Sotomayor, Obama and the Legitimization of Racism

I would hope that a wise White man with the richness of his experience would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a Latina woman who hasn't lived that life.

Had any previous Supreme Court nominee made such a statement, he would have been tarred and feathered throughout the press and in public life for making such a blatantly racist statement. But Sotomayor's inverse version of the remark was treated not only as normal but even praiseworthy.

Yet Sotomayor's comment was not merely a racist remark. It would have been far less dangerous and problematic if she had merely recited some sort of stereotype showcasing her own stupidity and prejudices. Instead she made the one statement that no judge can be permitted to make, she expressed the belief that certain people, based on race and gender, are more fit to issue rulings than others.

This belief, that some races and genders are more fit to rule, hold authority and voice their views than others, is at the heart of political discrimination. It is a belief that the 14th, 15th and 19th amendments existed to strike down.

If Sotomayor is placed on the Supreme Court, she will have to issue rulings for a nation that derives its existence from the Declaration of Independence, a document which states that all people are created equal, a premise she clearly does not believe in. Nor should anyone expect a member of the racist La Raza (The Race) organization to believe it, anymore than we would expect a member of the KKK to do so either. The difference of course is that La Raza has been legitimized because it is a racist group composed of a racial minority. And that same legitimization of minority racism is at the heart of the defense for Sotomayor's own racist statement.

Rather than bringing about the colorblind society that Martin Luther King spoke of, Social Liberals hijacked the civil rights to impose a society blinded by color, in which left wing radicalism fused with racism could be used to impose a blatantly exclusionary agenda. Sotomayor, like Obama, is both the beneficiary and the promoter of that agenda.

Obama could not have gotten as far as he did, if American society had not been primed with the idea that color is a legitimate reason to support a candidate when it is expressed as "positive racism", or that racial loyalty in politics is unacceptable among the majority, but laudable among minorities. Both of these are racial double standards which legitimize racist ideas and practices when applied to minorities against the majority.

In the Social Liberal moral and ethical calculus, racism is not equally wrong regardless of who practices it, it is only wrong when practiced by the "privileged" majority, against the oppressed minority. By contrast racism by the minority is not racism, but the pride of an oppressed people affirming their own self-worth. That kind of double standard pervades the treatment of both Obama, who belonged to a racist church whose views were not far afield from David Duke's, or Sotomayor, who openly expressed her belief that she was more fit to serve on the bench and issue rulings because of her race.

Social liberalism has legitimized racism, and if Sotomayor is placed on the bench, she will be the first openly racist Supreme Court Justice since Democratic Justice and Klansman, Hugo Black. The media's treatment of Sotomayor showcases the "Positive Racism" that treats race plus position as an accomplishment. But as Sotomayor's bigotry demonstrates, the flip side of positive racism is simply racism.

America can either be a nation of laws, or of identities. Sotomayor's nomination is a vote for America as a nation not run on the bedrock of law, but on the constantly shifting sands of diversity through racial and ethnic identity and personal biography subsituting for actual accomplishments.

Sotomayor's nomination represents everything that is wrong with the Social Liberal exploitation of race, a reality that can best be summed up by a press that has devoted 99 percent of its coverage to celebrating her "historic accomplishment", the only thing historic about it again involves race, and 1 percent to actually talking about her rulings and positions. That is the triumph of diversity over qualification, and it is the opposite of what the Founding Fathers intended.

The Self-Evident Truth of the Framers, equality, lies in the dustbin. In its place stands guilt ridden diversity and tokenism. In its place stands race as a qualifier for public office, a hateful atavism that was supposed to be extinct in 21st century America rather than ruling over it. In its place stand Barack Obama and Sonia Sotomayor.