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May 29 update: I look at former Congressman Tom Tancredo’s charge that Sotomayor is part of a “Latino KKK” here.
With the announcement this morning that Obama will nominate Judge Sonia Sotomayor to fill David Souter’s seat on the Supreme Court, conservative critics have pounced on comments Sotomayor made about ethnicity, gender, and judging seven years ago.
In a lecture given at the University of California, Berkeley School of Law in 2002, Sotomayor said this:
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.
I have a hunch that we’re all going to be seeing a lot of this quote in the next few weeks, so let’s take a look at it in context.
Sotomayor’s comment was framed as a response to something Justice Sandra O’Connor had said about the role of gender in the law. A wise old man and a wise old woman, O’Connor had argued, would reach the same decisions in deciding cases.
But Sotomayor wasn’t so sure.
Wise men, she said, sometimes have blind spots. Wise men like Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes and Benjamin Cardozo had ruled that sex and race discrimination were constitutional, after all, and they did so as members of an all-white, all-male Supreme Court. (As Jeffrey Toobin noted on CNN after Sotomayor’s nomination, 107 of America’s 111 Supreme Court justices have been white men.)
Does this mean that white men can’t understand the perspectives of women and people of color? No. They can, Sotomayor said, and do. But “to understand takes time and effort,” and not everyone is willing and able to make that investment. “Hence, one must accept the proposition that … the presence of women and people of color on the bench” will make a difference in the decisions rendered.
If you believe that perfect objectivity is a goal that judges can and should strive to meet, then you may disagree with Sotomayor’s argument. But perfect objectivity is not Sotomayor’s goal — in that same speech she quoted Harvard Law professor Martha Minnow as saying that “there is no objective stance” available to a judge, “only a series of perspectives. No neutrality, no escape from choice.”
At the same time, she said, “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. … I can and do aspire to be greater than the sum total of my experiences.”
I’m a little nervous about Sotomayor’s position on students’ rights, as I noted a couple of weeks ago. But there’s a lot to like in this appointment.
I’m going to be speaking at a media conference at Hunter College this Saturday, as part of a panel called “Media for Student Activism: Building Networks, Building Movements.”
The NYC Grassroots Media Conference will feature more than forty panels in four sessions, on subjects ranging from managing online communities to queer youth media. It’s going to be an amazing conference, and student registration is only fifteen bucks!
I’m really excited about our panel too. It’s called Media for Student Activism: Building Networks, Building Movements, and I’ll be talking about Twitter and blogs. We’ve also got a documentarian, a Labor Studies prof, and two undergraduate student activists on board, each of whom will be bringing something of their own to the group.
More on the panel (and the conference) later this week.
December 2010 update : If you’re looking for information on the White Student Union at West Chester University, click here.
I’m having a conversation on Twitter this afternoon with a guy who proposed creating a “White Heterosexual Organization” on his campus. He did this, as he put it, to show “how f’ing stupid it was to have a group based on race, or sexual orientation.”
I’ve seen this argument a lot over the years: “If blacks can have a Black Student Union, why can’t whites have a White Student Union? Why is one okay and the other one not?”
When someone asks me this, my response is always pretty much the same: “Do you actually want to have a White Student Union on campus? Would you be active in a WSU there was one? Is there stuff you’d like to be doing that the absence of a WSU is keeping you from doing?”
So far, nobody has ever answered any of these questions with a yes.
The guy I’ve been talking to on Twitter says he wanted “to make a point about the wrongness of segregation, regardless of purpose.” But you don’t demonstrate that something is bad “regardless of purpose” by showing that it’s bad if it has no purpose, you demonstrate it by showing that it’s bad even if it has a great purpose.
That’s the first fundamental problem with the WSU thought experiment — it doesn’t engage with the reasons that BSUs exist.
The argument that people should never voluntarily separate themselves by race (or gender, or religion, or sexual orientation) is one I can respect. It’s not one that I agree with, but it’s one I can respect. But I can only respect it if the person making the argument understands the real-world reasons why people sometimes do separate themselves along such lines.
If you don’t know why people are doing something, why should I listen when you tell me they should stop?
A new article on segregated high school proms in the Deep South — which are still going on today — reveals a lot about the myths and realities of racism in America.
The article, from today’s New York Times Magazine, concentrates on Montgomery County High School, a small school in a southern Georgia community that’s about two-thirds white. The school itself didn’t integrate until 1971, and its proms have been segregated ever since.
Or rather, its white prom has been segregated. The students refer to the proms as “the black-folks prom” and “the white-folks prom,” but the black-folks prom is open to anyone, and it’s not uncommon for a few white students to show up. As with historical segregation, the point of the whites-only prom is less to keep the races separate than maintain whites-only space.
Another important fact about the proms is that it’s mostly white parents, not white students, who are behind the segregation. As one student told the Times, white parents tell their kids, “if you’re going with the black people, I’m not going to pay for it.”
At the same time, though, the article doesn’t let the white students off the hook. As one black student notes, “half of those girls, when they get home, they’re gonna text a black boy.” That’s white privilege right there — participating in a exclusionary racist institution one moment, re-engaging with your black friends the next, and in many cases not even noticing the transition from one to the other.
The administration of Liberty University is moderating its position on the campus’s College Democrats club, which it dissolved a little over a week ago.
In a May 15 email, LU Vice President for Student Affairs Mark Hine told the club’s president that the College Democrats was “no longer going to be recognized as a Liberty University club,” citing university regulations requiring that all campus groups and their parent organizations adopt policies and positions consistent “with the distinctly Christian mission of the University, the Liberty Way, the Honor Code, or the policies and procedures promulgated by the University.” Groups in conflict with those principles, he noted, could not “be approved, recognized or permitted to meet on campus, advertise, distribute or post materials, or use University facilities.”
Yesterday, however, in an email to Rod Snyder, an official with the Young Democrats of America, LU chancellor Jerry Falwell Jr. took a different stance. The College Democrats, he said, would not be allowed to use Liberty University’s name, but they “will not be prevented from meeting on campus or having a club.”
Fallwell claimed that Snyder had been “misinformed” about Liberty’s position on the CD, and he seems to have grasped onto an ambiguity in Hine’s original email as the basis for his new position. Although Hine said that CD would not be recognized as a club because of the Democratic party’s views, he did not explicitly say that the group would not be allowed to meet on campus. He strongly implied it, to the point that it’s the only sensible reading of his letter, but he didn’t say it explicitly.
This isn’t a complete reversal of the university’s May 15 policy, but it is a significant retreat, and a major victory for the school’s College Democrats.
Sunday morning update: Liberty University offered another olive branch to the College Democrats on Friday, offering full recognition if the group would affiliate with the national organization Democrats for Life rather than the Democratic Party. On its face, this seems like a plausible compromise, as the LU College Dems identifies itself as a pro-life organization.
There is, however, a hitch.
Democrats for Life does not endorse or campaign on behalf of pro-choice candidates. Ever. And if the Liberty University College Democrats were to affiliate with DfL, they wouldn’t be able to do so either. As LUCD president Brian Diaz pointed out to a local newspaper, that means that the group would have to sit on the sidelines of the 2012 presidential election.
studentactivism.net 
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