HARPOONING THE GREAT WHITE WAIL

      REFLECTIONS ON RACISM AND RIGHT-WING BUFFOONERY

      FOR A GROUP that regularly critiques people of color and the left for promoting a politics of victimization, white conservatives demonstrate a penchant for the histrionics of victimhood unparalleled in modern times. Facing a nation led by a black man, sullying the hallowed halls of a house they long considered white in more than just name, the far right finds itself in meltdown mode, which would be humorous to observe were it not so toxic in its consequences for the nation.

      Most recently, the nomination of Judge Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court has driven conservatives insane, as with Bill O’Reilly, who recently stated with a straight face that Sotomayor’s nomination was just more evidence that the left “sees white men as the problem” in America.

      Others across the radio dial have accused Sotomayor of being racist for suggesting that racial, ethnic, and gender identity might affect a judge’s sensibilities (a subject to which we will return). Rush Limbaugh even proclaimed her the equivalent of former Klan leader and lifelong neo-Nazi David Duke. Just to review, Duke has openly praised Adolf Hitler and claimed that Jewish people are akin to cancer. He has blamed integration for the spread of venereal disease and has advocated the sterilization of impoverished black women. In his autobiography, he calls for the rising of “Aryan warriors” to take back the culture, violently if necessary, from the Jews he believes have hijacked it.

      So yeah, exactly like Sotomayor.

      The full complement of smears against the judge is far too extensive to list. Still, among other choice items, we have G. Gordon Liddy expressing concern about Sotomayor’s menstrual cycle, which Liddy worries might impair her judgment. Concerns about judgment are especially rich coming from Liddy, the Watergate principal who once concocted a scheme to kidnap anti-Nixon protesters and offered to be assassinated if it would help cover up the Nixon gang’s burglary of Democratic headquarters, which he had masterminded. Presumably, Liddy was not in the grips of menses at the time.

      Most of the criticism on talk radio and Fox News concerns Sotomayor having once said that she hoped her experiences, as a woman and Latina would help her render fairer decisions than white men might, specifically on cases about discrimination. To the ears of reactionaries, intent on ginning up the white grievance machine against President Obama, this comment amounted to a proclamation of supremacy on her part—a declaration that Latina judgment was inherently more sound than that of white men.

      Of course, she meant no such thing. What Sotomayor was suggesting is that being a Latina, like anything else, informs one’s perceptions and interpretations of facts and the law, because it will have affected one’s experiences in life. There is nothing controversial about this statement. Indeed, it is one with which other justices have agreed, such as Sandra Day O’Connor, who said the same thing about being a woman in 1981. Likewise, Clarence Thomas claimed that his experience with poverty would make him more sensitive to the concerns of non-elites (not that it has, but he said it), and Samuel Alito suggested his family’s immigrant experience would help inform his opinions of immigration-related issues.

      Her comment was simply a truism: Identity shapes experience, which then informs perceptions. Identity provides a lens through which one observes reality. It doesn’t mean that a person is suddenly incapable of rendering fair opinions on legal matters, having viewed a particular case through that prism. Still, it does mean that pure objectivity—the notion that a judge is a blank slate with no lens whatsoever—is a lie.

      To make such a claim is not, as Newt Gingrich would have it, “new racism,” let alone equivalent to “the old racism,” as he also suggested. The old racism (which isn’t that old) was about the deliberate denying of opportunities to people of color. It was like the kind of racism practiced by the late Justice William Rehnquist (a favorite of Gingrich and his ilk), who, as a law clerk, penned a memo defending segregation and advocating it be maintained, and who, during his days as a GOP poll watcher, tried to keep black and brown folks from voting in Arizona. Again, nothing like what Sonia Sotomayor said or meant with her words.

      Even more to the point—and this is what confirms the accuracy of Sotomayor’s comments—white male judges gave that old racism the cover of law. And why? Because of their personal biases, shaped by their identities as privileged group members who had the luxury of seeing nothing wrong with the social order from which they profited. The very fact that, for over 150 years, white men rendered one opinion after another dispensing with the rights of persons of color demonstrates the fundamental truth of what Judge Sotomayor was suggesting: namely, identity matters. How else could such esteemed jurists, render such horrific judgments as were handed down in Dred Scott or Plessy v. Ferguson? Is it not self-evident that had there been persons of color on the Court when those cases were argued, such Justices would have felt differently about the validity of separate but equal? Or the suggestion, rendered in Dred Scott, that blacks had no rights which the white man was bound to respect?

      The simple truth is, we all have a lens. White men may not realize it, or we may consider that lens to be merely normal, in the sense that it is a generic, rational, human one, unsullied by our race or gender. But the luxury of believing such a thing is the hallmark of white privilege and white supremacist thinking. To universalize that which is particular to oneself is to suggest that persons like you are the very model of a human being, endowed with superior judgment, clarity, and objectivity relative to others, clouded as they are by their mere social identities.

      But the law is not a fixed, exact thing, free from differing interpretations, which is why most Supreme Court opinions are mixed or split decisions, rather than unanimous, 9-0 renderings. Rational and fair-minded people, all of them legal scholars, can and do come to different conclusions about the same set of facts, the same precedents, and the same Constitution to which all are sworn. And when considering why two judges may look at the same facts and see different realities, race, gender, class, and other identity markers might be among the explanations. Not because there is something inherently different about whites or people of color, men or women, that leads them to different conclusions, but because our social location can influence what we see and don’t see.

      It’s hard to imagine how anyone could argue with this rather banal observation. After all, according to surveys in the early 1960s, even before civil rights laws, two-thirds of whites said blacks had fully equal opportunities, and nearly 90 percent said that black children were treated equally in schools. In other words, most whites even then, at the height of the civil rights movement, saw no need for that movement. Surely this was not because whites were intrinsically cruel or incapable of sympathy in the face of human suffering. Instead, it must be because, as whites, they simply didn’t need to see the pain as real. They had the luxury of remaining oblivious to how their own racial supremacy adversely impacted the lived experiences of millions of their fellow countrymen