Last month, I started a piece on the nomination of Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court. At the time, I was pretty peeved that she was being maligned for a clumsy statement about race. This occurred before her Senate hearings earlier this month, so this is rather dated, but as I am about to unleash about some of the other racial boogeymen on the national radar, I thought to publish this first as my prologue, if you will:
OK, I have been patient, tolerant quiet so far because I assumed that with the election last Fall, we had finally come to a truce in our so-called culture war. But now it appears that the battle lines have been redrawn over the Supreme Court nomination of Judge Sonia Sotomayor. According to Rush Limbaugh, the most tolerant and unprejudiced man in America, she is an unqualified racist.
This revelation was not derived from any rational scrutiny of any jobs she held prior to being nominated, but from one controversial statement and one difficult employment discrimination case.
Since the current Supreme Court has yet to announce a decision in the employment discrimination case at issue, I will reserve comment until later.* And whether her statement about a wise Latina versus a white male jurist was really that offensive is a matter of interpretation, but out of respect for those who do find it insulting, I will denounce it and say that she should have known better. However, I would point out that in addition to hundreds of judicial opinions rendered and countless other public statements made over the course of her professional life, if this is the best her detractors have uncovered after an evaluation of every single word she has ever uttered or written...
Whereas, Rush Windbag, who has no distinguishable career accomplishments and has made numerous statements that teeter on the edge of outright racism (and many that go all the way there) certainly must be an authority on the issue since it takes a qualified racist to identify the unqualified ones.
Calling anyone a racist is provocative enough, but branding Judge Sotomayor as one is just a smokescreen for the real issue which is that America’s most endangered species is the disappearing white man from positions of power. Of course there are plenty of white men still in power (just look at the U.S. Senate and the corner offices on Wall Street), but in the alternative universe inhabited by Mr. Limbaugh and his ilk, they are the new American buffalo. Just look at what happened to the Democratic Party: for the first time in more than 200 years, there is a black president! And now that a Puerto Rican woman has been nominated for a lifetime appointment to the Supreme Court, it means that we are one step closer to eventual white male disenfranchisement.
Conventional wisdom had been that since our country mended its sexist and racist ways in the 60s, only the hardest working and most deserving individuals excel. Gender and skin color are no longer impediments to advancement, and as such, Sonia Sotomayor, who was raised in a Bronx housing project by a widowed mother, educated at Princeton and Yale Law School should be the embodiment of everything they say is possible in America.
Except now that Rush and Co. have embraced neo-victimhood, Sotomayor’s hard work and merit are neither admirable nor praiseworthy. Instead, she represents the new millennial dynamic where a high-achieving woman with an opinion is a femi-nazi, and a similarly accomplished person of color not in prison is the beneficiary of some residual historic guilt. Thus, her success is not really hers since in order to get to this point she had to displace somebody…
And chances are that somebody resembles the type of person who has taken for granted that his skin color, family name, and gender have opened far more doors than have been closed due to political correctness and unbridled affirmative action.
Which is why Rush has his tightie-whities all in a bunch…it has been tough ceding power to those who were once deemed inferior. It upsets the natural order of things when women and people of color forget our place—the kitchen, the bedroom, the ghetto, or some Third World country—and many of us have become too ambitious. And those white guys who seemingly deny their oppression by aligning with us are either suffering from Stockholm’s syndrome or are just outright traitors (and are probably all still Democrats).
Thus, once Sotomayor is confirmed, the battle will only have just begun. Her fitness for the high court will barely register as a disqualifier, although I’d like to see her detractors try to prove that a former NY city prosecutor lacks respect for the rule of law. Her hearings will be used as a platform to scare people about this New World Order where people of color take too much obvious pride in themselves. (By the way, now that Latinos are the largest minority group in the country, Brown is the new Black…so things will really get interesting soon enough.)
* As expected, the Supreme Court reversed the Second Circuit panel in the firefighter case and have effectively upended the remedial impact of Title VII. Sotomayor will be lambashed for lacking empathy for the aggrieved firefighters...
