The American right has unleashed a campaign to portray Barack Obama’s supreme court nominee, Sonia Sotomayor, as racist for suggesting white men don’t always make the best judges — and as un-American for using the Spanish pronunciation of her name.
Obama’s choice faces a tough confirmation battle in Congress, and the president wants to dwell on her strengths — as an American of Puerto Rican descent raised in the Bronx who made it to Princeton and Yale, bringing areas of experience and understanding not hugely evident among the white male majority on the supreme court.
But Republicans and conservative groups are accentuating the same factors as evidence she was nominated because she has a racial agenda.
Newt Gingrich, the Republican former speaker of the House of Representatives, and Karl Rove, who was George Bush’s chief strategist, have both called Sotomayor racist and said she should withdraw as a nominee over comments she made in 2001 that a female Hispanic judge would have a better understanding of certain race and gender issues than a white male.
”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,” she said at the time. ”Whether born from experience or inherent physiological or cultural differences, our gender and national origins may and will make a difference in our judging.”
To some Americans, Sotomayor’s comments appear self-evident. They point to the personal experience Thurgood Marshall brought as a black man elevated to the supreme court during the civil rights era.
But conservatives say her comments are evidence that she will be biased against whites and men.
Rove and two Republican members of Congress also called Sotomayor racist.
The White House warned Republicans to be ”exceedingly careful” about such language. Some Republican strategists said the tactic could backfire if it alienates the Hispanics who support the party. But other conservatives took up the cudgel. Rush Limbaugh, the country’s most popular talk radio host, said the party should press the issue. ”If the GOP [Republican party] allows itself to be trapped in the false premise that it’s racist and sexist and must show the world that it isn’t, then the GOP is extinct,” he said.
Critics are also using Sotomayor’s pronunciation of her own name as a stick to beat her. The judge, whose parents hail from the Spanish-speaking US territory of Puerto Rico, uses a Hispanic pronunciation.
Some critics have taken up a call by a prominent conservative magazine, the National Review, saying she should anglicise it. The writer, Mark Krikorian, said ”there ought to be limits” to the demands made on English speakers to try to pronounce foreign names.
Other critics have also latched on to Sotomayor’s history of legal activism in the 1980s, when she served on the board of a legal group. —