{"id":549,"date":"2009-07-13T15:21:10","date_gmt":"2009-07-13T15:21:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/progressiverevival\/2009\/07\/wise-latina-power-judge-sotoma.html"},"modified":"2009-07-13T15:21:10","modified_gmt":"2009-07-13T15:21:10","slug":"wise-latina-power-judge-sotoma","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/progressiverevival\/2009\/07\/wise-latina-power-judge-sotoma.html","title":{"rendered":"Wise Latina Power!  Judge Sotomayor and the Senate Confirmation Hearings"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;m sick of the constant harping on Judge Sonia Sotomayor&#8217;s &#8216;Wise Latina&#8217; comment. \u00a0Jeff Sessions, the Senator from the great state of Alabama (&#8216;everybody knows about\u00a0Alabama&#8217; -Nina Simone) made reference to it again in his opening\/opposing statement at Sotomayor&#8217;s confirmation hearings today.\u00a0<\/p>\n<div><\/div>\n<div>The sentence, for those of you who haven&#8217;t been following the obsession, goes like this:\u00a0<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div><span class=\"Apple-style-span\">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&#8217;t lived that life.<\/span><\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div>Judge Sotomayer said these words to a conference called <a href=\"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/progressiverevival\/2009\/05\/judge-sotomayer-racist-or-repr.html\">Raising the Bar: Latino and Latina Presence in the Judiciary and the Struggle for Representation.<\/a> \u00a0The context makes a difference. The context was a\u00a0symposium\u00a0meant to give encouragement to other Latina and Latino lawyers &#8211; a minority group that has traditionally been under represented in the legal tradition, especially as judges.<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div>For those who have always enjoyed the\u00a0privilege\u00a0of\u00a0assuming\u00a0they could be the best at something it seems odd to say that you might actually be better at it than another group &#8211; that fact is taken for granted. \u00a0For instance, nobody is questioning my ability as a man to be a good lawyer, a good judge, a good voter, a good landowner, a good bank account holder &#8211; because it was\u00a0presumed\u00a0by society that I would be good at those things by the very nature of my gender.\u00a0<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div>Not so for a women. \u00a0<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div>There was a time when for a women to make the case that she should be allowed to be a lawyer, judge, voter, landowner, bank account holder (let alone claim she might be a good one) was extraordinary, as all of these things were forbidden to women. \u00a0So at a conference encouraging women it would not surprise one to hear a woman say that she might even be better at these things than a man because she is forced to compensate for an entire society that has legally and normatively insisted that she is not only not equal &#8211; she is inferior. \u00a0\u00a0<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div>So maybe in the context of the symposium supporting the idea that Latina women and Latino men could be judges (shock!) Judge Sotomayor was compensating a little. \u00a0Maybe she also was right and that the particular rich experience that a wise Latina women would be bring would be a valuable <a href=\"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/progressiverevival\/2009\/05\/judge-sotomayer-racist-or-repr.html\">addition to the court (for more on that question see my earlier post Racist or Representative).<\/a><\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div>I, for one, am not intimidated or threatened by her comments. I do not\u00a0believe\u00a0that\u00a0<\/div>\n<div>Judge Sotomayor&#8217;s is a racist. \u00a0She is proud of the abilities and wisdom that she and other \u00a0Latina women are offering to the bench. \u00a0She is qualified and I welcome her confirmation. \u00a0<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;m sick of the constant harping on Judge Sonia Sotomayor&#8217;s &#8216;Wise Latina&#8217; comment. \u00a0Jeff Sessions, the Senator from the great state of Alabama (&#8216;everybody knows about\u00a0Alabama&#8217; -Nina Simone) made reference to it again in his opening\/opposing statement at Sotomayor&#8217;s confirmation hearings today.\u00a0 The sentence, for those of you who haven&#8217;t been following the obsession, goes&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":51,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[375,3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-549","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-race-2","category-u-s-constitution"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v23.9 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>Wise Latina Power! Judge Sotomayor and the Senate Confirmation Hearings - Progressive Revival<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/progressiverevival\/2009\/07\/wise-latina-power-judge-sotoma.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Wise Latina Power! 