Latimer on Law

Comments On A Wise Latina, White Males And Jim Crow States' Rights

                        Comments On A Wise Latina, White Males  And Jim Crow States' Rights

 "I believe in states' rights ... [I] believe we have distorted the balance of our government today by giving powers that were never intended to be given in the Constitution to that federal establishment."  

           -Ronald Reagan, August 3, 1980, addressing white voters at Neshoba, Miss. County Fair

"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".

        -Judge Sonya Sotomayor, 2001 Judge Olmos Memorial Lecture, U. Cal., Berkeley, School of Law

            The right wing GOP extremists, which is to say the great majority of today's Republican Party, are savaging President Obama's Supreme Court nominee, Judge Sonya Sotomayor, based on a quote about her being a "wise Latina woman" taken from a lengthy speech about the role of both race and gender in American law and politics.  She had used the line several times going back into the 1990s, but it was given full contextual meaning in 2001 while delivering the Judge Mario G. Olmos Memorial Lecture at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law.

            The GOP ideologues are vigorously trying to tar Judge Sotomayor with the racist and/or sexist brush for saying she would "hope" that a Latina woman's life experience would lead her to reaching a better conclusion on cases involving racism or sexism than a white male who has not experienced such bigotry on a personal level. 

            Yet, these are the same people who vehemently defend Ronald Reagan's overt racist appeal to white southern voters at the Neshoba, Mississippi, County Fair in 1980, giving his first speech as the GOP presidential nominee by declaring his firm belief in "states' rights."  They desperately try to deny both history and reality by pretending that "states' rights" was not the catch-word for almost 100 years of Jim Crow segregation in the South.

            Instead, they pretend that Reagan only meant states' rights in context of other issues based on the usual  GOP buzz words like "bureaucracy" and "taxes," the simplistic slogans that pass for thoughtful analysis of issues among today's GOP faithful.  Oh, sure, Reagan mentioned "welfare" -as if that didn't have for the GOP a huge racial implication.  I mean does anyone really believe that when Reagan later referred to a "welfare queen" he was  describing a white woman?  

            Does anyone really believe that when Reagan spoke of "federal regulations" to a crowd of whites in a bastion of the Jim Crow South,  he meant anything other than the federal civil rights regulations?  That might have been plausible in Philadelphia, PA, but not in Philadelphia, Mississippi, the scene of the most egregious act of Jim Crow terrorism in recent memory, where a white mob got away with murdering three civil rights workers who so deeply threatened their precious Southern "way of life" by helping rural blacks register to vote.

            No, clearly, the "white male" Ronald Reagan was campaigning for America's highest constitutional office by making a direct appeal to the basest element on the American political scene, the white racist bigotry that still defiles our democratic and Constitutional values among much of the American polity today.  This includes those who are falsely trying to smear Judge Sotomayor as a bigot while they implicitly defend Reagan's actual, overt support for Jim Crow racism in 1980 by always referring to him in the most reverent terms -as if he really were a man of principle and substance as opposed to the B-movie actor he in fact was, just playing the role of President as scripted for him by his handlers.

            Judge Sotomayor has said recently that her remark about a wise Latina  was a poor choice of words, but I disagree.  Her backing off from the remark is understandable as part of today's sound byte politics, perfected by the post-Reagan GOP, where the national media has little inclination to place any such commentary in proper context and thereby detract from its sensationalist appeal.

            Unlike Reagan's speeches which always began and ended with barking out divisive right-wing slogans, having no reasoned, contextual analysis in between, Judge Sotomayor's 2001 speech at the Berkeley Law School placed her "wise Latina" comment in a specific and appropriate context.  She was addressing a gathering of young, aspiring lawyers, including many women and minorities, and discussing how they might make a difference in improving society by serving the important Constitutional ideal of equality for all people.  Her concern was for both minorities and women:  "I warn Latinos in this room: Latinas are making a lot of progress in the old-boy network."  For any objective, fair-minded person, this was a far cry from Reagan's overt racist appeal in 1980 to the white fairgoers in Philadelphia, Mississippi.

            Unlike Reagan's speeches, Judge Sotomayor dug deeply and intelligently into the social and political context surrounding the issues of equality that she was addressing:

"America has a deeply confused image of itself that is in perpetual tension. We are a nation that takes pride in our ethnic diversity, recognizing its importance in shaping our society and in adding richness to its existence. Yet, we simultaneously insist that we can and must function and live in a race and color-blind way that ignore these very differences that in other contexts we laud. That tension between "the melting pot and the salad bowl" -- a recently popular metaphor used to described New York's diversity - is being hotly debated today in national discussions about affirmative action. Many of us struggle with this tension and attempt to maintain and promote our cultural and ethnic identities in a society that is often ambivalent about how to deal with its differences.

