I've been thinking of this a lot watching some of the attacks on Sotomayor, but I'd frame the critics as suffering from the terrible, pervasive fear that some brown person, somewhere, is getting away with something.I think this is so true. The presumption of so much of Sotomayor's critics rest on this idea that they've never gotten a break, that no one's ever favored them, that they've never benefited from a policy. It takes that sort of fiction to believe that someone like her is "dumb."
Posit that everything the critics say about Sotomayor is true; that indeed, everything they say about affirmative action is true. Is this the biggest problem facing America? Is this the biggest problem facing America from Sonia Sotomayor?
Given my politics, I am probably not going to like how she rules on many, maybe even most, issues. But almost none of those issues involve racial preferences, which, even if they are a problem, are a small problem for America, affecting fewer people than almost any of the other major policy questions we're debating today. Making race, or racial politics, the central complaint, makes it seem like your biggest policy priority is making sure that not one minority in the land gets anything they don't deserve. But hey, we all get things we don't deserve. I'll go further: almost all of us get something we don't deserve as a result of our race, including white people. Perhaps even especially white people.
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I think this post by Megan sums up a lot about how I feel about Affirmative Action. It's not the notion that we may need to take another look at AA that's objectionable, but the notion that in a world where everyone else plays by the rules the accolades garnered by people like Sonia Sotomayor, are ill-gotten:
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Is it fear that brown people are getting away with something, or just the allure of playing the victim?
Limbaugh, O'Reilly, Tancredo, Lou Dobbs and Co. have all made hash over the years complaining about "reverse racism." While I know the potential of a minority being given undeserved priority fills them with anger, I think they just got used to their weird, self-righteous comfort in the belief that white people are now being wronged. Takes care of white guilt pretty effectively and provides an easy, throwaway counter to charges of conservative racism. They saw an opportunity to fit Sotomayor — a person they would likely hate on sight as a leftist wuss-cake even if she were a white male — into that narrative, and get a couple shots in at Obama, Liberal Media and the Ivy League. Wins all around, but I think not even those last three cherished conservative targets are as appealing as the opportunity to put on their martyr hat.
they play the martyr, sure. but it is a martyrdom as old as the republic. read up on poor white resentment of freed slaves. it is the belief that it is a zero-sum game. that any benefit for a minority is a negative benefit for a white person. the Soto nomination triggers something in Southerners.
Hm. You're right that the racism and the victim mentality are historically linked, and that's probably a good explanation for why Limbaugh and Co.'s reverse racism line gets so much play in the working class. I was putting myself into the headspace of the talk-show host, who is not poor or in job competition with a minority, and forgetting the audience.
What you say regarding the false presumptions of Sotomayor's critics is insightfully discussed by a reader over at Andrew Sullivan.
Judge Sotomayor is on the record, dissenting from her colleagues, to defend a white bigot. What does it say about critics who don't bother to read the record. Of course we all knew racism was ignorant and blind.
Read on (I've edited to include salient portion of the post) --
Sotomayor's Defense Of A White Bigot
A reader writes:
It took about, oh, under one minute to do a Google search and come up with Judge Sotomayor's dissent in Pappas v. Giuliani, 290 F.3d 143.
The plaintiff, Pappas, was fired by the NYPD when it was discovered that Pappas had regularly (but anonymously and on his own private time) distributed racist and anti-semitic pamphlets of the David Duke variety.... There are two critical points to take from this. The first, and most important point to consider, is that here we have a judge, accused of entho-centric racism, dissenting on behalf of a white male police officer accused of distributing racist pamphlets. This is outside the Limbaugh/Rove/Hannity nattering nabob narrative and so has to be ignored by much of the MSM.
I, personally, have benefited tremendously from AA.
Like most racial justice policies AA is traditionally discussed on a sort of pseudo-rational level.
The program is almost never viewed in the context of society as a whole even though the entire point was to level the playing field for women and minorities for systemic disadvantages.
Instead when view in isolation whites and especially white males view it as putting them at a disadvantage.
...and there the discussion ends.
It's really just that simple for most, it works against me therefore it is the defining racial injustice of our time.
It would be a little funny if it weren't such a perfect tool for channeling long-standing racial animosities into a more socially acceptable direction.
