The Lived Experience of the "Wise Latina"

...Is apparently scaring the hell out of some people.

I'm so over the dog-and-pony show that is Judge Sonia Sotomayor's confirmation hearings.  As you probably heard, barring a "meltdown," she'll be confirmed.  Good, so can we move on already?

Apparently not, as every hour on the hour NPR reminds me that we should all be hyperventilating and unpacking her "wise Latina" remark.  Still.

Sigh.

By now, Sotomayor (for the countless time, probably) has clarified her remarks while also trying to make clear that we are all bound by our lived experiences.  Justice Ginsberg does the same in an excellent interview over the dearth of women on the Court.  And Jamelle at PostBourgie nails the bias involved here...heck, I'm just going to cut and paste practically the entire thing:

What pisses me off is this completely ahistorical sense on part of Republicans that the Supreme Court is and always has been a perfectly just, perfectly impartial institution.  For most of this country’s history, the default perspective on the nation’s highest court has been that of wealthy white men, and accordingly, the court’s rulings have reflected the biases and prejudices of its members.  The court’s Dred Scott ruling, for instance, clearly reflects the fact that a majority of the Court’s members at the time were slaveholders.  Likewise, the Court’s ruling in Plessy v. Ferguson clearly reflects a group of men who had – like most of their peers – internalized a narrative of black inferiority and black “difference.”

That the GOP refuses to acknowledge this obvious fact is extremely troubling, not only because it betrays a (at this point characteristic) disregard for history, but also because it seems to suggest that conservatives see Sotomayor as “defiling” the court with her empathy and her “Latina-ness.”  For conservatives, the Court’s long era of white male dominance was marked by impartiality and fairness.  And now, with the possibility of greater minority representation on the bench, we have to worry about bias and prejudice in the court’s opinions.  This idea  – that minorities will sully the reputation of <insert organization> – isn’t a particularly new one (it colors a lot of the early commentary on the Reconstruction-era South), and it’s incredibly offensive to boot.

A good friend of mine, an activist lawyer at The Advancement Project, has gone a step further and produced a video (above) documenting all the racist and sexist invective that has been lobbed at Sotomayor, juxtaposing it with the triumphs and tragedies of our history of slavery, the Civil Rights Movement, immigrants' rights and suffrage (to name a few).  Stop the Hate is the overall message; that is, what seems like mindless tripe from the mouths of Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh is steeped in an often violent and painful history for women and people of color in the U.S.

So watch the video, then consider this coverage of the Bronx County Courthouse serving the neighborhoods where Sotomayor was raised in public housing so many years ago, with the privileged and insulated positions of those slandering her character in the media.  It's a long way from

...the Bronx, a place with the highest unemployment rate in the state and the fourth-highest poverty rate in the country among large counties, [where] the [court] cases seemed to pivot not on questions of law but of dollars-and-cents economics."

to

the Fox News room or the AP Washington Bureau.  In the Bronx, 51% of residents are Latin@; 22% are white.  25% of families live below the poverty line.  In journalism, the majority of "experts" providing commentary are white; the print and broadcast worlds (radio and tv) are at least 80% white; men outnumber women four to one on the Sunday morning news shows.  Fewer than one in five Senators are women. And so on...

Welcome, I expect, to the bench, Judge Sotomayor.  I, for one, look forward to the wisdom you offer as an public-housing born, Princeton & Yale educated, American, Nuyorican woman with a range of legal and judicial experience.  We could really use your perspective.