Sotomayor

I just came across this. It is a very nice accusation of the bland racism of the Republicans when it comes to "considering" the Sotomayor nomination to the Supreme Court. Here is Eric Martin at the Obsidian Wings web site:

It was odd to see the way the GOP turned the Sotomayor confirmation hearings into the "wise Latina" show - opting to focus, monomaniacally, on a few words from a speech delivered over 7 years ago, while virtually ignoring the output of one of the longest judicial careers of any recent Supreme Court nominee. Jim Henley summed it up succinctly:

If Sonia Sotomayor is so great, how come she only ever said one thing in her whole life?

But aside from how strange it was to see politicians questioning a potential Supreme Court justice - incessantly and repetitively - about one passage in a speech, and not her jurisprudential outlook/body of work (which belies the accusation of bias as supposedly evidenced by that excerpt), the essence of Sotomayor's supposedly controversial commentary shouldn't really be all that controversial.

Judges whose life experiences differ from the white male norm that has dominated the Supreme Court since its inception, would, I "hope," be able to make better informed decisions on cases for which being white and male may increase the likelihood of certain blindspots, and being a member of a minority group might provide certain insights.

Further, while a minority will likely be well-versed in the dominant culture of a given society (by virtue of it being dominant and all), a member of the majority group is less likely to be familiar with the culture of that minority group. Due to this myopia, sometimes the dominant group just doesn't get it - or at least, has a harder time of it. Much of the rest of the GOP's performance during these hearings (and in previous weeks) provided ample evidence for that proposition.

Stephen Colbert, once again, nails it (via):

For instance, take the Dred Scott case. Those justice's life experience, being white men in pre-civil war America some of whom owned slaves, in no way influenced their decision that black people were property. And, their personal backgrounds had nothing to do with the all-neutral court decision that it was legal to send Japanese Americans to internment camps in 1942. Imagine how the life experience of an Asian judge would have sullied that neutrality.

Now, in a perfect world, judges would be colorblind and infinitely empathetic such that absolute neutrality, and the total usurpation of personal bias and the influence of life experiences, was not only an attainable framework for judging, but a commonplace one. But since we live in this world instead, diversity provides a helpful check on the inevitable effects of judges' personal contexts and histories - especially when those personal histories have tended to be relatively uniform, thus increasing the risks of certain lapses.

Yep... those Republicans don't want any of that "empathy" stuff. Who wants a black man on the court for the Dred Scott decision or the Plessy vs. Ferguson decision. Why right now you can see how rational and empathic white folks are by how they are handling the Gates/Crowley brouhaha. They've looked at it and said "ain't no racism here, why let us just finish trussing this uppity black boy up, let us hang him from the highest tree, and sho 'nuff won't be no more racism here".