All those years, white men tried to stop women and minorities from playing the victim. And now, thanks to U.S. Circuit Court Judge Sonia Sotomayor, they can’t wait to cast themselves in that role.
Sen. Lindsay Graham of South Carolina recently said that, while he is uncomfortable with U.S. Circuit Court Judge Sonia Sotomayor’s “I would hope … a wise Latina” comment, he did not think that she doesn’t like white people.
What a relief. Here I thought that Sotomayor had managed to make her way through Princeton (where she outperformed many a white male on her way to graduating No. 2 in her class), Yale Law School (where she was chosen, on grades alone and over many a white male, to edit the Yale Law Journal), the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office (where she worked alongside many white males) and onto the federal judiciary (where she served alongside plenty of white males) and that somehow she had emerged from all these experiences not being able to get along with the species. Sotomayor has sure had plenty of practice over the years.
In fact, I’d bet she has had more experiencing interacting with white males — and, frankly, beating them at their own game — than Graham has had interacting with Latina high-achievers. In her travels, it’s likely that Sotomayor spent much more time trying to fit into the institutions she served than those running the institutions spent trying to suit her.
Still, as silly as Graham’s recent statement was, it’s a step up from what he said about Sotomayor’s “wiser Latina” comment a couple of weeks ago on Fox News Sunday. As someone who once occasionally served as a military judge, Graham seems to think the remark was aimed directly at him.
“It is troubling, and it’s inappropriate,” Graham said of the comment. “And I hope she’ll apologize.”
Oh, brother. Apologize to whom? To him? To every white male in a 100-mile radius? To every white male in the country?
It’s funny. I don’t remember any senators — including Democrats — asking that Samuel Alito apologize to African-Americans and Latinos for allegedly belonging to Concerned Alumni of Princeton, an organization opposed to affirmative action and dedicated to the proposition that women and minorities didn’t belong on the Princeton campus. Alito had bragged about belonging to the group when pursuing a promotion in the Reagan Justice Department but conveniently lost all recollection of it during his confirmation hearing.
Nor do I remember anyone in the Senate asking John Roberts to apologize to Latinos for a tacky and condescending remark in a 1983 memo he wrote while working for Reagan White House Counsel Fred Fielding. Alluding to Reagan’s support for amnesty for illegal immigrants, Roberts suggested that readers of a Spanish-language magazine would be glad to hear the Reagan White House supported a proposal to “grant legal status to their illegal amigos.”
And if you go back further, I doubt that anyone asked the late William Rehnquist to apologize for what people testified under oath were his efforts to suppress minority voter turnout as a young lawyer in Phoenix in the 1950s and ’60s. According to several witnesses, Rehnquist harassed African-American and Hispanic voters in majority-minority precincts. The witnesses said that Rehnquist, who was part of a group called Operation Eagle Eye, would harass minorities who were waiting in line to vote by asking them pointedly whether they had a right to be there, whether they could interpret the Constitution, whether they could speak English, or whether they were U.S. citizens.
This whole Sotomayor affair is really good for white males. They need it. They’re so used to seeing people who look like them occupy most of the top positions in society — in fact, six of the eight currently occupied seats on the Supreme Court — that they don’t know how to react to a perfectly harmless comment about how different people with different life experiences might apply a different lens. Those comments by a woman who, even her critics concede, is probably going to end up on the Supreme Court have been a great help. They let white males experience, if only for a fleeting moment, the sort of thing gives you … what’s the word? Oh yes, empathy.
It’s not just Lindsay Graham. Many white males — in Congress and in the media — can’t wait to condemn Sonia Sotomayor. They ought to thank her.
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