President Obama’s first nominee to the Supreme Court has been called much more than that – racist is the term being bandied about by some – but can’t we agree that, at the very least, she’s a white-male basher? And should we be surprised that Obama would select one for the high court?
Here’s the quote, which you’re probably reading for the umpteenth time, but it still deserves repeating:
“I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experience would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life.”
Sotomayor said that in 2001, at the University of California Berkeley School of Law. Just the kind of statement we’d expect someone to make in that hotbed of left-wing fervor.
And we shouldn’t be surprised that Sotomayor made her comments on a college campus. I’m starting to wonder if white-male bashing isn’t a course requirement on some American colleges and universities.
Students in my writing class at Johns Hopkins University used to slip white-male-bashing comments into their papers all the time. The key phrase in that last sentence is “used to.”
Once I started announcing that in my class, white males were allowed to, indeed expected to and encouraged to, bash back, the white-male bashing suddenly ratcheted down.
Many of those white-male-bashing students were themselves white, mostly women who had clearly taken one too many we-hate-men feminism courses.
But sometimes white guys prone to self-flagellation wanted in on the abuse. So Sotomayor’s comment isn’t necessarily racist; it’s just part of a recent trend to bash white males at every opportunity. When college students do it, I can understand it while not condoning it. I expect more from a Supreme Court justice.
What was most alarming about Sotomayor’s “wise Latina female” statement is how wrong she was. White men, by virtue of their gender and skin color, can’t, as judges, reach those “better conclusions” Sotomayor is so concerned about? For heaven’s sake, hasn’t this woman even heard of the late Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black?
Black was white, male and born and raised in Alabama. At one point, he even belonged to the Ku Klux Klan, no one’s idea of a “friend of the Negro” organization.
But in the book “Simple Justice,” author Richard Kluger wrote of Black:
“The black man never had a better friend on the Supreme Court than this lean, courtly son of the Deep South…(Black) from the start showed concern for the abused rights of blacks. One of his first clients was a Negro ex-convict who…was leased out to work while serving time but was held for 15 days beyond his sentence period without pay – as a slave, that is. Black sued for damages and…won a judgment of $137.50.”
When Black was a county prosecutor in Alabama, Kluger wrote, “he exposed the torture chamber that police were operating in the Birmingham suburb of Bessemer; many of the victims of the police brutality were black, including one 70-year-old who had been strapped to a door and beaten to the brink of death.”
In the 1940 case of Chambers v. Florida, which overturned the murder convictions of four Florida blacks who had been coerced into confessions, Black wrote in the majority opinion that Southern blacks “have suffered the most from secret and dictatorial proceedings” and that such victims “have almost always been the poor, the ignorant, the numerically weak, the friendless and the powerless.”
Pretty compelling stuff, eloquence that will not be surpassed by Sotomayor once she ascends to the high court. With one quote from one speech on a California campus eight years ago, Sotomayor cavalierly dismissed Black’s entire career. But she’s wrong for another reason.
How would a “wise Latina woman” have handled the case of the three falsely accused Duke University lacrosse players three years ago?
All three were white, accused of raping a black woman. Since the premise of Sotomayor’s UCal-Berkeley remarks was that race and gender affect a judge’s rulings, who should have been the judge in the Duke case? Sotomayor clearly dismissed white males. So would a black male, a black female or a “wise Latina woman” have been a better judge?
Or would the most competent and impartial judge have sufficed, regardless of race or gender?
Examiner columnist Gregory Kane is an award-winning journalist who lives in Baltimore.
