The truth hole
Dear Crystal,
I too feel highs and lows watching the ocnfirmation hearings this week.
Judge Sotomayor Confirmation Hearing, Day 2
Senators Sessions and Graham asking whether Sotomayor’s identity inhibits her ability to judge fairly are clear examples of white privilege and the inability to acknowledge that our life experiences enrich and limit our understanding of the world. This is why we are interdependent- why I who have always had full physical ability cannot on my own answer questions about what public amenities are most needed for people in wheelchairs. I who am light skinned living in a society where light skin is rewarded, taken as normal and neutral, cannot alone understand where society’s biases live and how they are perpetuated.
Thinking of oneself as naturally neutral and objective is a hallmark of white privilege. It’s a simple idea- one my boyfriend summarized beautifully. How can these Senators act like it didn’t take 130 years and a movement of women and abolitionists to include “women” in the Constitutional notion of “all men created equal.” And who led the movements to overturn the Dred Scott decision, Plessy v. Ferguson, so on and so forth?
Does that mean that one part of our experience- our ethnic or racial or gender heritage- operates in the same way for every member of a group? Of course not. This is part of what Sotomayor argued herself in the 2002 speech with the “wise Latina” soundbyte.
On Day 1 of the hearings, Sen. Durbin’s question period was a positive for me. Durbin read the second part of Sotomayor’s 2002 speech in an effort to share the full argument. Meanwhile, Durbin’s questions tackled the disparity in crack v. cocaine sentencing, and racism and arbitrariness in the death penalty. Here was someone who has considered how race matters, and it’s no wonder he wanted to share more of the speech Sotomayor has been so hastily attacked for.
Here are clips from Judge Sotomayor’s 2002 UC Berkeley address:
“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…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. I also hope that by raising the question today of what difference having more Latinos and Latinas on the bench will make will start your own evaluation. For people of color and women lawyers, what does and should being an ethnic minority mean in your lawyering?… Each day on the bench I learn something new about the judicial process and about being a professional Latina woman in a world that sometimes looks at me with suspicion. I am reminded each day that I render decisions that affect people concretely and that I owe them constant and complete vigilance in checking my assumptions, presumptions and perspectives and ensuring that to the extent that my limited abilities and capabilities permit me, that I reevaluate them and change as circumstances and cases before me requires. I can and do aspire to be greater than the sum total of my experiences but I accept my limitations. 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.,,”
NPR’s show Tell Me More discussed this question of identity and the bench with Judge Cruz Reynoso, the man who introduced Judge Sotomayor in 2002 on the day she delivered the now oft quoted speech. This is their succinct but poignant talk.
Judge Cruz Reynoso
Some argue that focusing on identity is a barrier to a content-of-our-character based world. What Sotomayor is arguing, I think, is that to get there, we must unveil how identity operates. This is how progress has been made on this front, historically.
We can thank people like Sen. Graham, Sen. Sessions and Howard Kurtz (see his even worse questions for Black female reporters) etc. because in their attacks on the judgement of a Latina woman or Black female reporters who are proud of the racial, ethnic, and gender facets of their humanity, they provide the starkest evidence as to why denying identity’s influence on the individual hinders our societal evolution.
There’s a blindness about the line of questioning Senator Graham engaged in, for instance, on Day 2 of the hearings. It reminds me of this Langston Hughes verse:
That Justice is a Blind Goddess
We who are Black are Wise.
Her bandage hides two festering sores
that once, perhaps, were Eyes.
