to following either legal or political hair-splitting. But as in most things over the past century or so, the political Left co-opted the concept and bent it to their own particular agenda. For willful partisans such as these, Affirmative Action has become Affirmative Racism, with a new politically privileged class entitled to special benefits.

The arguments in favor of Affirmative Racism mouth the formula of Affirmative Action, but are devoid of interest in the question whether any actual discrimination has occurred. They just take it as given, and that's that.

Continue .....
In the Ricci case, it was clear that the local government was favoring the local blacks in rejecting the results of the firefighters promotion test, but there was no corresponding evidence anywhere that any of the blacks involved had ever suffered actual discrimination, whether at the hands of the City, the State, the Federal Government, the local City Council, the Police, the educational system, the Governor, the PTA, the Elks Lodge, the Realtors Association, the Master Gardeners, the Boy Scouts, the YMCA, the YWCA, or .... anybody. Compare this situation to Charlotte-Mecklenburg at the time of Judge McMillan's ruling, when 100 years of the Jim Crow South was coming to an abrupt end.

To sum up, Affirmative Action that is based on the reality of actual discrimination that has taken the life, liberty or property of a whole class of people is solidly grounded in Constitutional law, ethics and morality, and the only argument between people of good will concerns the often problematic details of implementation. Affirmative Action that is based on some version of statistical representation of a particular race simply because it is a politically favored minority without regard to any real evidence of actual discrimination is in fact Affirmative Racism, just as much as Jim Crow was in the Old South.

Affirmative Racism is a pox on our society, and a growing threat to our way of life. To this day, the Affirmative Racists in our society practice their devilish trade in the halls of government and in many of the most prestigious educational institutions, oftentimes in violation of actual court orders!

So, Easy, I agree with you that the Sotomayor hearings are a perfect time 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." The fact that Ms. Sotomayor will be confirmed anyway is irrelevant. This type of thinking will not be stopped unless it is first dragged out of the sewers and exposed. These Senate Hearings are an ideal time and place to cast the harsh glare of the public eye on this grotesque philosophy.