Judge Sonia Sotomayor: The Right & Wrong of Her Remarks

Since any experience can be a profound learning experience that gives one general insight, the interesting question has to be in what sense are the following remarks by Judge Sonia Sotomayor defensible: “I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life”.  Interestingly, the respect in which her claim has any plausibility is also a respect in which the claim has remarkable applicability across the board, regardless of ethnicity, sex, and so forth.

First of all, the claim is not that any Latino women could make a wise decision simply in virtue of having lived as a Latino person.  And it is certainly a good thing that the judge did not make that claim; for there are way too many stupid people of every ethnic persuasion whose ability to extrapolate anything substantive from the experiences of their life is woefully limited. 

The fact that a person has lived as Latino, with all that this is meant to imply in terms of social interaction and various forms of social injustice, does not in any way entail that the person will be more insightful person about the world. 

For one thing, one could become full of bitterness as a result of which one distorts in an unfavorable way any and everything that one experiences, including one’s experiences with fellow members of one’s ethnic group.  And, of course, this point fully applies to all other ethnic groups (however an ethnic group might be construed).

And with regard to the point in the preceding paragraph, it is worth noting that even a successful person can be extremely bitter—so much so that the person’s bitterness is an impediment to enjoying the fruits of her or his success.  In the example that follows, I shall talk about  helping under-privileged minorities, although I understand all too well that anyone of any color can be under-privileged.  Some of the poorest people whom I have ever seen are white.

Now, imagine a white who has devoted her entire life to helping under-privileged minorities, and who has been quite successful at helping such individuals to succeed.  Well, if I am not mistaken, then Judge Sotomayor’s remarks apply with full force to that white person.  This is because that white person will have sensibilities that I am not likely to have although I belong to a minority group.  I make this latter claim for the following reason.

Although I enjoy by most accounts considerable success as a professor, it is not the case that I have devoted my life to helping minorities.  Nor have I obviously encountered one barrier after another owing to racism.  It is true that I have on various occasions helped members of every ethnic group.  Just so, it is simply false that I have devoted my life to helping minorities, under-privileged or otherwise.  Accordingly, a wise white person who has devoted her or his life to helping such minorities, and who has been very successful in this regard, will surely have much more understanding about the plight of under-privileged minorities than I will have. 

Throughout my life, I have enjoyed a sustained sense of self-confidence (not to be confused with arrogance, which is the tendency not to take others seriously).  If I want to do something, I simply assume that I will be able to do it in some (morally decent) way or the other.  In general, I have no clue what to say to people who are forever asking “What if this and what if that goes wrong?”  Why?  Because my view is that if Plan A seems not to be working , then switch to Plan B.  And so on.  Of course, we sometimes have to try our hand at something else.  But that truth strikes me as a feature of life and not something to dwell upon.  It is not a feature of racism or oppression or poverty that we sometimes need to change plans.

Let me put the point another way: If an easily discouraged under-privileged minority person needs encouragement and the choice is between talking to a white person who has devoted her or his life to helping under-privileged minorities and talking to me, the unexpurgated truth is that the under)privileged minority individuql would do much better talking to the white person rather than to me. 

Now, I can imagine someone saying “Surely, Laurence Thomas, you can speak to the issue of racism even better than the white person who has devoted her or his life to helping under-privileged minorities”.  Alas, this need not be true at all; given the context in question.  To begin with, there is no one way to deal with issues of racism.  Second, what I might experience in terms of racism may in many instances be quite removed from what an under-privileged minority might experience. 

If, for instance, a black person received her Ph.D. at the age of 25 from a program ranked 4th in the country at the time, I think it is safe to say that such an individual probably has very little to say about, for example, feelings of self-doubt and racism that an under-privileged black might have.  Accordingly, such an under-privileged black would do much, much, much better talking to the white person who has devoted her or his life to helping under-privileged minorities.  President Obama, for example, very may have grown up poor, but he has a scholarly pedigree that few will ever attain; accordingly, there is a very real sense in which he cannot speak to “struggling to stay the course” in a way that parallels the concerns of someone trying just to attend community college. 

So my disappointment with Judge Sonia Sotomayor is not so much that she made the claim that she made, but that she failed to see its universal applicability.  And I am rather surprised that she did not offer a very substantial illustration of what she meant.  In fact, I think that it was irresponsible of her not to do so, especially since she could have easily offered an illustration that has universal applicability. 

So I will end this blog-entry with an illustration from my own life.  There is a very interesting respect in which my ability to be disconcertingly discerning of the non-verbal behavior of the 400 students in my signature course Ethics and Value Theory (at Syracuse University) owes something significant to my being a minority who lives in a primarily white world.  Unfortunately, it is true that so many of us, regardless of our ethnicity, privilege skin color above all else.  In my own life, I can see that sort of thing a mile away and often with simplest question.  Here is one such question that often follows my merely stating that I am a professor: “What do you teach, Black Studies”.  Or, here is a query that was raised by one of my former undergraduate students: “There is nothing about racism on the syllabus.  When do we discuss the topic of race in class?”    

Then there is the concern on the side walk that many a white woman has that I might steal her pocketbook.  Having dealt with that concern all my life, I can typically see the tension mount more than a half a block away.  Whatever the profile is of people stealing pocket books from white women might be, I am sure that I do not fit it.  And “No”: I have never stolen anyone’s pocketbook.

At any rate, the most famous case of this sort occurred when I was invited to be a speaker at a conference on a university campus, and a 50-something white female janitor called the campus police on me while I was standing in the hallway watching a display (located right next to the auditorium entrance where the conference was being held).  There I was in a coat and tie watching the display; the campus police officers arrived and we said “Hello” to one another, and then they proceeded to speak to the janitor who –whilst pointing to me—says: “He is the one”.  It was a great moment of amusement, since they the officers grasped ever so clearly that I was not the thief that the woman had supposed I was.  But oh was the president of the university embarrassed.  

The moral of the story in the preceding paragraphs is this: Given a lifetime portfolio of experiences like that and one becomes extremely good at discerning the character of the slightest bit of non-verbal behavior.  And it is those powers of observation developed over the years –several decades, in fact‑‑ that have made me disconcertingly perceptive in Philosophy 191, which in turn has made me an extremely effective professor.  This is the kind of point that Judge Sonia Solomayor was trying to make. 

Considerable powers of non-verbal observation require an unusual array of experiences.  Could my powers of non-verbal observation have come by way of another route?  Of course, they could have.  But this truth hardly takes away from the reality that my powers of observation came about in the way that I described. 

A final comment: Some people might think that the story that I have recounted about being visibly black undermines my remarks earlier, since it does not matter whether I am from the hood (as they say) or a professor.  Fortunately, there is no inconsistency here; for how one can diffuse any such experiences make all the difference in the world in terms of how one lives one’s life.  The most innocent guy with all the “trappings” of being from the hood does not have at his disposal the resources that come with being a professor who has a relatively successful career. 

Analogous to the white person who has devoted her or his life to helping under-privileged minority children, a wise Latina judge might have some important insight into how both justice and injustice manifest themselves in the lives of people of every ethnic group.  In order not to be open to the charge of racism: this ought to be and must be the point that Judge Sotomayor was trying to make.