You are indeed allowed to be irritated. You’re also allowed to answer the question. Would, in your opinion, a white judge have been given a pass for speaking thus in any context?
I believe Sotomayor was talking about discrimination cases specifically, and the idea that a white man would have more experience facing discrimination than a Latina is stupid. I do think a white judge would have phrased the idea differently because it would sound worse coming from a white person. But I think the idea that experience can inform a judge’s decisions is unobjectionable regardless of who it comes from. (Isn’t the entire pro-life wing of the Supreme Court Catholic? What a coincidence.)
Would people get upset about it anyway? I don’t know. I don’t care: I’m interested in what she actually means, not “can I use this as an excuse for disliking her.”
When was the last time a white man was asked about how his race and gender would affect his decisions? Institutionally, white men are the default perspective of power and authority, so the issue of “identity politics” never come up with them–they are always (unless they’re gay or Jewish) assumed to be “objective” and “neutral”, unswayed by any “baggage” that comes with being the member of a cultural minority. So no white man would have occasion to volunteer a quote analogous to what she said, and if he did, it would likely be just as incongruous as to hear an upper-class Anglo talk about the difficulties he had to overcome in the Civil Rights-era South (though, again, context would matter).
The fact remains that, in context, what she said was not particularly inflammatory or controversial, and the tedious Its-OK-if-a-Liberal-Says-It hand-wringing two-step just doesn’t fly.
Nicely put. I’d been thinking about this since the first time somebody over here brought up this quote- which was probably about ten minutes after the nomination.
OTOH, the idea that a white man might have a better perspective on being falsely accused of discrimination (or of benefiting from discrimination) is smart. So in a given case, it’s possible that a white man might have more empathy as to one person and a Latina woman as to the other, and who is to say which produces the better result?
I have had to respond to this so many times the last couple days, I’m thinking of making it be my sig. :rolleyes:
Judge Sotomayor was comparing the merits of having a Court filled with nine “wise old men” versus the merits of having a justice on the Court who was, say, Latina. In the process, she asserted that, if both potential justices were equally “wise,” she would hope that the “wise” Latina judge would be able to reach a better decision about an issue of discrimination against Latinos than the equally “wise” old white male judge. Why? This is self-evident. The Latina judge has experiences that the old white male judge does not, so is better able to understand the impact of the decisions being made. And since it is entirely a fiction to believe that all Court cases are decidable solely on the basis of “law” without reference to real impact (a position that not even the most conservative justices on the Court hold), this makes sense.
But please note that she also continued by noting that not only has the Court in the past (when consisting of nine old white men) made some really egregious rulings, they have also gotten it spot on, which means that it is not impossible for old white men to get the result correct. Thus, she certainly is not a believer of the idea that she as a Latina is inherently a better pick for the Court, or that her results would inherently be better than any specific white male who might be nominated.
Your second sentence doesn’t follow from your first.
“Not impossible to get the correct result” is not the same thing as “just as good as anyone else”.
If A is likely to get the correct result (in certain types of cases) 80% of the time, and B is likely to get the correct result 90% of the time, then, all else being equal, B is a better choice.
And I agree 100%. It’s just too bad that if a white male made a similar statement, no one would be as understanding, even though it is just as true.
I do think that this is much ado about nothing from the right…
Sotomayor didn’t make any statements regarding this picayune analogy, though.
And as far as your question to me, I’d say that’s why there are nine justices instead of one and they can discuss these things. I’m confident Roberts is keeping a sharp eye for those kinds of cases.
I don’t understand what you mean by this.
I don’t think it works like that. Roberts can’t change her viewpoint any more than she can change his. And they each get a vote.
Perhaps you’re saying that “everyone is biased in this manner and now we’ll have a more even distribution of bias”. That’s possible. OTOH, it’s also possible that some people are biased more than others.
[FTR, I’m not opposed to the SS pick, under the circumstances. Not who I would have picked, but as good as one might have expected from BO, from a conservative perspective.]
But she’s only talking about a specific subset of cases in which her life experience is directly relevant. Another judge with different life experience might have a similar advantage in making a wise decision on another topic.
So the statement doesn’t show that she thinks that on balance she’d be a better judge than an old white guy, which is what her critics are making it out to say.
Possibly, but I’m betting the likelihood of an individual white man being falsely accused of discrimination is much less than the likelihood of an individual latina being discriminated against.
Or of benefiting from discrimination.
To use an actual example, the firefighter case featured competing discrimination issues. The minorities wanted more minority promotions, and the whites wanted the unbiased test used. How does empathy come into play? It could go either way.
You could bring your experience as a minority to bear, with an appreciation of the struggles that minorities have in getting promotions. Or you could bring an appreciation of the fact that white men aren’t necessarily born to lives of privilege and ease, and have to struggle for what they get, and appreciate the effort they put into this specific test, and so on.
Every case has two sides. Having life experiences that lend one to be especially understanding of one side does not make one a better judge, IMHO.
Unless, again, the claim is that the bench is already filled with white men who are biased against minorities, and you need for the minorities to catch a break every once in a while just to even things out.
I’d argue that it’s much harder for an individual to notice when they’re personally benefiting from discrimination than when they are being discriminated against.
Having read the entire speech, ISTM in context that she is in fact claiming that women and minorities make better judges overall, and not just WRT specific issues.
It might be that she only thinks they’re better WRT these specific issues, but it doesn’t appear that she thinks these issues are counterbalanced by other issues on which white men might be better. Of particular note (emphasis added):
One other thing that I found striking was that she seemed reluctant to concede that men could even sometimes get it right on discrimination issues without help from wiser women & minorities:
I agree.
What I wrote about “benefiting from” was along the lines of the firefighter case issues - sorry if this was confusing.
I think it goes more to having diversity on the court. While diversity should not be the primary metric for selecting a SC justice it is nice to have if you can get it too. Icing on the cake if you will.
As has been noted nine white men may very well come to a good decision. Sometimes they do not. For example, do you think Chief Justice Taney might have delivered a different ruling (or at least a different written decision) in Dred Scott if (say) Thurgood Marshall or Clarence Thomas also sat on the court? Would Taney not benefit from their presence to avoid an appalling decision that included gems such as: “…beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race, either in social or political relations, and so far inferior that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.”?
This is an example of how you can completely change the context and meaning through selective quoting. Here is a more complete quote:
Something completely different.
(Which is not to take a position on whether or not the presence of an African-American on the court would have influenced Taney’s opinion.)
I mean she did not address the circumstance you created, wherein one person will get it right 80% of the time and another will get it 90% of the time.
That may be true in some cases and not in others.
I was looking at is as perspective rather than bias. They mean similar things but one is loaded more negatively.
A circumstance you haven’t supported with regard to Sotomayor.
The passages you are quoting don’t support this even one iota.
It was an implication of DSYoungEsq’s post, to which I was responding.
So use perspective, if you prefer. I didn’t mean “bias” as in “bigoted” but as in “more likely to support”.
It’s a claim I haven’t made. She raised the possibility, though, by being upfront about it. But maybe not. (That’s certainly her claim, anyway.)
OK.