We’ve been reading a lot about Sonia Sotomayor growing up in a public housing project in The Bronx. That’s true, but it’s only part of the truth. According to the Associated Press, she also spent most of her teen years in a middle class neighborhood and attended a Catholic private school.
But of course she and the various White House spokesmen didn’t emphasize that.
I am sympathetic to their presentation. I like to tell people that I grew up in a working class neighborhood in Detroit and that my father made his living with his hands. Both statements are true, but not the whole truth. When I was 11, we moved to Bloomfield Township (a high income suburb) and my father is a surgeon.
In France people like to emphasize any aristocratic connection they have. The family of President Valerie Giscard d’Estaing, I read somewhere, added the particule d’Estaing to their name in the 20th century, when France had long since become a republic. In the United States, in contrast, we like to celebrate the most humble of our ancestors.
The Rockefellers will tell you that they are the descendants of dirt farmers, and are unlikely to volunteer that they are the descendants of French Huguenots and that the name was originally Rocquefeuille. Sotomayor seems to have had an advantage I also enjoyed: a childhood and adolescence lived in several very different social settings in a large metropolitan area. For a child who is attentive to these things, it’s a useful education to be exposed to people from widely differing segments of our society. And to be in a family that is upwardly mobile, not downwardly mobile like Ronald Reagan’s.
