May 6, 2014

Wise Latina turns out as "Who? Whom?" as expected

From the NYT:
Sotomayor Finds Her Voice Among Justices 
By ADAM LIPTAK MAY 6, 2014
“I am a lawyer’s judge,” Justice Sonia Sotomayor said last year. “I write very technically.” 
That was true at the time. But something has changed in the current Supreme Court term. In opinions concerning human rights abuses, the death penalty and, most notably, affirmative action, Justice Sotomayor has found her voice. 
Cristina Rodriguez, Yale
“She’s setting a public agenda,” said Cristina Rodriguez, a law professor at Yale. “She’s looking for her moments. And her willingness to talk about how biography informs judgments challenges a lot of people’s notions about what the law is supposed to do.” 
Justice Sotomayor, 59, is approaching her fifth anniversary on the Supreme Court, where she has emerged as an increasingly confident figure. In the last term, she asked more questions than any other justice. In the current one, she has staked out positions that have led to testy exchanges with colleagues across the ideological spectrum. 
She is a kind of folk hero to the adoring crowds who attend her public appearances by the thousands. Her memoir, which told the story of her ascent from a housing project in the Bronx, was a best seller. Some call her “the people’s justice.” 
Others attacked her in unusually personal terms after she became the first beneficiary of affirmative action to defend the practice from the Supreme Court bench, summarizing in emphatic and impassioned tones her 58-page dissent from a ruling upholding Michigan’s ban on using race in admissions decisions at the state’s public universities.

Let's be clear about the hilariously unprincipled appeals court ruling that the Supremes, including even the Democrat Stephen Breyer, overturned. Ward Connerly and Jennifer Gratz organized a 2006 initiative campaign to ban racial preferences by the state of Michigan that triumphed over the uniform opposition of Establishment groups in the state with 58% of the vote, the black radical group with the intentionally intimidatory name By Any Means Necessary (i.e., including violence). The appeals court ruled on a party line 8-7 vote just after Obama's re-election that this successful initiative unfairly burdened minorities in the political process, even though they were completely at liberty to change the state constitution back in the same way Ward had changed it: by getting a majority of voters to vote for an initiative of their own.
“Race matters,” she wrote, “because of the slights, the snickers, the silent judgments that reinforce that most crippling of thoughts: ‘I do not belong here.’ ” 
... “I would hope,” she said, “that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experience would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life.” At her 2009 confirmation hearings, Justice Sotomayor disavowed the remark, saying it was a “rhetorical flourish that fell flat.” 
Last month’s dissent, in Schuette v. BAMN, was a mix of legal analysis, historical overview and policy arguments. ... But what stood out was a fairly brief reflection about what it was like to grow up Puerto Rican in New York City. 
“Race matters to a young woman’s sense of self when she states her hometown, and then is pressed, ‘No, where are you really from?’ regardless of how many generations her family has been in the country,” she wrote. “Race matters to a young person addressed by a stranger in a foreign language, which he does not understand because only English was spoken at home.” ...
In her Supreme Court opinions, Justice Sotomayor has introduced a new vocabulary. She was the first to use the term “undocumented immigrant.” 
In her recent dissent, she proposed another change. “Although the term ‘affirmative action’ is commonly used to describe colleges’ and universities’ use of race in crafting admissions policies,” she wrote, “I instead use the term ‘race-sensitive admissions policies.’ ” 
      

53 comments:

Harry Baldwin said...

Sotomayor is to jurisprudence as the Towson University debate team is to intellectual discourse.

Rob said...

“Although the term ‘affirmative action’ is commonly used to describe colleges’ and universities’ use of race in crafting admissions policies,” she wrote, “I instead use the term ‘race-sensitive admissions policies.’ ”

The old euphemism treadmill is really beginning to spin.

Anonymous said...

So race matters?

Anonymous said...

Hamsters, it's all hamsters.

Anonymous said...

""""""""In her recent dissent, she proposed another change. “Although the term ‘affirmative action’ is commonly used to describe colleges’ and universities’ use of race in crafting admissions policies,” she wrote, “I instead use the term ‘race-sensitive admissions policies.’ ” """"""""""""


This is in the same vein as Lani Guinier and Angela Davis.

Semi-employed White Guy said...

OT but speaking of Puerto Ricans, last month there was a minor scandal here in Orlando involving the Orange County, Florida GOP Chairman. The scandal was that he accurately labeled Puerto Rico as a "basket case" as well as correctly identify the inverse relationship between increase in Puerto Rican immigration and the electoral success of the GOP.

Of course, then the back tracking started. He first apologized a little and then a lot.

But now I can't find his original comments which were a refreshing burst of reality, especially from a Republican. All that is on Google now are the apologies. The inconvenient truths are at the bottom of the memory hole.

Anonymous said...

