Do Republicans really want to seem like they're ganging up on Sonia Sotomayor, the first Latina nominee to the Supreme Court, by calling her a racist? If they don't, somebody had better get the word out, because that seems to be the talking point of the week.
Former House speaker
Newt Gingrich: "A white man racist nominee would be forced to withdraw. Latina woman racist should also withdraw."
Former representative
Tom Tancredo: "She appears to be a racist."
Rush Limbaugh: "She sure sounds like a racist -- you might want to soften that, and you might want to say a reverse racist ... Obama is the greatest living example of a reverse racist, and now he's appointed one."
Media Matters, a liberal watchdog group, calls it "
a race to the bottom." The group has compiled video clips of numerous conservatives making the accusation
here.
The root of all this is a sentence Sotomayor uttered in 2001 during a long speech at Berkeley. Here's the sentence:
"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."
And here's the context:
"Whether born from experience or inherent physiological or cultural differences, a possibility I abhor less or discount less than my colleague Judge Cedarbaum, our gender and national origins may and will make a difference in our judging. Justice O'Connor has often been cited as saying that a wise old man and wise old woman will reach the same conclusion in deciding cases. I am not so sure Justice O'Connor is the author of that line since Professor Resnik attributes that line to Supreme Court Justice Coyle. I am also not so sure that I agree with the statement. First, as Professor Martha Minnow has noted, there can never be a universal definition of wise. Second, 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.
Let us not forget that wise men like Oliver Wendell Holmes and Justice Cardozo voted on cases which upheld both sex and race discrimination in our society. Until 1972, no Supreme Court case ever upheld the claim of a woman in a gender discrimination case. I, like Professor Carter, believe that we should not be so myopic as to believe that others of different experiences or backgrounds are incapable of understanding the values and needs of people from a different group. Many are so capable. As Judge Cedarbaum pointed out to me, nine white men on the Supreme Court in the past have done so on many occasions and on many issues including Brown.
However, to understand takes time and effort, something that not all people are willing to give. For others, their experiences limit their ability to understand the experiences of others. Other simply do not care. Hence, one must accept the proposition that a difference there will be by the presence of women and people of color on the bench. Personal experiences affect the facts that judges choose to see. My hope is that I will take the good from my experiences and extrapolate them further into areas with which I am unfamiliar. I simply do not know exactly what that difference will be in my judging. But I accept there will be some based on my gender and my Latina heritage."
You can read the speech in its entirety
here . And here's a revised assessment from Rod Dreher, a conservative columnist for the
Dallas Morning News. He says that in context, Sotomayor's remark
does not seem controversial.
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