Caricature Witness
The ugly assumptions behind the case against Judge Sotomayor.
In introducing Sonia Sotomayor as his first pick for the Supreme Court, Barack Obama served up the requisite lavish praise. She possessed "not only the knowledge and experience acquired over a course of a brilliant legal career, but the wisdom accumulated from an inspiring life's journey."
Those words were not casually chosen. They were aimed at a charge that had made its way into the public sphere even before Sotomayor's name was formally put forth: that she may not have the intellectual heft to serve on the high court. The suggestion originated in a New Republic article questioning Sotomayor's "ability to provide an intellectual counterweight to the conservative justices." The idea then moved into the blogosphere and other media. (In National Review's formulation, she became not only "dumb" but "obnoxious.") Let me first acknowledge, in the interest of full disclosure, that Stomayor is a friend. But even were she not a friend, I would find it odd and strangely patronizing that a summa cum laude graduate of Princeton (where she earned its top academic award, the M. Taylor Pyne Honor Prize) who was a Yale Law Journal editor is now portrayed as an intellectual lightweight. While there are any number of legitimate questions one could raise about Sotomayor's approach to judging, calling her dumb is, well, just stupid.
Susan Sturm, a Columbia University law professor who worked with Sotomayor on the law journal, sees the attack as an example of a "stereotype shaping public discourse." In short, a poor Puerto Rican girl from the Bronx must have gotten into those fancy schools because of affirmative action and therefore, despite her enviable achievements, can't really be all that smart. Sturm believes the Senate Judiciary Committee will easily see past the whispers of intellectual inadequacy. But it's worth considering, if only momentarily, why the charge gained even a modicum of credibility, why it is so galling and whether it is time to put aside the assumptions that made it so easy to question Sotomayor's competence.
I have no idea what role, if any, Sotomayor's ethnicity or gender had to do with her admission to Princeton. But it's a sure bet that Ivy League recruiters would have coveted even a white male who had overcome what she had (childhood diabetes, a father's death, life in the projects and a childhood spent speaking a foreign language) and gone on to compile a brilliant academic record at a competitive high school. And had that male graduated summa, his accomplishments would have been celebrated, not questioned. As presidential adviser Valerie Jarrett put it during a recent conversation, "The last time I checked, summa cum laude had nothing to do with affirmative action." So why is it so easy for people, on the basis of no credible evidence, to label Sotomayor intellectually suspect? Because stereotypes don't require evidence; they require only a lazy mind.
It's not just Sotomayor's intellect that is under attack. She also stands accused of being a judicial activist who will drag her experiences as a woman and a Latina into arguments where they don't belong. Those who know her well see something almost comical in the notion. Ted Shaw, a Columbia law professor who attended New York's Cardinal Spellman High School with her, says Sotomayor was "not a cause person." Her only activism, he says, "was to excel in everything she did." Ironically, even as conservative groups were making her out to be some kind of racially tainted radical, some prominent Latinos were debating whether she had been too evenhanded, too disinclined to embrace the Latino community.
As for being unduly influenced by her personal background, even Sotomayor admits that she cannot be other than what she is—that her experiences as a woman and a Latina will lead her to see things differently than a white male. Professor Sturm says Sotomayor is merely stating the obvious; that all judges have biases shaped by their experiences. Surely anyone who has closely followed the high court knows it is impossible for judges to separate their backgrounds—and biases—from their judging. In a recent New Yorker article, Jeffrey Toobin persuasively argues that Chief Justice John Roberts's life of extreme privilege and executive-branch employment has resulted in a clear bias on behalf of the wealthy and the powerful. Obama predicted as much in refusing to vote for his confirmation. Indeed, given the court's ideological divisions, Sturm thinks Sotomayor might be something of a tonic: "She's the kind of bridge builder who is crucial for the court."
Sturm also thinks that even the unmerited attacks on Sotomayor's intellect could have an upside. For in demonstrating that the person bears no relation to the caricature, Sotomayor just might help the nation acknowledge and confront the prejudice that still sometimes colors serious discourse. At this juncture, no one can precisely predict what Sotomayor's role will be on the court or on the national stage. But what is obvious, given her history, is that she will certainly surprise those who can see her only through the lens of their own preconceptions.
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Ellis Cose, author, columnist and contributing editor (since 1993) for Newsweek magazine and former chairman of the editorial board and editorial page editor of the New York Daily News, began his journalism career as a weekly columnist for the Chicago Sun-Times—becoming, at the age of 19, the youngest editorial page columnist ever employed by a major Chicago daily. Cose, who is also an independent radio producer, is a popular campus lecturer and public speaker.
In addition to serving as a columnist, editor and national correspondent for the Chicago Sun-Times, Cose has been a contributor and press critic for Time magazine, president and chief executive officer of the Institute for Journalism Education, chief writer on management and workplace issues for USA Today (where he has also served as an occasional columnist and member of the board of contributors) and a member of the editorial board of the Detroit Free Press. He has also been a fellow at the Gannett Center for Media Studies at Columbia University, at the National Research Council/National Academy of Sciences, a senior fellow and director of energy policy studies at the Washington-based Joint Center for Political Studies, and a consultant to the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations.