Where is the racism, sexism or other bigotry in that analysis of American society?  Only a fool or a racist would deny the fairness or the accuracy of what Judge Sotomayor said here, which of course includes all those on today's GOP right wing who are critical of her nomination to the Supreme Court.

          Judge Sotomayor expanded on this by giving an honest and heartfelt explanation of where she was coming from in terms of both her ethnic identity and her place in American society as a loyal citizen:

In this time of great debate we must remember that it is not political struggles that create a Latino or Latina identity. I became a Latina by the way I love and the way I live my life. My family showed me by their example how wonderful and vibrant life is and how wonderful and magical it is to have a Latina soul. They taught me to love being a Puertorriqueña and to love America and value its lesson that great things could be achieved if one works hard for it. But achieving success here is no easy accomplishment for Latinos or Latinas, and although that struggle did not and does not create a Latina identity, it does inspire how I live my life."

Here, unlike the GOP extremists who are attacking her today, Judge Sotomayor defined her love for America in terms of the "great things" that can be accomplished by someone who works hard against great odds.  This is a patriotic idealism, infused with our Constitutional ideals,  as opposed to the cynical flag-waving in support of resource wars of aggression typically equated with "patriotism" by the Republican right wing zealots who are attacking her nomination today.

            Judge Sotomayor also made valid and all too accurate points which, unlike her "wise Latina" comment, are directly relevant today to her nomination:

"Unfortunately, there are some very deep storm warnings we must keep in mind. In at least the last five years the majority of nominated judges the Senate delayed more than one year before confirming or never confirming were women or minorities."

"The statistics I have been talking about provide a base from which to discuss a question which one of my former colleagues on the Southern District bench, Judge Miriam Cederbaum, raised when speaking about women on the federal bench. Her question was: What do the history and statistics mean? In her speech, Judge Cederbaum expressed her belief that the number of women and by direct inference people of color on the bench, was still statistically insignificant and that therefore we could not draw valid scientific conclusions from the acts of so few people over such a short period of time. Yet, we do have women and people of color in more significant numbers on the bench and no one can or should ignore pondering what that will mean or not mean in the development of the law".

This is a basic reality that Sotomayor's critics seek desperately to ignore in the debate over her appointment to the Supreme Court, just as they desperately seek to ignore or rationalize Reagan's overt racist appeal to win the Southern Jim Crow vote based on his avowed support for "states' rights."

             Judge Sotomayor's remark about a "wise Latina" was given in context of a fair, accurate and even-handed discussion about the traditional makeup of the Supreme Court:

 "In our private conversations, Judge Cedarbaum has pointed out to me that seminal decisions in race and sex discrimination cases have come from Supreme Courts composed exclusively of white males. I agree that this is significant but I also choose to emphasize that the people who argued those cases before the Supreme Court which changed the legal landscape ultimately were largely people of color and women.

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".

Here, she was referring to the 1954 ruling in Brown v. Board of Education, which held that the public schools of Little Rock,  Arkansas had to be racially integrated under the principle of equal protection embodied in the Fourteenth Amendment.  And it was Ronald Reagan's cherished principle of  "states' rights" that Brown overturned, and which racist Southern pols like Arkansas Governor Faubus and Alabama Governor George Wallace chanted in defiance of federally mandated integration.

            This was the context in which Judge Sotomayor mentioned, toward the end of the lecture, her "wise Latina woman." 

"Justice O'Connor has often been cited as saying that a wise old man and wise old woman will reach the same conclusion in deciding cases. . . .  I am . . . not so sure that I agree with the statement. First, as Professor Martha Minnow has noted, there can never be a universal definition of wise. Second, 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."

Judge Sotomayor, was not really making a claim as to any purported racial or gender superiority across the board, as with the Jim Crow racism that Reagan pandered to in 1980, but was only acknowledging a basic reality of the human condition, that our individual background and experience will always have some effect on the way we look at political and cultural issues despite any protestations to the contrary.   

