Of Pride and Prejudice
Latinos celebrate a milestone that Judge Sotomayor's critics struggle to understand
One day there will be no more barriers to breach, no more "firsts" for society's former outsiders to claim. But that day has not yet come. So as Sonia Sotomayor seeks to become America's first Latina Supreme Court justice, many of her supporters look on with a mixture of gratitude and disbelief. Tough characters such as Congressman Jose Serrano of New York have been reduced to tears. When I ran into him at Sotomayor's confirmation hearings, Serrano explained that Sotomayor's mother reminded him of his own parents, and their sacrifices and determination to see him make something of his life.
Others were equally touched. "With Barack Obama as president and Sonia Sotomayor as a candidate for the Supreme Court, I am witnessing something I never thought I would experience … I don't know what it means, but I like to think it speaks well of America," said Margarita Rosa, executive director of New York's Grand Street Settlement, who got to Princeton two years ahead of Sotomayor.
Juanita Hernandez, a Harvard-educated lawyer for the Securities and Exchange Commission, said she "prayed for a Latina." Sotomayor is "the dream come true for the immigrant," added Hernandez, whose parents were born in Mexico. "We have not had a Latina like this ever," exclaimed Jenny Rivera, a professor at CUNY School of Law.
The senators were a good deal more restrained. Indeed, some seemed unsure whether to congratulate Sotomayor or condemn her. Members of the Republican minority repeatedly invoked what has become the most infamous speech ever given by a Latina. What did she mean, they want to know, in suggesting that a "wise Latina woman" might make better decisions than white men?
Sotomayor was suitably contrite. She said her words were meant to inspire young Latinas; she wanted to help them to see how "their lives and experiences would enrich the legal system." She wanted to help them to believe "they could become anything they wanted to become." Over and over, she explained that she did not think that any ethnic group or gender had a monopoly on wisdom.
Sen. Lindsay Graham of South Carolina was having none of it: "If I had said anything like that, and my reasoning was I was trying to inspire somebody, they would have had my head," he railed. Had he dared to suggest he would make a better senator "because of my experience as a Caucasian male … it would make national news and it should," he added.
Graham is right. But what he chose not to point out is that, not so long ago, American truly believed what he now acknowledges is ridiculous: that only white males (and the occasional white woman, preferably the widow of a senator who died in office) should be senators. Sotomayor and Graham both were born into that world. And strange as it may seem today, they were also born into a country that had only seen white males as Supreme Court justices.
For someone like Graham, the exultation over Sotomayor's success may be difficult to understand—as it may be for others who have never been made to feel like second-class citizens, or who have never doubted that America would embrace them, or their children.
As Sotomayor pointed out in her now notorious 2003 speech, she was born in 1954, the year Brown v. Board of Education, the famous Supreme Court case that officially desegregated America's public schools, was handed down. Graham's home state of South Carolina spawned Briggs v. Elliott, the first in a series of cases that were bundled together as Brown. Briggs was sparked by segregation in Clarendon County, an area whose schools remain effectively segregated to this day.
It was only in 1967, some 13 years after Sotomayor's birth, that President Lyndon Johnson nominated Thurgood Marshall, who became the first person of color on the Supreme Court. It was not until 1981 that the court got Sandra Day O'Connor, its first woman.
Sotomayor's now notorious speech can be characterized many ways. It was, in part, history lesson, and in part a reminder that life experiences matter, and that, in America, the experiences of women and people of color have, in some ways, been quite different from those of white males. Her crime was in suggesting that those experiences might have something to do with judging.
But that observation (however inelegantly Sotomayor may have phrased it) is not all that remarkable. It's impossible to imagine, for instance, that a court that permitted blacks as members would have decided that racial segregation was proper, as the Supreme Court did in Plessy v. Ferguson (the 1896 decision upholding the "separate but equal" doctrine that finally was overruled more than half century later by Brown v. Board). Nor is it possible to imagine a court with Japanese-American justices ruling that it was perfectly fine for the government to intern over 100,000 people of Japanese descent (as the Supreme Court did in Korematsu v. the United States in 1944—a fact Congress finally got around to apologizing for in 1988.) White men (some of them, at least) have a history, Sotomayor was arguing, in assuming that their biases add up to objectivity; and we must first acknowledge those biases before we can set them aside.
Thank God we are no longer a country where blatant prejudice and unexamined biases control the judiciary. And we are right to celebrate that. Our transformation does, indeed, speak well of modern-day America, and of the ultimately transcendent power of its founding ideals. But the tears of Sotomayor's fans and her own (now eaten) words remind us that we are still in the process of overcoming a painful past. We have not yet reached the point where we can simply assume, as Graham apparently does, that gender, class, and ethnicity can be totally divorced from how we experience and interpret life.
A wise judge would know that.
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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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