And, to make up for that last post,I’d like to present what Sotomayor actually said, and to whom.
First off, she was speaking to a group of largely Latino law professors and students at UC Berkeley; it was the 2001 Judge Mario G. Olmos Memorial Lecture.
Toward the end, she said:
There you have it, folks. She borrowed the “wise woman” bit from Sandra O’Connor, and added that she hoped that she could do better than “reach the same conclusion.” Perhaps we should all hope so.
Do you really think that helps? AFAICT, it shows that Sotomayor was making just as racist a statement as she is accused of doing.
O’Connor says that she believes that gender (and, by extension, ethnicity) should not matter - a wise old man and a wise old woman should reach the same conclusion. Sotomayor says she disagrees with this - Latinas are apparently better at judging than white men, not the same. This is racist (and sexist). It is equivalent to saying “white men make better judges than black women”.
She borrowed the Sandra O’Connor idea only to contradict it.
I am constantly surprised at the ability of some people to look at a phrase and interpret it to say exactly the opposite of what it does.
Regards,
Shodan
To me, the whole speech parses weird - as if words were left out. She starts by saying that there can never be a universal definition of wise. Then says better, but doesn’t give context for a Latina woman making a better judgment call.
I do believe that a judge’s life experiences will color their wisdom - sometimes for the worse and sometimes for the better - and that its more likely for nine white, straight, privileged, Christian men to have similar definition of a “wise” decision than a diverse court. And therefore, I think that a diversity of life experiences on the Court and within the legal system generally is a wise thing to have.
Seriously. I’m pretty darned liberal and I do hope Ms. Sotomayor ultimately gets appointed, but how anyone can interpret her statement other than what Shodan says above is beyond me. I don’t think it should be a deal breaker and I think we can all probably stop harping on it, but it does rankle, slightly.
But that’s not what she said. That is not the debate. She was not pointing to the body of justices, but to individual justices, comparing herself as a Latina to white males.
Sanity, ahhh. Thank you.
She said she would HOPE that a “wise Latina woman” would come to better conclusion in some cases (the comment in question was made as an allusion to sexual harrassment cases), that she HOPED that people with different experiences would draw from those experiences. It’s no different from Alito (a former member of a racist club in college) said he drew his experience as the son of Italian immigrants.
She also pointed out that 9 white guys had decided on Brown.
This is an example of right wingers hearing what they want to hear, not what was actually said. It’s always entertaining to see upper class, white, Christian, American males – the most priveleged, and powerful people in the history of the world – try to paint themselves as a persecuted minority.
She wasn’t talking about herself at all, nor was she saying that ny group was “better,” only that not all “wisdom” was the same – that it manifested itself differently according to experience.
Everyone else is doing it - they just want to be popular.
No, actually if you read the entire speech, the subject of it was the probable effect on the bench of having more women and people of color on it. Her thesis was almost exactly what **Dangerosa **said. It’s a longish speech and quite a good one, and it does have controversial bits – though none of them lend themselves to hearings or pittings for that matter, because they are not really sound bite-able. Her thesis is essentially here, from the same speech:
Because I accept the proposition that, as Judge Resnik describes it, “to judge is an exercise of power” and because as, another former law school classmate, Professor Martha Minnow of Harvard Law School, states “there is no objective stance but only a series of perspectives - no neutrality, no escape from choice in judging,” I further accept that our experiences as women and people of color affect our decisions. The aspiration to impartiality is just that–it’s an aspiration because it denies the fact that we are by our experiences making different choices than others. Not all women or people of color, in all or some circumstances or indeed in any particular case or circumstance but enough people of color in enough cases, will make a difference in the process of judging.
They’re terrified of losing their privileged position in society. And since a lot of people have convinced themselves that racism doesn’t exist anymore, they cry racist when other people point out that it ain’t necessarily so.
It’s interesting that she then goes on to talk about how the Supreme Court handled discrimination cases, isn’t it? Is it possible to conclude that perhaps she was talking about experience with discrimination?
All,
Reread posts by Shodan and WOOKINPANUB. If, after having done so you do not agree, repeat.
Dio, she was saying that someone of one race would reach a wiser conclusion than someone of another race. Just imagine what side of this you’d be on if Scalia said something like this.
No she wasn’t. That is literally not what she said.
Everyone agrees that non-white judges are likely to understand discrimination better than white judges, right?
Of course not, but I have to ask.
I took that as sort of ‘post-modern’ stuff, like cultural relativism and suchlike. But I think you are correct - you can’t say ‘there is no one standard that applies to everyone’ and then try to apply one standard to everyone.
My take on it was that she was in front of a friendly audience, and she got carried away. This kind of “all animals are equal but some are more equal than others” is pretty much mainstream thought at Berkeley, so it passed without remark.
Regards,
Shodan
Perhaps a bit of attention may be focused on that one word, “understand”. Perhaps a better choice would be “appreciate”.
One can understand as the result of strictly cognitive processes. One can understand a disease without experiencing it, it is not needful that an oncologist be a cancer survivor. And there is plenty of study and insight available on what discrimination is, and how it operates in the civic arena. That might well lead to understanding.
But to appreciate the effect of racism or any form of hurtul discrimination on its victim, one gains great insight by being said victim. Well, duh! This is not to say that old white men have no understanding of the injustice of helplessness, but they are bound to have less appreciation.
The oncologist who has not suffered cancer is the intellectual equal of the one who has not. But who is likely to be wiser about its human cost?
Who cares, there is nothing in her judicial record to indicate even a hint of what is being alleged here. She said something carelessly about ten years ago. YAWN.
Amen.
If you’ve got something to say, say it. The OP is just bloviating about something that doesn’t exist. It’s unsubstantiated namecalling, and a waste of time.
That’s what I get from reading the three paragraphs that were quoted here. The statement in itself is racist, but the paragraph that follows it suggests that she was referring specifically to cases of race and sex discrimination. Because her record doesn’t show any racism in her rulings, I’m willing to give her a pass on this one.
As far as I can tell - that’s pretty much mainstream thought whatever group of people you are in. It certainly is something that white men lost their corner on long ago, but there seems to be plenty to go around, so white men still have plenty of it.