Race matters to a young person addressed by a stranger in a foreign language, which he does not understand because only English was spoken at home.” ...

So it's racist if a Latino tries speaking in Spanish to another Latino? Or is it supposed to be a white person speaking Spanish to a brown person? Isn't that being nice - making an effort to address people in their own language? Does Satomayor really not know Spanish? Wouldn't it be racist too if she didn't know English and white people insisted on speaking only English to her? It's heads I win, tails you lose - no matter what, white people are racists. What does this have to do with racial preferences in college admissions?

This goes along with the fractal theory of microagressions.



Samuel Pepys said...

I'd just go back to Rodney or Nelson and just bombard these black n brown and yellow hostiles from a safe range until they submit.

Anonymous said...

The fact that this person is on the Supreme Court should be enough to convince hand wringing conservatives that the US is dead. We are decades past the point when we might have been able to right the ship.

Samuel Pepys said...

It's Hamsters all the way down.

Also check out pages of My diary.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-477584/Revealed-eye-popping-private-life-compulsive-womaniser-Samuel-Pepys.html

Rampant sex god and bureaucratic innovator

Daniel said...

“She’s setting a public agenda,” said Cristina Rodriguez, a law professor at Yale."

Take a look at this other wise "Latina" referenced in the article, presumably also victimized by racism.

http://www.law.yale.edu/faculty/CRodriguez.htm

bgates said...

Others attacked her in unusually personal terms

I'd have been happy to attack her legal analysis, but there wasn't any.

Anonymous said...

She's an embarrassment at least Clarence Thomas has enough sense to remain quiet and follow Scalia's lead. This one actually thinks she brings something to the table.

Dave Pinsen said...

It's really too bad Romney didn't win the nomination in '08. If he had, he might have won the general election by not losing his cool like McCain did when Lehman went bust. Then Sotomayor wouldn't be on the court now. A better first Latino justice would have been the appeals court judge who reversed her decision on the New Haven fire department case.

Anonymous said...

IQ matters too. Will the Wise Latina rule that dumb people should be awarded positions on the basis of their limited cognition because they've heard the snickers?

Anonymous said...

“I instead use the term ‘race sensitive admissions policies.’ ”

A real Supreme Court racist.

Modern Abraham said...

On a semi-related note, I happened to look up the "prince of Dominican fiction"'s latest novel on Amazon. From a glowing review by the author of Wonder Bread Summer-


I once saw Junot read at the Enoch Pratt library in Baltimore. He has a dynamic presence and is a fearless reader. He was able to calm and fully captivate a room full of twitchy, cafeteria-smelling high school students and grumpy senior citizens. It was hard to look away from Junot at the podium, but indeed, I had to watch the slightly-Amish-looking woman who was signing the story for the hearing impaired. I couldn't help but wonder how one actually signs such fresh sentences as, "You, Yunior, have a girlfriend named Alma, who has a long tender horse neck and a big Dominican ass that could drag the moon out of orbit. An ass she never liked until she met you. Ain't a day that passes that you don't want to press your face against that ass or bite the delicate sliding tendons of her neck. You love how she shivers when you bite, how she fights you with those arms that are so skinny they belong on an after-school special."


This is America 2014. A nice white lady (Total Feline Rate = 9) helpfully singing "Ain't a day that passes that you don't want to press your face against that ass". Forever.

Oswald Spengler said...

http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/nyc-crime/cat-flying-kick-heartless-creep-bk-article-1.1780412

"Helpless stray cat goes flying after being kicked by heartless creep in Brooklyn"

Obviously, this was a case of vibrant youth community action against racist "meowcroaggression" by a feline interloper.

Anonymous said...

From Sotomayor's Wiki page:
"Her father died of heart problems at age 42, when she was nine years old.[6][16] After this, she became fluent in English."

What prevented her from being fluent in English for the first 9 years, since she was born and raised in the Bronx? Were there insufficient opportunities to learn English in NYC? Did her father forbid it?

I was born and raised in a European country, immigrated (legally) in my 20s without knowing any English, became fluent in English a few months later after ardent self-study, and scored in the top 2% percent of the SAT verbal section a couple of years thereafter. So why exactly are Hispanic children born and raised here unable to become fluent in English until age 9 or even later, if ever? Especially children who go on to become Justices of the Supreme Court? Can someone explain this to a dumb white immigrant?

And why is it that Sotomayor, born and raised here, and her co-ethnics need "race-sensitive" policies (i.e., preferences in admissions and hiring) but I don't?
If it's because people kept asking her "but where are you REALLY from?", I can claim the same experiences.

Anonymous said...

Obligatory Finn-bashing in Nicholas Wade's book--p. 57:

"...A variant of the gene called HTR2B, an alle that predisposes carriers to impulsive and violent crimes when under the influence of alcohol, has been found in Finns."