            For example, can anyone argue with a straight face that Justice Antonin Scalia's opposition to same-sex marriage or his defense of state laws that criminalize homosexuality do not come directly from his upbringing and his faith in Roman Catholicism?   The only difference here is that Sotomayor is honestly expressing her "empathy" for individuals subjected to discriminatory laws, which might be called a bias, while Scalia is tacitly expressing his antipathy -or more candidly, his bigotry, while disingenuously pretending to deny it.

            As for why Judge Sotomayor felt a "wise Latina" might more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male on such issues, someone like Scalia or Reagan for example, she explained:

"However, to understand takes time and effort, something that not all people are willing to give. For others, their experiences limit their ability to understand the experiences of others. Other simply do not care. Hence, one must accept the proposition that a difference there will be by the presence of women and people of color on the bench. Personal experiences affect the facts that judges choose to see. My hope is that I will take the good from my experiences and extrapolate them further into areas with which I am unfamiliar. I simply do not know exactly what that difference will be in my judging. But I accept there will be some based on my gender and my Latina heritage."

Again, she explains her remark with an analysis that is both fair and accurate.  People always bring to any calling the sum total of their life experience, which in turn limits both their understanding and ability to view matters in wholly neutral terms. 

            The only fault with Sotomayor's" wise Latina" comment, if any, is that she was being honest, something that is very rare in American politics as defined by the post-Reagan GOP.  Rather than pretend to an impossible Solomonic neutrality, Sotomayor acknowledges and accepts the real challenge of honestly attempting to achieve both fairness and balance in determining our constitutional rights on each individual case that comes before the Court:

I willingly accept that we who judge must not deny the differences resulting from experience and heritage but attempt, as the Supreme Court suggests, continuously to judge when those opinions, sympathies and prejudices are appropriate.

Unlike Reagan's 1980 "states' rights" sloganeering to Jim Crow southern voters, Sotomayor's well reasoned and historically accurate lecture to the young law students at Berkeley was both appropriate to our democratic constitutional ideals and honest in its assessment of the challenges to those ideals that exist in America today.

          Reagan did, however, make one unguarded and honest comment in 1962 about his own political beliefs.  Reagan had been a Democrat until JFK started talking about Civil Rights.  It was then that Reagan went Republican, like all the racist Southern Dixiecrats have done, and he explained it by saying:  "I didn't leave the Democrat Party, they left me."   

          Hence, his defense of "states' rights" to the white bigots at the Neshoba County Fair in the epicenter of Jim Crow politics.   Hey, it is what it is.  Reagan's subsequent address in the 1980 campaign to the Urban League in New York, supporting "civil rights," only proves what a two-faced liar he was as well as a racial bigot.  

            Today's corporate driven GOP likes to talk about racial equality in an attempt to dupe blacks into voting for them, like they have done with the religious right on so-called "values" issues.  They've been very successful until recently in getting gullible white "Christian" soldiers to fight and die in a supposedly 'holy war" against Islam in Iraq that is really nothing more but just another overseas war for corporate opportunity.  But  they will never have any real credibility on race until, like the Democrats in 1962, they leave Reagan and his political legacy in the trash can of history where it belongs.  

            As seen from the concerted opposition to both President Obama generally and his nomination of Judge Sotomayor specifically, that day is a long way off.  Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell dismissed Judge Sotomayor's apology for the "wise Latina" comment by saying:

"If it was a bad choice of words, it was a bad choice of words repeatedly, leading one to believe that it probably wasn't just an isolated statement, but a core belief."

Funny, though, I can't recall McConnell or any other right-wing GOP extremist ever admitting the obvious fact about Ronald Reagan, that his 1980 "states' rights" comment to white voters in the Jim Crow south wasn't just an isolated statement, but a core belief in Jim Crow racial segregation, as was his 1962 comment that the Democratic Party had left him when JFK and then LBJ began pushing civil rights legislation.

             In contrast to Sen. McConnell however, anyone with an open mind and a sense of fairness would take the trouble to actually read the full text of Judge Sotomayor's 2001 lecture at Berkeley Law before carping about her alleged bias based on the "wise Latina" comment:

                             http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/15/us/politics/15judge.text.html

And then they would have to take the trouble to deal with that comment in context of everything she had to say on the subjects of race, gender and the role of the judiciary.  But that sort of honest analysis of political and social issues is anathema to the extreme right wing ideology that today's GOP leadership embodies, based only on simplistic and inflammatory sloganeering and sound-bytes because they have nothing of any real substance to offer intelligent and fair-minded Americans of every race, gender, religion and sexual orientation.