Sonia Sotomayor’s nomination brings out subtle racism everywhere

President Obama announced his appointment of Sonia Sotomayor for the ninth seat on the Supreme Court bench yesterday morning, setting the interwebs and the cable news pundits on fire with something big to talk about all day.

Stuart Taylor at the National Journal is right in pointing out that this nomination is extremely shrewd because it puts the Republican Party in a tight spot. If they criticize Sotomayor for the things they most want to attack her for, they risk further branding themselves as the party of old white men. If they don’t attack her aggressively, they risk giving a victory to Obama and further weakening the party.

After Obama’s announcement, what followed was almost boringly predictable: all the news today has been dominated by talk about her race and gender. And though she was only nominated about 12 hours ago, her nomination has already brought race to the forefront of the public discourse — a topic we all normally like to avoid for the sake of our own comfort levels. Better to pretend race doesn’t exist, right? Right. Except now, it suddenly exists, more than ever. The fact that she grew up in the Bronx projects but graduated summa cum laude from Princeton and Yale Law School doesn’t exist, but the fact that she’s a Latina woman definitely does exist.

For instance:

–Glenn Beck says Sotomayor is a racist! (Does anyone else besides me see the irony in the fact that a panel of three white men are discussing whether Sotomayor is racist towards white men?)

–Senator James Inhofe thinks Sotomayor might allow ‘undue influence because of her own personal race and gender‘! (Oh my god, you’re right, because she’s a LATINA WOMAN and her opinions might be different from those of WHITE MEN, she’s automatically a bad judge) 

–Mike Huckabee calls her Maria  Sotomayor. Well, you know, all those brown people have such similar names. 

–Even Politico, however inadvertent, falls prey to some good old-fashioned racial stereotypes.

–The conservative Judicial Confirmation Network whines that “in Sotomayor’s court, the content of your character is not as important as the colour of your skin.”  That’s not a hypocritical statement to make about a minority judge at ALL…

The underlying assertion in all these subtle, or not so subtle, criticisms Sotomayor is that her race and gender make her less qualified to be a Supreme Court justice, because her race and gender might affect her decisions. Thus, following that logic, we should only pick jurists who don’t have any race or gender to cloud their decisions.

You mean to tell me white men are raceless and genderless and completely neutral? Why didn’t someone tell me that before?!

The real problem with Betty Brown: words matter

Side note: I have this whole post brewing about the US, Israel, and the UN Human Rights Council, that I’m excited about but haven’t finished. It kind of demands more thorough research and long-form writing than is suited for blogging, so I haven’t gotten around to it. Maybe some time this week.

Today, though, I want to put in my two cents about this Betty Brown business. For those of you who haven’t already heard of Betty Brown, she is a previously unknown Republican lawmaker from the state of Texas who got her 15 minutes of fame last week when shemade some seriously inflammatory remarks about how Asian-Americans should change their names to make them “easier for Americans to deal with.” I kid you not. If you haven’t seen it, here’s the video of her madness.

Upon hearing initial reactions to her statements, Brown, dismissed them, saying Democrats are “trying to make it all about race.” Um, I think she made it about race when she made all her ignorant statements. Anyways, she has since apologized, but only in part. She has apologized for suggesting Asian Americans change their names — but she hasn’t apologized for suggesting that Asian Americans aren’t American. Specifically when she says:

“Do you think that it would behoove you and your citizens to adopt a name that we could deal with more readily here.

“Can’t you see that this is something that would make it a lot easier for both you and for people who are pollworkers, if there were some means by which you could adopt a name just for your poll identification purposes that would be easier for the Americans to deal with?”

That kind of language, and ignorance, is the REAL problem here. The problem is the fact that Brown still subscribes to the antiquated, racist notion that Asian Americans are The Other and are not real “Americans.”

In 2009, I would think most people would have caught on to the fact that the meaning of American is no longer white, blue-eyed, and blond, but far more diverse than that. It seems some of our lawmakers still haven’t clued in to that, however.

What does ‘American’ mean, anyways?

Update: just after I published this piece, I read a fantastic article in this month’s issue of The Atlantic about the changing racial/ethnic makeup of America. If you liked this post, check out the Atlantic article HERE for a thought-provoking read.

So I spent the last two weeks backpacking in Southeast Asia, and yes it was fantastic! But today when I sat down in front of the laptop I had missed so dearly for two weeks, what I wanted to write about wasn’t all the stuff I did, but something  that most people regard almost insignificant.

I wanted to write about the spare minute or two we spent in each country on our trip (5 of them, not counting our re-entry into the US yesterday morning) filling out arrival and departure cards. Of all the time we spend traveling, it’s probably the most easily forgotten two minutes of any traveler’s time abroad.

But for me, waiting in line at customs and filling out that card so many times was interesting because the third line on each card, after first and last name, would always be “Nationality.” And then the government of that country would give you one line with 10 little boxes, one per letter, within which to neatly write down the country you hail from. You know, as if our national identities could be neatly encompassed in 8-10 little boxes.

I always spend an inordinate amount of time staring at the card trying to figure out what to write down. Then eventually I give up and write down American, because that’s what the title on my passport says I am. But writing American on that card always, every year, made me feel like a little bit of an impostor. I never felt ‘American’ like my peers, despite bring born and raised in the United States. I felt more like I was supposed to be a foreigner; and that Americans were people that had been here for generations. People that weren’t separated from the rest by immigrant parents and cultural barriers and skin colors.

One night last week, my friends and I sat in a restaurant in Phuket, Thailand, discussing our backgrounds. Of the five of us, one was Caucasian, one Japanese, two were Americans whose parents immigrated to the US from India, and one had parents who immigrated from Hong Kong. We were discussing whether we more closely associated ourselves with America, or with our original country, and each of us shared about the collective pull we have all felt at times between our heritage and the country we now live in.

And then it was the one white guy’s turn– the one whose family can be traced in America for generations back, the one person at the dinner table that night who I felt was lucky enough to feel truly secure that he, really, is American.

He, I knew, will never have an identity crisis about what nation can lay claim to him, nor will he feel like an impostor when he writes down American. He will never know how frustrating it is to be challenged by people you meet in other countries who, because of the color of your skin, can’t believe you when you insist you’re American.  I thought he had it easy — but then he confessed that his lack of ethnic background meant that he felt like he was constantly on a search, constantly struggling to redefine for himself what “American” truly means.

And I realized: isn’t that the very essence of being American? The fact that every one of us, white or black or Asian or whatever else, are constantly redefining what it means to be “American”? If there’s one thing I’ve learned over the last few weeks, it’s that the criteria with which we used to decide what and who is perceived as American in the past is crap.

What much of the world doesn’t understand about America yet, and many Americans themselves don’t understand, is that our identity as a nation is changing. This is the only nation where you can come over from any other country in the world and assimilate into the culture here. I could move to Cambodia, but I’d never be a Cambodian — I’d forever be branded an expat, a foreigner. But a Cambodian could move to the US and eventually become one of the 300,000,000 other Americans. And the thing that ties us all together is the fact that we can be one society, where each one of us possesses our own unique story as to how we ended up in this continent and how we became American. We can forget the barriers that separate us and learn to appreciate diversity for what it is, and for what it can teach us.

And what a remarkable concept that is. Having a funny last name that no one can pronounce, or having parents from a different country doesn’t have to make you less American than anyone else — it makes you a shining example of what America can stand for. Hell, you could become president!

What does “American” mean to you?

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