WORD S2E3: AN OPEN-ENDED LETTER TO SONIA SOTOMAYOR

In May 2009, President Obama nominated Judge Sonia Sotomayor for appointment to the highest court in our land. For many, especially members of the Latino/Puerto Rican community, President Obama’s nomination was marked by triumph and exuberance; one of our own had finally achieved recognition that we, as a people, know we’ve deserved for years, upon decades, upon generations. Yet during the period between nomination and confirmation, the media took a tack in its account of Sotomayor’s story that troubled our people as much as the nomination brought us joy. Flanked by the pol itical right, media outlets embarked on a ruthless campaign to tinge Judge Sotomayor’s achievements, given her social, racial, and gender identity, with a tone of pleasant surprise.

Sotomayor’s ascent to one of the most esteemed positions in the very institutional structure which deprives our people of opportunity and resources should have been celebrated as a moment of unbridled triumph for citizens of all races. Instead, it emerged as an opportunity for the media to subtly devalue our peoples’ intelligence and ca pability. To the American people, Sonia Sotomayor became a young Puerto Rican from the Bronx whose academic achievements were an outlier and a novelty within a tradition of failure and inadequacy. The connection between Sotomayor’s ethnicity and this carefully curated sense of surprise was not lost on our people; the line between surprise and dismay was too poorly drawn.

We know how smart our people are. We know full well that the obstacles to our advancement in society can’t be ascribed to a lack of intelligence or even a failure of education. We as a people realize that our outcomes are influenced by firmly institutionalized racism and lack of opportunity. It’s no surprise that these issues were not addressed in the carefully curated plethora of rags-to-riches stories we heard in the mainstream media about Judge Sotomayor. The sense of surprise the media feigned in narrating Sotomayor’s story strikes those of us Puerto Ricans and Latinos from the Bronx, Brooklyn, or Queens who find ourselves closer to the “rags” than the “riches” side of the equation, as insulting and demeaning, and represents a failure of the media to stare down centuries of institutionally backed, funded, and purposeful racism.

The outright racist backlash against Sotomayor’s nomination from the reactionary right was even more disheartening than the media’s subtle tone of surprise. The right wing endlessly criticized Sotomayor for having remarked in a 2001 lecture at Berkeley Law School 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.” It is unsurprising that Sotomayor would distinguish her own experience from that of a white male. To those who grew up in the same community as Judge Sotomayor, this statement would be ascribed to common sense. Yet in her confirmation hearings before the Senate Judiciary Committee, she was forced to back away from this statement, referring to it as a “rhetorical flourish that fell flat,” and insisting that her background as a Puerto Rican woman from the Bronx would have no effect on her legal decisions. The implication of this exchange runs deeper than overt racism or prejudice; more importantly, it’s 2011, and today the opinion of an upper-class white male is still the only right and impartial one.

-Advocate of Wordz

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