Over many years, I have called Tom Tancredo many thingsa demagogue, a bully, a carnival barker and probably worse.
But I have never called him a racist — and for at least two reasons.
One, I don’t think he is a racist. I think he’s a demagogue and a bully and, well, I particularly like carnival barker. But I don’t think he believes that white people are inherently superior. I think he’s a rabble-rousing mono-culturalist (if there were such an actual word) who opposes multicultural America and knows he can raise a crowd if he calls Denver a sanctuary city or rails against pressing “One for English” at the ATM.
Two, to call someone a racist is not just name-calling. It gets at something fundamental, the great stain on our nation’s history. It matters.
And yet, Tancredo, finding the first available camera, goes on MSNBC to charge that Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor “appears to be a racist.” It would be stunning, except, of course, that it’s Tancredo, who trades in outrage.
He was adding his voice to the voices you’d expect to add here. Rush Limbaugh rages against “reverse racism.” And Newt Gingrich, hinting at a run for president in 2012, tweets — because he’s hip — that “New racism is no better than old racism. A white man racist nominee would be forced to withdraw. Latina woman racist should also withdraw.”
Forget about a post-racial America. Now we’ve moved to some new kind of racial world, in which the R-word is no longer reserved for, say, Bull Connor or someone standing on schoolhouse steps shouting “segregation forever,” but also for a Supreme Court nominee making a point about gender and ethnicity on the bench at a conference about, yes, gender and ethnicity on the bench.
I have to admit that when I read the speech, I didn’t see any big deal there. Maybe that tells you why I’m not an editor. I assumed that if you read the quote in context, it was pretty clear what she was talking about. I assumed that if Sotomayor’s many hundreds of rulings from the bench showed a strain of racism, we’d have heard about it.
But the story has became her quote from the 2001 speech at Berkeley: “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.”
Let’s agree that it’s a sentence she wishes she could rewrite. Let’s agree that if she had added the phrase, “in certain cases,” we probably wouldn’t be having this conversation. And maybe we can agree that if you look at the phrase she did add — “with the richness of her experience” — you can make the case she’s really an experiencist rather than a racist.
But more to the point, the real argument you can have is whether she overstates her case.
Her quote is a play off something attributed to Sandra Day O’Connor about a “wise old man” and a “wise old woman” coming to the same conclusion if reading the same text. Sotomayor disagrees. And if you look at this court, with eight wise men and one wise woman, you can’t miss the fact they often read the same text and come away with a 5-4 decision.
In her speech, Sotomayor makes the case for diversity of experience, even while conceding that nine white men on the bench ended segregation. Here’s the part of Sotomayor’s speech that immediately follows the “wise Latina” line:
“Let us not forget that wise men like Oliver Wendell Holmes and Justice Cardozo voted on cases which upheld both sex and race discrimination in our society. Until 1972, no Supreme Court case ever upheld the claim of a woman in a gender discrimination case.”
Are you really confused now by where she was going?
Do you think she’s saying that “a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experience” has some inherent advantage in ruling, say, on a Chrysler bankruptcy case?
Or do you think (as Wendy Kaminer suggests in the Atlantic) she’s thinking more along the lines of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who was stunned by her colleagues’ inability to understand the trauma of a 13-year-old girl being strip-searched by Arizona school officials looking for Advil?
“They have never been a 13-year- old girl,” Ginsburg told USA Today. “It’s a very sensitive age for a girl. I didn’t think that my colleagues, some of them, quite understood.”
University of Chicago law professor Brian Leiter argues that the interesting part of Sotomayor’s speech is not the wise Latina quote, but this: “I further accept that our experiences as women and people of color affect our decisions. The aspiration to impartiality is just that — it’s an aspiration because it denies the fact that we are by our experiences making different choices than others.”
It’s a provocative statement — that there is no perfect wisdom or impartiality from the bench — but does it make her a racist? Ask the carnival barkers.
Mike Littwin writes Sundays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Reach him at 303-954-5428 or mlittwin@denverpost.com.
