Sonia Sotomayor: An Echo of Obama's America

What is left of the Republican Party has come out swinging against President Barack Obama's pick to the Supreme Court, a judge on the Second Circuit Appeals Court Sonia Sotomayor, a woman who symbolizes Obama's vision of America, his character, and reminds me why I became so fascinated with this man and voted so enthusiastically for him.

A child of Puerto Rican immigrants whose father died when she was 9, only a year after she was diagnosed with diabetes, grew up in the Bronx projects and went on to graduate summa cum laude from Ivy League Schools entering into the creme of the crop of the country's jurists, Sotomayor echoes the American dream of the post-WWII era: her parents moved to the US in order to participate in the emergence of the United States as an economic superpower. Sonia does not represent the American Dream ONLY because of the things she did, but MOSTLY because of the things she was ABLE to do in this country. Anywhere else on this planet, as a child of immigrants, living in a poor neighborhood, a single parent-home, she would have been faced with so many barriers that she would have not have been able to become a fully integrated national citizen. In America she did. This is not to say that most individuals who face adverse circumstance in this country make it. On the contrary, most do not and not because of some genetic flaws but because economic and the consequent social adversity is almost impossible to overcome. But, her life does mean that at least some, even if only a few, do make it in this country precisely because of what this country means to them. And in this respect, Sonia Sotomayor is a shining beacon of the American dream.

From the moment I read her short bio as she emerged as one of the finalists, some weeks before Obama finally picked her, I was convinced it would be her. Anyone who has read "Dreams from My Father," or even the "The Audacity of Hope," or listened to Obama's marvelous speech on race in Philadelphia would have been able to make the same prediction. Obama's genius lies not in some Messiah gene, but in his uncanny ability not so much to read the mood of the country as to shape this mood. How does he shape it? By cleverly rummaging through the disparate narratives that make up this country--slavery, immigration, racism--and picking out not only those that suit his background, but ALL of the strands, tying them together, and presenting the unified quilt of THE American narrative to the American people. This is why he picked Sonia Sotomayor. It has nothing to do with her specific Supreme Court credentials and has everything to do with Obama's vision of America. And it is for this reason, I am still an enthusiastic supporter of this man.

In nominating her to the Supreme Court, Obama has also brilliantly exposed the intellectual exhaustion, xenophobia and plain stupidity of the far-right in this country which is what is left of the GOP. Their character assassinations of Sotomayor show just how out of touch they are with the self-perception of America in the year 2009.

First: the GOP has a static vision of America that is stuck somewhere between mid-late 19th century. Their claim that Sotomayor's "empathy" is detrimental to her ability to make "objective" decisions would be funny if it were uttered by a five-year old, but is otherwise tragic since it is uttered by adult men (and few women) in suits. There is no such thing as "objective" decision. Our Constitution is not the Shari'a, or God's revelation, but man-made law that is necessarily continuously re-interpreted to suit the changing demographics and mood of the country. If it were up to the likes of Mitch McConnell and Rush Limbaugh we would still be interpreting "all men are created equal" to mean that blacks and women are not human beings.

Second criticism from the far-right has been that she will be a policy maker. Newsflash: judges are policy makers. As a judge on an appeals court, Sotomayor was necessarily a policy maker. If the Republicans bothered to learn how the law actually worked in reality (and not their wacko minds), they would realize that an appeals judge rules on specific cases and thus elaborates a previously general law into the minutiae of everyday life, and in doing so, every judge will necessarily tap into their previous experience and yes (gasp) emotion to make a judgment. The judges deciding Brown Vs. Board of Education did not use a footnote in a law ruling but their common sense to declare that black kids are as human as the rest of us.

Finally, the third and the most upsetting criticism has been that she is simultaneously, a racist and a man-hater. As evidence, the nutjobs who belong in a mental institution and not Wolf Blitzer's "Situation Room" (although sometimes I honestly cannot tell the difference between the two) claim that because she has emphasized her Latina identity and has served for Latina advocacy groups that she is a racist. The same goes for her gender identity. This criticism again would be funny if it did not echo the tragic intellectual depravity of the so-called Republican opposition. If these children in suits would bother to read a single book on racial and gender identity they would quickly realize that when a minority racial group claims its identity that is not the same thing as whites claiming their own race. This is simply because in a formerly "white" country where non-whites were considered less than human, it was non-whiteness that had been marked for centuries and whiteness had been seen as normal! The same goes for gender identity. Thus, nobody questioned Samuel Alito or Roberts about how their "whitness" might impact their rulings. Precisely, because whiteness is tragically still seen as the standard of racial normativity. In terms of gender identity, I know that Republicans are terrified of intelligent women (lest they confirm their own intellectual cowardice and ineptitude), but at least they should not be honest about it if they ever want to be anywhere near the corridors of power in this country.

In conclusion, the shrillness, the stupidity, and the plain meanness of the far-right attacks on Obama's vision of America--echoed by Sonia Sotomayor's life story--almost guarantee that the Republicans will remain in wilderness for some time and when they finally re-emerge they will necessarily have to be a better party. And we will all be better for it.