That Sotomayor Quote : Houston Indymedia

The quote about race from Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor has been a rallying point for the right. She said "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." Even when taken out of context, the quote isn't racist in that it does not compare an average Latina with an average white, but a wise Latina with experiences to an average white. Furthermore, the quote was a single line in a long speech about the inequalities of our system. Just as James Brown's 'Say it loud, I'm black and I'm proud' had a different meaning than a white band singing about white pride, Sotomayor's quote should be categorized as an assertion of worth in response to oppression rather than as a statement of racial superiority.

In the U.S., one out of seven of us are Latino. On the Supreme Court, zero justices out of nine have ever been Latino. So an unspoken statement of the appointment process is that white people make better judges than Latinos. If an official said so publicly, it would be scandalous, but there is no need to say it or even think about it, the statement is built into the system. Sotomayor's quote apparently has some Americans concerned that she could tip the scales of justice towards decisions which discriminate against whites, but that would take quite a bit of tipping. The Supreme Court may be totally lacking in Latinos, but our prisons aren't. Twenty percent of prisoners are Latino. There are huge racial disparities in the treatment of different races committing the same offenses in how often each is pulled over, written a ticket, given a harsher penalty, or given the death penalty. Police, wardens, prosecutors, judges, and elected officials never have to put into words the underlying logic that whites are more deserving of leniency than blacks and Latinos.

This all fits into a larger picture of how our society can be oppressive without the words of oppressors. When Hitler went to war, he spoke in language that matched the aggression of his armed forces: "Our strength lies in our quickness and in our brutality... I have given the command and I shall shoot everyone who utters one word of criticism, for the goal to be obtained in the war is not that of reaching certain lines but of physically demolishing the opponent." This type of language is the antithesis of Obama's. He says things like: "We are not in Afghanistan to control that country or to dictate its future. We are in Afghanistan to confront a common enemy that threatens the United States, our friends and allies, and the people of Afghanistan and Pakistan who have suffered the most at the hands of violent extremists."

When our bombs blow up children in Afghanistan, it doesn't matter to the mothers that our President has called them friends. The fact that U.S. politicians rarely openly expresses ideas of empire is of little consolation to those on the other sides of our weapons. The fact that politicians don't say out loud that Latinos and blacks deserve to be incarcerated more than whites doesn't matter to those in the prisons. No officials say out loud that Latinos don't generally make it onto the Supreme Court is because whites are wiser and make better judges than Latinos. But this unspoken rule is even more powerful for not being said aloud. Sotomayor's quote did not arrive into in a post-racial America, but inside a system in which our institutions have the luxury of being unaware of their tendencies towards empire, racism, and white-supremacy.