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President Barack Obama likes to make history. Yesterday Obama announced Judge Sonia Sotomayor as his nominee for Supreme Court Justice; Sotomayor, if confirmed by the Senate, will be only the third woman to serve on the Supreme Court and the first person of Latin descent. Within the first twenty-four hours of the announcement the conservative voices began to attack Sotomayor, and the attacks have little if anything to do with substance and everything to do with sexism and racism. However, most of the mainstream media and even most of the alternative media will not call these attacks what they are.
There have been the expected references to Judge Sotomayor being a liberal and an activist judge, and these labels would have been applied to whatever nominee President Obama would have announced. However, there have been questions raised about her intellect and her temperament, questions that are completely centered in sexism. From all of the usual suspects these questions have been raised about a woman with impeccable credentials, a woman that graduated with honors from two of the most prestigious universities in the country. None of these same questions where raised about any of the previous male nominees. Also, this idea of temperament has a mixture of both sexism and racism. Women who achieve higher positions of authority are often painted as less feminine, and as being overly aggressive. There is also the racial stereotype of the angry Latin woman, a stereotype that is often specifically perpetuated about Puerto Rican women.
Judge Sotomayor has also already been labeled as a racist, or even the ridiculous label of reverse racist, because of the Ricci v New Haven case in which the New Haven fire department through out promotion exams because it was deemed racial bias. There is also the quote that the conservatives are already repeating with regularity. Sotomayor said in 2001 that, "I would hope 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." That sound you heard was every conservative white man clinching his fist at the idea that a Latina could actually reach a better conclusion than them.
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