Sotomayor is the very last person this should be an issue for, the most experienced nominee to the SCOTUS in what I've heard is about 100 years.
...and yet racism still shows its ability to overcome reason.
The pathology behind this phenomenon is very American: the idea that one must step on others to rise to the top, and consequently that their gain must be your loss.
When you add minority status, or any semblance of 'difference', it gives those who are disappointed in their own failures someone to blame other than themselves.
Isn't it obvious that this is all really just about politics anyway? The critics of Sotomayor don't go around saying that Clarence Thomas wouldn't have been considered for the Court had he not been black, or that Sarah Palin would have been nominated for VP if she were a man. Believe me, if Sotomayor was a conservative jurist and all else were equal, and Bush had nominated her a year ago, we'd be seeing both sides of this debate switched.
Well not both sides anyways. I don't think the Democrats would be dumb enough to argue she's unqualified, they accepted Roberts on much less.
Moreover it's harder for them to play the white resentment card, though certainly not unheard of.
I made the point on my own blog, and in a couple of comment sections, but what I really don't understand about the affirmative action nonsense is this: if you actually believe that someone who graduated summa cum magna from Princeton and at the top of her class at Yale Law never would have been admitted in the first place without race-based affirmative action, how is that anything but a very strong case for the efficacy of such policies?
If you actually believe that someone who graduated at or near the top of her class at first a superb high school, then at Princeton, and then at Yale did so because of affirmative action, then you're a racist. As others have pointed out, Sotomayor is an example of affirmative achievement... she received no gifts. She busted her ass to do better than her fellow students at every level of her education.
To your point, which is a good one. Racism is illogical at its core. Does it surprise anyone that racists do not examine the efficacy of their own arguments? They're talking only to themselves and their client audiences.
The biggest beneficiaries of Affirmative Action are WHITE WOMEN.
PERIOD.
Until that's the beginning sentence of anything debating Affirmative Action..
talk to the hand.
How is that again? I mean you used CAPS and everything so I guess the argument should be clear cut but, I`d still like it spelled out for me a little, I`m a white woman, I need that leg up, thats why they designed Affirmative Action to benefit me first.
The line from Megan's piece--"almost all of us get something we don't deserve as a result of our race, including white people. Perhaps even especially white people"--has solid parallels with some of Malcolm X's words:
"If you see somebody winning all the time, he isn't gambling, he's cheating...It's like the Negro in America seeing the white man win all the time. He's a professional gambler; he has all the cards and the odds stacked on his side, and he has always dealt to our people from the bottom of the deck." - Autobiography of Malcolm X, pg. 16-17
The question is, WHO exactly is cheating?
"almost all of us get something we don't deserve as a result of our race, including white people. Perhaps even especially white people"
Perhaps?
Another way to say it is that half the people in the world don't get what they deserve: a 21st Century standard of living. And virtually all of them are on the “non-white” side of the color line.
As a woman business owner, I can't help but smirk at the white men who complain that America is being taken away from them. I don't have statistics on education as regards affirmative action, but in the business world regarding government contracts, still less than 5% of government contracts go to woman or minority owned firms. Here's a link to Gov. Patterson talking about this in NY, where the percentage is 3%.
http://www.dailygazette.com/news/2008/jun/13/0613_govecontract/
Like most racism, opposition to Affirmative Action (I just can't call it "AA" for reasons pointed out by wiredog above) is a combination of ignorance and fear. And it's not just poor white people who are afraid of losing their position in society as others take their rightful place. It's also ignorant white middle class kids with no understanding of the history of this country think their families got where they are with hard work and that everyone has the same opportunities that they do. They might not be public about their distrust of affirmative action as working class whites are, but believe me, many of them are thinking it privately.
When I see this kind of craziness, I think it's fueled by the white experience of seeing other whites with more privilege.
If you grow up watching your parents scraping to make ends meet, you know those Princeton legacy guys are getting what they didn't earn, that they're cheating, exactly the way Malcolm X did. The deep layer of anger is about that, and it's so deep you may not even be able to name it to yourself. The anger at Robinsons and Sotomayors getting a shot at Princeton is built on top of that.
