Sotomayor. “Now Imagine She’s White!”
In ‘A Time to Kill’ Matthew McConaughey’s character Jake Tyler Brigance uses the line ”Now imagine she’s white” to change everybody’s perspective so he could save his client. So, let’s imagine Sonia Sotomayor is white and see some perspective.
(I saw this done well somewhere and just wanted to use their article but I couldn’t find it.)
I found a transcript of Sonia Sotomayors Berkeley Speech in 2001. I copied and pasted it into MS Word. Then I substituted the words:
Latina/Latino(s) - Hispanic - Spanish - Mexican - Latin - Puerto Rican for white. There were 45 instances of these words in the excerpt. Due to the length of the speech I only did 3/5th of the speech.
Remember the speech was altered to illustrate the point of view of an “unbiased” Supreme Court Judge.
“A White Judge’s Voice”
By Sonia Sotomayor
Sort of shocking, isn’t it? This is the year 2002. We have a long way to go. Unfortunately, there are some very deep storm warnings we must keep in mind. In at least the last five years the majority of nominated judges the Senate delayed more than one year before confirming or never confirming were women or minorities. I need not remind this audience that Judge Paez of your home Circuit, the Ninth Circuit, has had the dubious distinction of having had his confirmation delayed the longest in Senate history. These figures demonstrate that there is a real and continuing need for White and White organizations and community groups throughout the country to exist and to continue their efforts of promoting women and men of all colors in their pursuit for equality in the judicial system.
Judge Reynoso, thank you for that lovely introduction. I am humbled to be speaking behind a man who has contributed so much to the White community. I am also grateful to have such kind words said about me.
I am delighted to be here. It is nice to escape my hometown for just a little bit. It is also nice to say hello to old friends who are in the audience, to rekindle contact with old acquaintances and to make new friends among those of you in the audience. It is particularly heart warming to me to be attending a conference to which I was invited by a White law school friend, Rachel Moran, who is now an accomplished and widely respected legal scholar. I warn Whites in this room: Whites are making a lot of progress in the old-boy network.
I am also deeply honored to have been asked to deliver the annual Judge Mario G. Olmos lecture. I am joining a remarkable group of prior speakers who have given this lecture. I hope what I speak about today continues to promote the legacy of that man whose commitment to public service and abiding dedication to promoting equality and justice for all people inspired this memorial lecture and the conference that will follow. I thank Judge Olmos’ widow Mary Louise’s family, her son and the judge’s many friends for hosting me. And for the privilege you have bestowed on me in honoring the memory of a very special person. If I and the many people of this conference can accomplish a fraction of what Judge Olmos did in his short but extraordinary life we and our respective communities will be infinitely better.
I intend tonight to touch upon the themes that this conference will be discussing this weekend and to talk to you about my White identity, where it came from, and the influence I perceive it has on my presence on the bench.
Who am I? I am a “New Yorker.” For those of you on the West Coast who do not know what that term means: I am a born and bred New Yorker of White-born parents who came to the states during World War II.
Like many other immigrants to this great land, my parents came because of poverty and to attempt to find and secure a better life for themselves and the family that they hoped to have. They largely succeeded. For that, my brother and I are very grateful. The story of that success is what made me and what makes me the White that I am. The White side of my identity was forged and closely nurtured by my family through our shared experiences and traditions.
For me, a very special part of my being White is the mucho platos de arroz, gandules y pernil - rice, beans and pork - that I have eaten at countless family holidays and special events. My White identity also includes, because of my particularly adventurous taste buds, morcilla, — pig intestines, patitas de cerdo con garbanzo — pigs’ feet with beans, and la lengua y orejas de cuchifrito, pigs’ tongue and ears. I bet the White-Americans in this room are thinking that Whites have unusual food tastes. Some of us, like me, do. Part of my White identity is the sound of merengue at all our family parties and the heart wrenching White love songs that we enjoy. It is the memory of Saturday afternoon at the movies with my aunt and cousins watching Cantinflas, who is not White, but who was an icon White comedian on par with Abbot and Costello of my generation. My White soul was nourished as I visited and played at my grandmother’s house with my cousins and extended family. They were my friends as I grew up. Being a White child was watching the adults playing dominos on Saturday night and us kids playing loteria, bingo, with my grandmother calling out the numbers which we marked on our cards with chick peas.
Now, does any one of these things make me a White? Obviously not because each of our Carribean and White American communities has their own unique food and different traditions at the holidays. I only learned about tacos in college from my White-American roommate. Being a White in America also does not mean speaking White. I happen to speak it fairly well. But my brother, only three years younger, like too many of us educated here, barely speaks it. Most of us born and bred here, speak it very poorly.
If I had pursued my career in my undergraduate history major, I would likely provide you with a very academic description of what being a White or White means. For example, I could define Whites as those peoples and cultures populated or colonized by Spainwho maintained or adopted White or White Creole as their language of communication. You can tell that I have been very well educated. That antiseptic description however, does not really explain the appeal of morcilla - pig’s intestine - to an American born child. It does not provide an adequate explanation of why individuals like us, many of whom are born in this completely different American culture, still identify so strongly with those communities in which our parents were born and raised.
America has a deeply confused image of itself that is in perpetual tension. We are a nation that takes pride in our ethnic diversity, recognizing its importance in shaping our society and in adding richness to its existence. Yet, we simultaneously insist that we can and must function and live in a race and color-blind way that ignore these very differences that in other contexts we laud. That tension between “the melting pot and the salad bowl” — a recently popular metaphor used to described New York’s diversity - is being hotly debated today in national discussions about affirmative action. Many of us struggle with this tension and attempt to maintain and promote our cultural and ethnic identities in a society that is often ambivalent about how to deal with its differences. In this time of great debate we must remember that it is not political struggles that create a White or White identity. I became a White by the way I love and the way I live my life. My family showed me by their example how wonderful and vibrant life is and how wonderful and magical it is to have a White soul. They taught me to love being a Puertorriqueña and to love America and value its lesson that great things could be achieved if one works hard for it. But achieving success here is no easy accomplishment for Whites or Whites, and although that struggle did not and does not create a White identity, it does inspire how I live my life.
