Can you see in Sotomayor your own family story?

Listen up. Today, The Daddy is feeling Judge Sonia Sotomayor, a woman and Hispanic who lifted herself up from a New York project to become a top student at Princeton, one of the US top universities, indeed, to become one of the most respected judges in the country. In one sense, it is a story about the continuing difficulties that sexism and racism adds to the already-difficult tasks of becoming a success in the United States. It is the same old song of well-to-do white males who feel so superior, so arrogant, and so entitled, that they dare not cede any positions of influence, esteem and money to women or people of color. "Those positions," they pompously say to themselves, "belong to us!" So they get down in the mud and play dirty: play right-wing conservatives against moderates, centrist against progressives, race against race, gender against gender, religion against religion and gays against straights. They use statements out of context, deploy half-truths and outright lies to keep Americans divided and to maintain their entrenchment in the various corridors of power.

On the other hand, the Sotomayor story is an atestment to the resilience, sheer will-power, and straight-up stubborn determination to beat poverty and despair and make one's name in this grand experiment we like to call the United States of America. Let's face it: Sotomayor's story is not hers alone. It's truly an American story. She rose out of poverty and projects through hard work. She worked so hard and disciplined her god-given intellect so well that she became a top student at one of the best and most prestigious universities in this country. She worked herself up from low legal positions to become a highly-respected judge of an appellate court of New York. And now, she has been nominated to be a judge on the Supreme Court, the highest court in the land.

Okay, not all of us rose to be the top student in our class or were fortunate enough to have our hard work noticed and rewarded with promotion and an increase in salary until we were considered for CFO of a company. But many of us did. And some of us used our intellect and creativity to start our own company and succeeded that way.

Not to be outdone by the business sector, some of us became successful on our own terms. We decided to be successful not by accumulating fancy titles and highly morgagedt homes but rather by making a difference in our families and the communities in which we lived. Yes, we accumulated things, but we also helped folks along the way. But the formula was always the same as that of Sotomayor: Work hard. Continue to improve. Never give up. Isn't that the American way? Isn't that the America Sotomayor represents?

Family and culture

Judge Sotomayor says she believes that her family (especially her mother) and culture played a role in her development as a person and as a judge. In looking at cases, she checks her assumptions which arose from her family rearing and cultural experiences. Weren't we similarly influenced by our families and culture? And because we now live in a diverse society, don't we also check our assumptions which arose from the the culture in which we lived when dealing with people of other culture's as well? And aren't we a better people because we do?

Sotomayor and the Republican Party

Today, the Republican party is in shambles. Its core group, its base, is sexist, racist, anti-semitic and homophobic. Republican politicians believe that, to maintain their status in the party, or to extend their influence in the party, they must cater to this base. That means they must appeal, either in code or in straight talk, to these racist, sexist, anti-semitic and homophobic sensibilities. Unfortunately, that also means they must fight against the civil rights of gay people, rail against laws to protect minorities or classes it deems not a part of them, and do everything they can to keep women and people of color from attaining top positions in the American political system, including positions on the Supreme Court. That brings us back to Judge Sotomayor and the present argument against her: that she should not become a Supreme Court because she is against white males.

They speak of one poorly-worded speech in 2001 where she speaks of the value of her culture in shaping who she is, including her assumptions. Of course, they exclude her point made later on in the speech that we all must continually monitor assumptions that spring from our experiences in our work.

They speak of a case (Rici vs. Destefano) where white firefighters filed a lawsuit alleging that the court of New Haven, in throwing out a test that not many minorities passed, discriminated against the many whites who passed it. Judge Stoomayor, sided with the lower courts saying that New Haven was within its right to find a fairer test and thereby protect itself from lawsuits from minorities.

And of course they conveniently forget, 0r fail to let us know, about the Judy and George King case. In this case, the Kings claimed they were bumped from a flight to the Bahamas so that white passengers without confirmed reservations could board. They also said their own boarding passes were confiscated. The Federal Court ruled that such disputes were the legal domain of the International Warsaw Convention whose rules did not ban racial discrimination. Who wrote the decision? Judge Sotomayor.

The real deal

Instead of applauding a woman who transcended racist, sexist, and classist barriers to become one of the most respected and esteemed judges in the land, Republican politicians like Sen. Orrin Hatch are teaming up with right-wing pundits like Patrick Buchannan and talk radio hosts like Rush Limbaugh to criticize her as being unfair to white males. But by taking one speech out of context, by cherry-picking one case out of thousands to misrepresent her as racist toward white males (Can you believe that?), they are doing something much more sinister:

(1) helping to keep our country divided along racial lines at a time when Americans need to be united to deal with issues critical to our survival like universal healthcare and bringing back manufacturing to this country so we can be a prosperous economy again;

(2) keeping our younger generation from being inspired by the Sotomayors of this country, people who, like our parents, and our parent's parents, became successful through hard work, education, and a stubborn will power that would not allow them to fail.

Can you see in Sotomayor your own family story?