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I have thought long and hard about writing this post about Judge Sonia Sotomayor and the racial debate touched off by what I think is a misreading of her 2001 speech, "A Latina Judge's Voice."
By now,you know the speech I'm talking about -- the one including the quote, "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." My fellow BlogHer CE Dana Loesch is among those who see the quote as either evidence of Sotomayor's incompetence or racism. As BlogHer CE Miguelina pointed out in commenting on Dana's post, that statement was immediately followed with:
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.
My reluctance comes not just because I knew the Judge in college and came to think highly of her. I wasn't one of her close friends, and we haven't talked since her graduation from Princeton University in 1976. She and I served together on the governance board of the Third World Center, a unit of Princeton University's student affairs office that provided resources for academic, cultural and social programming centered upon the needs and interests of students of color. (The TWC is now known as the Carl Fields Center for Equality and Intercultural Understanding, in honor of the University's first administrator of color.)Back then, I was impressed by her ability to calmly sort through contentious arguments and tedious bureaucratic details. Considering the sweep of her accomplishments in the 33 years since she finished second in her class at Princeton, I have every reason to believe that she will be a fine Associate Justice of the Supreme Court.
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I have some concern about adding to the focus on Sotomayor's public comments and her participation in organizations in organizations concerned with racial justice, to the exclusion of her substantial judicial record. Tom Goldstein as the SCOTUSblog conducted a systematic analysis of 50 of Sotomayor's decisions related to race and found no evidencethat she placed racial empathy or identification above the law. Goldstein said his numbers "decisively disprove the claim that she decides cases with any sort of racial bias."Reflecting on Goldstein's analysis, Prof. Ann Althouse notes that in one of her dissents on a race-related case, she argued for the free-speech rights of a white employee who was fired for disseminating racist material. Althouse adds:
"Stop jumping ahead to the assumption that Sotomayor stretches the law to decide cases in favor of people who tug her heart strings and look at the record."
But I do think that there is a contribution I can make to this discussion that hasn't been made, and that is to look at Sotomayor's speech, and her past involvement in racial advocacy groups such as the Puerto Rican Legal Defense Fund as part in the context of an intraracial process of leadership development.
Where others worry that Sotomayor's interests intimate racial chauvinism, I see the organizations in which she has participated, and others like it, as deliberative spaces where people of color who had the privilege of education and entree to the professions could contemplate the meaning of their positions, and the responsibilities that inhere in the privileges that we had been accorded.
I understand this as part of a tradition that goes back to the days of the American Negro Academy where a small cadre of African American intellectuals caucused about the conditions of African Americans in the Jim Crow era.
What We Did at the Third World Center
When Sotomayor and I colabored at the Third World Center, much of the work concerned mundane matters common to all student organizations:constructing budgets, building a calendar
