I’ve just returned from my doctoral commencement ceremony. Posting will resume tomorrow.
In a 2002 interview Judge Sonia Sotomayor said that she felt “isolated … and very unsure about how I would survive” as an undergraduate at Princeton, and that campus organizations for students of color “provided me with an anchor I needed to ground myself in that new and different world.”
Sotomayor grew up poor in the Bronx, and she discovered in her first semester at Princeton that her educational background “was not on par with that of many of my classmates.” She became involved in Accion Puertorriquena, a Puerto Rican student organization, and the campus’s Third World Center, and she credits “the third-world students who preceded me and those who had supported me while I was at Princeton” for helping her to thrive on campus.
The complete article, from Hispanic Outlook in Higher Education, is not online, but extended excerpts can be found here.
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?
studentactivism.net 
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