Beyond that there's a subconscious awareness that it isn't safe to challenge the people who really were born with silver spoons in their mouths--but it's safe to kick people from projects in the Bronx and tiny apartments in selected corners of Chicago. Accordingly, even though the silent rage may be at everyone who gets Ivy League benefits, the only rage that you express out loud is at the people who have the smallest share of those benefits.
Finally, the part where they say "she was summa cum laude" could sound like people using Latin tricks, and the stuff about editing the Law Review could sound way too much like the crap about which fork they use for their dessert at the debutante ball. Once you're sure folks are trying to cheat you, there's some sense in assuming that the details they offer are just elaborations on the main con.
If I'm right, it's still poison. It's still ridiculous, destructive, and insane. But if I'm right, then over the long haul, starting some frank discussions of which white people get the best deal among white people might be a way to defuse some of the bizarre resentment of nonwhite success.
Good insight. The problem with a system that admits people based on 10% Affirmative-Action, 60% legacy/donations and 30% purely on academic merit is not the 10% AA, but the 60% rich kids.
Perhaps we need symbolic recognition of the economic injustice faced by middle-class white kids!
We've discussed this in places before, but a couple of thoughts about this. Affirmative Action has a couple of ideas within it that must be reframed for people to understand. First of all, the idea that AA is designed to redress injustice is a loser. Americans, with their future orientation and complete lack of sense of history neither understand nor are willing to swallow such rationales. It's not my fault that our nation was built upon the slaughter and dismantling of American Indian civilization here; my people came to America in the twentieth century and never lived in the south--what have I to do with slavery? That kind of thinking is part and parcel of our national consciousness, whether or not it belies a kind of tunnel vision about the upshot of history. And it is the idea that the right wing ideologues glom onto every time.
The real purpose of Affirmative Action is to level the opportunity playing field for populations in America that right now, currently, are underrepresented in the job markets and/or higher education. It is in America's--that is all our--interest that by and large all our various populations participate in our society in a roughly egalitarian percentages. Thus, Affirmative Action programs need to be fluid--that is, there needs to be recalibration of who gets assistance as time goes on; they need to demonstrate results, and their ultimate and clearly stated goal would be to become no longer necessary, but in doing so adequately prepare the populace for understanding that this may take longer than sooner in some instances.
Affirmative Action has turned into an opportunity to, rather than assist particular groups get a leg up where they are hamstrung, spin it in the popular imagination so that anyone who achieves anything from any minority ethnic group (white women like Rikyrah points out, the main beneficiaries at least early on, while once included in this spin, are no longer), specially playing on long held, media perpetrated, and often unconscious prejudices, must be obviously considered a recipient of tax payer charity.
The question must be is the outcome worth its undercutting. If Judge Sotomayor was a beneficiary of Affirmative Action, one would think that it would be testimony to the kind of success AA is aimed to achieve. Instead, while it does not really appear she benefitted at all, the right pandering to its base finds a way to make use of the concept to massage its base into thinking that they remain superior Americans, who have made their way the old fashioned way--unregulated, government intervention free, capitalist social Darwinism--because they are the fittest to survive.
Let's make this clear:
Stop pretending that there were NO qualified 'Minorities', until the Civil Rights movement. Just stop that foolishness.
There WERE educated qualified 'minorities'.
But, they were completely shut out of opportunities because of the color of their skin.
Period.
Affirmative Action only made it so that someone actually had to look at and consider the application.
Stop with the delusion that nobody Black or Latino was qualified for anything until after the passage of the Civil Rights Bills. That's bullshyt. You had PhD's working in the POST OFFICE, for pete's sake.
We have ample precedent for affirmative action, for example, the concept of corporate liability, by which shareholders may suffer for actions for which they were not responsible, such as tort claims for conduct which predates their stock ownership. Also, the equitable concept of avoiding unjust enrichment and unjust deprivation.
But I too think that affirmative action is currently politically unfeasible. I think that the best way to go is to seek the best possible life for everyone, via programs such as universal health care.
Megan's post was very sharp and witty (she can be quite funny sometimes), the problem is just that her readers are intolerable.
It's amazing to me that anyone would try to paint Sotomayor as unqualified; the only possible justification for this kind of idea would be that no person of color could ever be qualified. And once you admit that, you look like, well, you know.....what you are.