The twice-yearly finals plague has ended and I'm back in the mind-numbingly boring city of San Jose for a while, doing work that is equally and appropriately mind-numbing. It's hard to believe that I've been absent from the blogosphere for almost a month and a half. So what has compelled me to return? Barack Obama's Supreme Court nomination, of course! Let's talk judiciary.
Sotomayor is a liberal judge, whose most recent judicial exploit involved supporting a ruling in the 2nd Circuit - one that will most likely be overturned when brought to the Supreme Court. The ruling ordered a fire department in New Haven, Connecticut to revoke a set of promotions because the eligibility test that determined said promotions produced an unsatisfactory pool of would-be promotees. Namely, 17 out of 18 candidates selected from the 118 individuals who took the test (27 of whom were black) happened to be white. The remaining candidate was Hispanic.
Thus arises once again the affirmative action issue, one that is hotly debated across the nation and even moreso on my university campus. George Will summarizes the position of affirmative action advocates succinctly and correctly in his article on the nomination, outlining the concept of identity politics as predicated upon one simple conjecture:
A person is what his or her race, ethnicity, gender, or sexual preference is, and members of a particular category can be represented -- understood, empathized with -- only by persons of the same identity.
If this position sounds like blatant stereotyping, that's because it is. Nevermind that Frank Ricci, one of the firefighters selected as a candidate for promotion (who also happened to be white) was dyslexic and had to quit his second job in order to accomodate the 13 hours of daily studying and taking of practice tests and interviews necessary to earn the sixth-highest test score in the entire applicant pool. He is white, and this fact alone was enough to deny him a hard-earned promotion.
The ruling itself is disturbing, but it is made moreso by the way in which it contradicts an important statement that Barack Obama made on the campaign trail, proclaiming that we must "eradicate the slander that says a black youth with a book is acting white." In this statement, Obama seemed to reject the racial rhetoric and stereotyping of Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson. Yet in her support for the New Haven case ruling, Sotomayor affirmed both. So, in nominating Sotomayor it appears that Obama has changed his mind regarding racial "slander."
Or (and this seems to me the more likely explanation) the nomination is simply a shrewd political move. Obama has alienated a good portion of Democrats with his foreign policy, which, apart from the quick closing of Gitmo, is almost identical to that of his predecessor. But Democrats love this nomination because it would add to the Supreme Court someone who is both "race-conscious" and a Hispanic woman. Meanwhile, the Republican Senators can't afford to oppose the nomination too strongly as they must preserve their own significant socially conservative Hispanic constituency. So, Sotomayor's confirmation is almost a sure thing.
Touché, salesman.
America’s Promise
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