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Originally Posted by Thomkal
I think we don't know enough about the context of her comments-.
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We do know the context. Basically the idea was back when the concept of women judges was controversial, someone said something like, "a wise man and a wise woman will come to the same decision." That the wise women wouldn't be overly swayed by emotions or be irrational, which was a real concern people had. Sotomayor said, "well shit, if you look back at all the discrimination and injustice endorsed by judges when they were all white men, maybe women can actually do it better, and in fact, they have." The idea was that as the judiciary, (and maybe the rest of the government) gets more diverse, we progress more as a society.
It was a provocative way to put it, for sure, but she knew her audience, this was a very liberal university, she was a public service lawyer, this was 15 years ago. She was trying to make young students think about this issue of diversity and why it matters.
Let's compare that to Trump, the current Republican nominee for president. He thinks that, because everybody knows he doesn't like Mexicans, it's unfair for him to have a Mexican judge preside over his case, and that judge should be disqualified on account of his race. This is how he feels. This isn't something he said during a casual speech at some conservative group 15 years ago - he's saying this right now, as a presidential candidate, on the record, this is what he's selling. In Donald Trump's America, we shouldn't have to face judges of the race that we don't like.
It kind of reminds me of the old pro wrestler Col. DeBeers from the AWA in the 80s. His gimmick was that he was a racist South African militant. So sometimes, if there was a black ref, he refused to wrestle in in the match until a white ref was assigned. He was a bad guy cartoony wrestling character. But now, 30 years later, we see basically the same trait in the Republican nominee for president. It's pretty wild.
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Originally Posted by NobodyHere
If a white person were to say what Sotomayor said, he or she would be called a racist.
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Yes, it's true, members of oppressed, disadvantaged races in a society can tend to "get away" with being more provocative when talking about race than the race who historically has the privilege. That makes sense. Historically, when the privileged race starts getting provocative about racial matters, shit tends to hit the van for the disadvantaged races. There's totally different motivations for being racially provocative depending on where your race falls in that society's power rankings. I don't know why that makes some white people so upset though. I don't feel like I'm really missing out on anything there. I think this is a part of Donald Trump's America too though. "PC" is wrong and we should all be "allowed" to express any racially provocative ideas or dislikes we have for any particular races without being judged. I'm not exactly sure how a president enforces that, but that "anti-PC" thing has been one of his rallying cries since the start.