This goes a long ways towards explaining Finns.

ben tillman said...

“Race matters to a young woman’s sense of self when she states her hometown, and then is pressed, ‘No, where are you really from?’ regardless of how many generations her family has been in the country,” she wrote.

Is she Black? Jewish? American Indian? What the hell is she talking about?

Anonymous said...

OT but this reminded me of World War T.
I was listening to NPR today (don't ask), a show about the terrible trials and tribulations of Indian (the "welcome to my convenience store"-Indian) transsexuals. The hostess was bending over every which way and going on and on about how public institutions must install transsexual bathrooms to accommodate the poor huddled masses of transsexuals who can't decide on which bathroom to go to.

To which one of the guests, apparently a faculty member at the University of Iowa department of Gender, Women, and Sexuality studies assaulted her over such insensitive remarks. In a soupy Indian accent, he/she/it declared that it's insulting to make a T-person go to the designated T-bathroom, because they might feel more comfortable in a women's bathroom if they're a "trans-woman", and likewise men's bathrooms and "trans-males". I had to look up this august scholar:
https://uiowa.academia.edu/AniruddhaDutta


Check out also the rest of her/his/its colleagues at the esteemed Department of Sexual Grievance Studies funded Iowa taxpayers.
Though I could not be sure of the "gender" of many of the faculty, there seems to be a disparate outcome in hiring:
http://clas.uiowa.edu/gwss/people/



Anonymous said...

Derbyshire put the right word on people like Sotomayor: solipsism. She's all wrapped up in herself.

Anonymous said...

"She's an embarrassment at least Clarence Thomas has enough sense to remain quiet and follow Scalia's lead. This one actually thinks she brings something to the table."

That's incredibly ignorant. Scalia and Thomas have different jurisprudential approaches, and Thomas is far better than Scalia. Scalia is a much wittier writer, but that's about it.

Anonymous said...

http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/up-a-third-uk-population-3500561

Anonymous said...

re: Another wise Latina
Cristina Rodríguez is a Professor of Law at Yale Law School. An expert on the effects of immigration on society and culture, as well as the legal and political strategies societies adopt to absorb immigrant populations

Sigh. "WASP" university employing a leech to design legal strategies to bring in more of her leech co-ethnics. We are doomed.

JeremiahJohnbalaya said...

Of she wasnt a fluent english speaker until after nine years old, people may well ave had a hard time believing she was from america. Or any one of the various biographical facts could be invented for purposes

Anonymous said...

IQ matters too. Will the Wise Latina rule that dumb people should be awarded positions on the basis of their limited cognition because they've heard the snickers?

Cognition-sensitive admissions policies. Nevermind, they already have that. It's called affirmative action, in other words, race-sensitive admissions policies.

Anonymous said...

http://blogs.spectator.co.uk/edwest/2014/05/darwins-unexploded-bomb/

Anonymous said...

http://www.realclearscience.com/articles/2014/05/06/race_is_real_what_does_that_mean_for_society_108642.html

Anonymous said...

Good to see a vibrant Latina like Cristina Rodriguez bringing some flavor and wisdom to the stale old WASP bastion that is Yale.

Anonymous said...

The gene called "Hater 2 B"?

Anonymous said...

Race sensitive policies?

Ok, how about this one. There is backing for denying gun rights for "mentally ill" (whatever that means) individuals.

Maybe Steve could compare some statistics for rates of gun violence among the mentally ill against gun violence among different races (whether mentally ill or not).

I have no idea how this would stack up, but it would be an interesting exercise.

Bert said...

"It's really too bad Romney didn't win the nomination in '08. If he had, he might have won the general election by not losing his cool like McCain did when Lehman went bust."

If you think any Republican had a chance of winning that year, you're dreaming. Granted Romney would probably have done better than McCain, but it was always a doomed fight.

And honestly, it's not like the Republicans are really our friends anyway.

Anonymous said...

“She’s setting a public agenda,” said Cristina Rodriguez, a law professor at Yale."

Take a look at this other wise "Latina" referenced in the article, presumably also victimized by racism.

http://www.law.yale.edu/faculty/CRodriguez.htm


That is some WHITE looking "underprivileged Latina."

I know so many white people who are way blacker than she is.

Simon in London said...

"her willingness to talk about how biography informs judgments"

tr: "I don't even pretend to be a real judge!"

Smart leftists at least pretend to be employing the norms of the civilisation they're destroying.

Cail Corishev said...

"biography informs judgments"

That's an awfully fancy way to say she decides cases based on her feelings.

Mr. Anon said...

“Race matters,” she wrote, “because of the slights, the snickers, the silent judgments that reinforce that most crippling of thoughts: ‘I do not belong here.’”

Sonia Sotomayor does not belong where she is.