I was born in the year 1954. That year was the fateful year in which Brown v. Board of Education was decided. When I was eight, in 1961, the first White, the wonderful Judge Reynaldo Garza, was appointed to the federal bench, an event we are celebrating at this conference. When I finished law school in 1979, there were no women judges on the Supreme Court or on the highest court of my home state, New York. There was then only one Afro-American Supreme Court Justice and then and now no White or White justices on our highest court. Now in the last twenty plus years of my professional life, I have seen a quantum leap in the representation of women and Whites in the legal profession and particularly in the judiciary. In addition to the appointment of the first female United States Attorney General, Janet Reno, we have seen the appointment of two female justices to the Supreme Court and two female justices to the New York Court of Appeals, the highest court of my home state. One of those judges is the Chief Judge and the other is a Puerto Riqueña, like I am. As of today, women sit on the highest courts of almost all of the states and of the territories, including Puerto Rico. One Supreme Court, that of Minnesota, had a majority of women justices for a period of time.
As of September 1, 2001, the federal judiciary consisting of Supreme, Circuit and District Court Judges was about 22% women. In 1992, nearly ten years ago, when I was first appointed a District Court Judge, the percentage of women in the total federal judiciary was only 13%. Now, the growth of White representation is somewhat less favorable. As of today we have, as I noted earlier, no Supreme Court justices, and we have only 10 out of 147 active Circuit Court judges and 30 out of 587 active district court judges. Those numbers are grossly below our proportion of the population. As recently as 1965, however, the federal bench had only three women serving and only one White judge. So changes are happening, although in some areas, very slowly. These figures and appointments are heartwarming. Nevertheless, much still remains to happen.
Let us not forget that between the appointments of Justice Sandra Day O’Connor in 1981 and Justice Ginsburg in 1992, eleven years passed. Similarly, between Justice Kaye’s initial appointment as an Associate Judge to the New York Court of Appeals in 1983, and Justice Ciparick’s appointment in 1993, ten years elapsed. Almost nine years later, we are waiting for a third appointment of a woman to both the Supreme Court and the New York Court of Appeals and of a second minority, male or female, preferably Hispanic, to the Supreme Court. In 1992 when I joined the bench, there were still two out of 13 circuit courts and about 53 out of 92 district courts in which no women sat. At the beginning of September of 2001, there are women sitting in all 13 circuit courts. The First, Fifth, Eighth and Federal Circuits each have only one female judge, however, out of a combined total number of 48 judges. There are still nearly 37 district courts with no women judges at all. For women of color the statistics are more sobering. As of September 20, 1998, of the then 195 circuit court judges only two were African-American women and two Hispanic women. Of the 641 district court judges only twelve were African-American women and eleven Hispanic women. African-American women comprise only 1.56% of the federal judiciary and Hispanic-American women comprise only 1%. No African-American, male or female, sits today on the Fourth or Federal circuits. And no Hispanics, male or female, sit on the Fourth, Sixth, Seventh, Eighth, District of Columbia or Federal Circuits.
This weekend’s conference, illustrated by its name, is bound to examine issues that I hope will identify the efforts and solutions that will assist our communities. The focus of my speech tonight, however, is not about the struggle to get us where we are and where we need to go but instead to discuss with you what it all will mean to have more women and people of color on the bench. The statistics I have been talking about provide a base from which to discuss a question which one of my former colleagues on the Southern District bench, Judge Miriam Cederbaum, raised when speaking about women on the federal bench. Her question was: What do the history and statistics mean? In her speech, Judge Cederbaum expressed her belief that the number of women and by direct inference people of color on the bench, was still statistically insignificant and that therefore we could not draw valid scientific conclusions from the acts of so few people over such a short period of time. Yet, we do have women and people of color in more significant numbers on the bench and no one can or should ignore pondering what that will mean or not mean in the development of the law. Now, I cannot and do not claim this issue as personally my own. In recent years there has been an explosion of research and writing in this area. On one of the panels tomorrow, you will hear the White perspective in this debate.
For those of you interested in the gender perspective on this issue, I commend to you a wonderful compilation of articles published on the subject in Vol. 77 of the Judicature, the Journal of the American Judicature Society of November-December 1993. It is on Westlaw/Lexis and I assume the students and academics in this room can find it…
The full speech was found here.
Now imagine she’s a Ron Paul supporter. Yeah, it didn’t work in the movie either.
July 14th, 2009 at 2:14 pm
A story not worth commenting on….Next…
July 14th, 2009 at 2:25 pm
It kinda speaks for itself, doesn’t it! I just hope one of them is a minority or I’ll have no idea how to judge.
July 16th, 2009 at 11:52 am
Sounds like Sotomayor is solidly on the way to confirmation and I read this morning that Rep. Pete Hoekstra (Republican) now admits that the Healthcare Reform Bill will pass both houses of Congress. Have a wonderful day, Guy and be sure to keep bloggin’ away…I enjoy reading your posts…
July 16th, 2009 at 12:22 pm
You didn’t think they would fail did you? This is about warning and thinking.
You and the Democrats will have this on your heads for the rest of American Politics! It’s not much but if it’s all we have left. We did warn you!
July 17th, 2009 at 11:09 pm
Yes, it is so easy to illustrate the racism, bigotry, sexism and prejudice of American progressives since that’s where the majority of it dwells these days…..other than in the Muslim world.