Cose's Bone to Pick: On Forgiveness, Reconciliation, Reparation and Revenge, was published by Atria (a Simon and Schuster imprint) in April 2004. The book is a wide-ranging look at a number of societies—the United States, Ghana, South Africa, East Timor, and Peru among them—and their ways of coping with cruelty and pain. The Washington Post had this to say: "The complex questions surrounding 'forgiveness, reconciliation, reparation, and revenge' probably require a scholarship of jurisprudence, philosophy, psychology, history and literature. This is the kind of ambitious enterprise that the world's great religions deal with. But Cose meets the challenge, and Bone to Pick ranges over centuries of contested histories, across five continents, spinning individual tragedies in and out of collective traumas, seeking the nature of 'forgiveness, albeit as a proxy for a larger set of values.' … The truth may be a prized (and politicized) commodity in the quest for social justice, but as Cose observes, quoting Czech novelist Milan Kundera, 'The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.' Bone to Pick is a timely reminder of that axiom and a useful addition to the canon of that struggle."
Cose's The Envy of the World, an in-depth essay on the state of black men in America, was published by Washington Square Press (an imprint of Simon and Schuster) in 2002 and has appeared on several best-seller lists, including the Essence magazine list, where it was number one. Newsweek featured the book on its cover and National Public Radio produced a special a program based on it. Kirkus Reviews called The Envy of the World, "A slender volume with a substantial and significant message." The Washington Post described it as "lucid, eloquent and deeply personal book." The Chicago Tribune called its author "a gifted, rhapsodic essayist." "Cose charts both an urgently argued history of black masculinity and a moving and nuanced snapshot of where it is now," declared Publishers' Weekly. The paperback edition was published in January 2003.
In May 2004 the Rockefeller Foundation issued Beyond Brown v. Board: The Final Battle for Excellence in American Education—a major report authored by Cose on the legacy of the historic Brown v. Board of Education school desegregation decision and the current challenges facing American educators. The report was the basis of a Newsweek cover feature and for a David Broder column and other stories in the national press. In November 2006, the Institute for Justice and Journalism at USC's Annenberg School published Cose's Killing Affirmative Action: Would ending it really result in a better, more perfect Union? That report, featured in several newspaper and in Newsweek magazine, examined California's 10-year experience living with Proposition 209, the measure that ended affirmative action in the public sector in California.
Cose's best-selling The Rage of a Privileged Class, a book-length essay on race in America, was published by HarperCollins in January 1994. It was featured as a Newsweek cover story and described by The New York Times Book Review as a "disciplined, graceful exposition of a neglected aspect of the subject of race in America." His A Man's World (published by HarperCollins in June 1995), was featured in a front page review in The New York Times Book Review. The Washington Post called it "a valuable, cogent and well-written contribution to an enormously complex subject."
Color-Blind: Seeing Beyond Race in a Race-Obsessed World (published in January 1997 and also excerpted in Newsweek) explored America's continuing obsession with race. The New York Times Book Review called it "a book this country desperately needs, one with genuine healing potential," and included Color-Blind among its best book of the year recommendations for 1997. Cose edited an essay collection entitled The Darden Dilemma published by HarperCollins in March 1997. His debut novel, The Best Defense, was published by HarperCollins in September 1998 ("a formidable first novel...crisp, fast-paced and engaging. In a genre glutted with lightweight fare, The Best Defense reaches higher"— The Seattle Times).
Cose is also the author of A Nation of Strangers, a history of American immigration, published by William Morrow and Co. in 1992 and of The Press, published by Morrow in 1989. He is the author of Energy and the Urban Crisis (1979) and the editor of Energy and Equity: Some Social Concerns (1978), both published by the Joint Center for Political Studies. He also wrote The Rebirth of Community Power, published by Westview Press: 1983.
At the Institute for Journalism Education (at the University of California, Berkeley), Cose designed and directed a widely quoted study on journalism careers published by IJE: The Quiet Crisis: Minority Journalists and Newsroom Opportunity (1985). He also instituted and served as inaugural director of IJE's Management Training Center at Northwestern University.
In his capacity as president of Ellis Cose, Inc. Cose has produced, written and hosted the pilot for a multimedia documentary series: "Against the Odds." The radio project (which has received funding from the Ford Foundation and will be distributed by Public Radio International) profiles individuals who have overcome tremendous adversity. It aspires to provide continuing and better coverage—in public radio but also on the web and in other media, including print—of people and communities often relegated to the margins of society. It also aims to stimulate thinking on how they, and their respective societies, can overcome that marginalization. The pilot focuses on a young man from a refugee camp in northern Kenya who, studying by the light of a rechargeable lamp, managed to get himself into Princeton University.
Cose has appeared on The Today Show, Nightline, Dateline, ABC Evening News, Good Morning America, the PBS "Time to Choose" election special, Charlie Rose, CNN's Talk Back Live, and a variety of other nationally televised and local programs. He has been interviewed for British, Brazilian and Canadian television. He is also a judge for the New York Public Library Helen Bernstein Book Award for Excellence in Journalism. Cose has received fellowships or individual grants from the Ford Foundation, The Andrew Mellon Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Aspen Institute for Humanistic Studies, and numerous journalism awards—including the University of Missouri medal for career excellence and distinguished service in journalism, two Clarion awards, and four National Association of Black Journalists first place awards. He was also named the 2002 winner of the New York Association of Black Journalists' lifetime achievement award, winner of the 2003 award for best magazine feature from the National Association of Black Journalists as well as the winner of two New York Association of Black Journalists' first place 2003 awards for commentary and magazine features. In 2004 Cose was named the first recipient of the newly inaugurated annual Vision Award from the Maynard Institute for Journalism Education. In 2006 he won a Unity award for commentary and also shared in a first place award from the Society of Professional Journalists.
A Chicago native, Cose holds a master's degree in Science, Technology and Public Policy from George Washington University. He is married to Lee Llambelis, former legal director for the Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund and current director of intergovernmental relations for the Attorney General of New York. He has a daughter, Elisa Maria.
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