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Judge Sotomayor and the Senate Confirmation Hearings - Progressive Revival","robots":{"index":"index","follow":"follow","max-snippet":"max-snippet:-1","max-image-preview":"max-image-preview:large","max-video-preview":"max-video-preview:-1"},"canonical":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/progressiverevival\/2009\/07\/wise-latina-power-judge-sotoma.html","og_locale":"en_US","og_type":"article","og_title":"Wise Latina Power! Judge Sotomayor and the Senate Confirmation Hearings - Progressive Revival","og_description":"I&#8217;m sick of the constant harping on Judge Sonia Sotomayor&#8217;s &#8216;Wise Latina&#8217; comment. \u00a0Jeff Sessions, the Senator from the great state of Alabama (&#8216;everybody knows about\u00a0Alabama&#8217; -Nina Simone) made reference to it again in his opening\/opposing statement at Sotomayor&#8217;s confirmation hearings today.\u00a0 The sentence, for those of you who haven&#8217;t been following the obsession, goes&hellip;","og_url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/progressiverevival\/2009\/07\/wise-latina-power-judge-sotoma.html","og_site_name":"Progressive Revival","article_published_time":"2009-07-13T15:21:10+00:00","author":"Paul Raushenbush","twitter_card":"summary_large_image","schema":{"@context":"https:\/\/schema.org","@graph":[{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/progressiverevival\/2009\/07\/wise-latina-power-judge-sotoma.html","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/progressiverevival\/2009\/07\/wise-latina-power-judge-sotoma.html","name":"Wise Latina Power! 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Judge Sotomayor and the Senate Confirmation Hearings"}]},{"@type":"WebSite","@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/progressiverevival\/#website","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/progressiverevival\/","name":"Progressive Revival","description":"Politics from the New Religious Progressives","potentialAction":[{"@type":"SearchAction","target":{"@type":"EntryPoint","urlTemplate":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/progressiverevival\/?s={search_term_string}"},"query-input":{"@type":"PropertyValueSpecification","valueRequired":true,"valueName":"search_term_string"}}],"inLanguage":"en-US"},{"@type":"Person","@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/progressiverevival\/#\/schema\/person\/79cf4745abafd37be8b44cd0493ca805","name":"Paul Raushenbush","image":{"@type":"ImageObject","inLanguage":"en-US","@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/progressiverevival\/#\/schema\/person\/image\/","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/progressiverevival\/wp-content\/wphb-cache\/gravatar\/8a4\/8a469b4689362184dbcd8bfb43296365x96.jpg","contentUrl":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/progressiverevival\/wp-content\/wphb-cache\/gravatar\/8a4\/8a469b4689362184dbcd8bfb43296365x96.jpg","caption":"Paul Raushenbush"},"description":"Rev. Paul B. Raushenbush is the moderator of the Progressive Revival blog and the Associate Dean of Religious Life at Princeton University. .An ordained American Baptist minister, Rev. Raushenbush speaks and preaches at colleges, churches and institutes around the country including the College of Preachers at the National Cathedral in Washington D.C., The Chautauqua Institute in upstate New York, and the New America Foundation. Rev. Raushenbush has served at Seattle First Baptist Church, the Presbyterian Chaplaincy at Columbia University and as College and Young Adult Minister at The Riverside Church in New York City. He has appeared on ABC World News Tonight and is a repeated guest on CNN. He has been quoted in The New York Times and The Washington Post and is a contributing editor for Beliefnet.com. His first book, Teen Spirit: One World, Many Faiths (HCI) was released in the Fall of 2004. He is the editor of the 100th Anniversary edition of Walter Rauschenbusch\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s book Christianity and the Social Crisis \u00e2\u20ac\u201c In the 21st Century (HarperOne). His work at Princeton includes strengthening the interfaith community on campus. He is the Co-Director of the Program on Religion, Diplomacy and International Relations at The Liechtenstein Institute on Self Determination at Princeton University. Rev. Raushenbush studied religion at Macalester College before attending Union Theological Seminary in New York City where he graduated with distinction.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/progressiverevival\/author\/praushenbush"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/progressiverevival\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/549","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/progressiverevival\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/progressiverevival\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/progressiverevival\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/51"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/progressiverevival\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=549"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/progressiverevival\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/549\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/progressiverevival\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=549"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/progressiverevival\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=549"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/progressiverevival\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=549"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}