Chicago said...

The Nobel Prize winner has until 1/20/17 to continue giving us these gifts that will keep on giving for many years afterwards. There's still a lot of time left for him to indulge his schadenfreude. After that it'll be up to someone like J Bush to carry on, which doesn't seem very inspiring or give much hope.

Anonymous said...

"Cristina Rodriguez, Yale"

A whiter shade of pale.

Anonymous said...

How would Sotomayor know anything about the plight of oppressed minorities? Through her entire career, since she was accepted at Princeton over higher ranking (presumably, non-Latino white) graduates of her high school, she has been a beneficiary of discrimination, not a victim of it. Of course, she came from a relatively poor background - but so do millions of whites, who get no such help.

International Jew said...

'She was the first to use the term “undocumented immigrant."'

Let's try out some analogous ideas:
Undocumented PhD
Undocumented patent
Undocumented property
Undocumented fact
Undocumented contract
Undocumented college application
Undocumented checking account
Undocumented assembly instructions
...

International Jew said...

Stop & frisk = race-sensitive safety precaution

Anonymous said...

“Race matters,” she wrote, “because of the slights, the snickers, the silent judgments that reinforce that most crippling of thoughts: ‘I do not belong here.’”
Stunning.
This Affirmative Action fraud, a United States Supreme Court Justice, is on the philosophical level of a college sophomore.
...
Between Eric "My People" Holder, this "Wise Latina" and B. "Dreams of My West-Hating Socialist Kenyan Father" it has become clear this government of "the other United States" is in fact a government "not of the United States".
As they say correctly over at VDare, it is an Occupation Government.
The U.S. may or may not come back someday, I don't know; but right now, there is no more United States as we knew it.
Time to see clearly.

Anonymous said...

Steve, you want African-Americans to stop being sore about slavery but you still won't give up being offended by Sodomayor (Mayor of Sodom) "Wise Latina" comment?

Be generous. Let it go.

Pat Boyle said...

The commenter named Harry Baldwin had a reference to the Towson University debate team.

Thanks Harry.

This is a fascinating story. Apparently two black women won the national college debate prize. What's interesting is that the two guys they beat from Oklahoma University were also black.

The new winning style seems to be to throw out the formal topic and rap about white racism. Both teams employed rap lyrics and hip hop sing-song chanting.

I was captain of my debate team in college. I never saw this coming.

BTW - Is 'Wise Latina' now in the dictionary as an oxymoron?

Pat Boyle

Anonymous said...

Well, the Finns are Mestizos.

The Founding Stock of America
"noticed" the same behavior by the Indians.
They also "noticed" certain behaviors of the Africans in their midst.

Naturally, that was when "noticing" reality was in vogue.




















Anonymous said...

"Apparently two black women won the national college debate prize. What's interesting is that the two guys they beat from Oklahoma University were also black."

debait. that's prolly some of the reason.

the other reason is that blacks can go all out to trash whites but whites have to be very careful about saying anything that is deemed offensive and 'racist'.

so, in a black vs white debate, blacks argue in terms of 'what is good for blacks' and whites, even in disagreement over details, must also argue in terms of 'what is good for blacks'.

So, if blacks argue for aff action and whites argue against it, both sides have to do on the premise of 'what is good for blacks'.

So, blacks will say 'aff action is good for blacks, and whites will say 'ending aff action is good for blacks'.

How about what is good for whites? Out of the question.

Idle Spectator said...

"I don't know; but right now, there is no more United States as we knew it. Time to see clearly."

You're right...no more black slavery, women have the right to the franchise, and Muslims are integrating into American society.

We are so blind!

Anonymous said...

"Sir" Fred Goodwinn of RBS fame was "The Peoples' Banker".

Mr. Anon said...

"Anonymous said...

Steve, you want African-Americans to stop being sore about slavery but you still won't give up being offended by Sodomayor (Mayor of Sodom) "Wise Latina" comment?

Be generous. Let it go."

No black American alive today was the child of a slave. Black slavery in America is as dead as anything else from the 19th century that is dead. It is as dead as the First Empire, the top-hat, or the viennese waltz. However, Sonia Sotomayor was only appointed to the Supreme Court a few years ago, is still very much alive, and still rules (in both senses) from the bench.

Generosity is what got white America to the state it is in today. No more generosity. We should neither forget, nor forgive.

Anonymous said...

Steve, you want African-Americans to stop being sore about slavery but you still won't give up being offended by Sodomayor (Mayor of Sodom) "Wise Latina" comment?

Be generous. Let it go.


Perp's still alive.

Anonymous said...

"I don't know; but right now, there is no more United States as we knew it. Time to see clearly."

You're right...no more black slavery, women have the right to the franchise, and Muslims are integrating into American society.

We are so blind!


Can't tell if serious.