Today is the second day of Sonia Sotomayor supreme court confirmation hearings. While nearly everyone expects Sotomayor to sail through the confirmation hearings with little trouble; former speaker of the house Newt Gingrich recently attacked the nominee by calling her a raciest (see this abc news article).
Gingrich tweeted: “Imagine a judicial nominee said ‘my experience as a white man makes me better than a latina woman.’ new racism is no better than old racism.” Moments later, he followed up with the message: “White man racist nominee would be forced to withdraw. Latina woman racist should also withdraw.”(excerpted from CNN)
This is quite curious on a number of levels;
- Gingrich aggregated his sentiments using the ’social networking’ sight/tool Twitter; this is about the last thing one would expect a stogy republican to do. (Dose John McCain even know what a tweet is ?)
- Newt Gingrich’s first name is ‘Newt’
- Newt is a white ‘man’ and grew up (as a military brat) with infinitely more privileges than Sonia Sotomayor… yet he somehow managed to call the first serious female nominee (since Ruth Bader Ginsburg) of the first ‘African American’ president of the united states; a racist. To make things even more interesting Sotomayor is also the first Latino (read:minority) supreme cours nominee..ever.
- Due to the amazing backlash on blogs, Twitter and the (arguably conservative) media Gingrich recanted and actually apologized.
I wanted to take a minute to analyze Sotomayor ‘controversial’ statement which seams to have tied Gingrich’s undies in a bunch. In 2001 while delivering a speech intended to explore how life experience can inform judicial opinions (source) Sonia Sotomayor stated:
“I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experience would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life,” (source)
If we strip the sentence down to some of its presuppositions we see at least the following:
- Better conclusions are made by wise people
- Experience can lead to wisdom or at least augment wisdom
- Latina women have had cretin experiences white men have not had
- All things being equal, a person who is wise, Latin and a woman has had greater experience than than those who are not, specifically white men.
From these propositions she concludes:
- It is hoped those who are wise, Latin and women would make better decisions than those who happen to be: unwise, white, male and less experienced.
This seams to make since. Lets try to rephrase the conclusion by removing race references. It would seam; if Sotomayor is making a racist statement and if in that statement race modifies gender; then we could remove race from the equation and get a sexist statement. However Sonia Sotomayor’s statement dose not seam to make any such sexist statement and says something like:
- It is hoped that a wise woman would make better decisions than an unwise man.
If we re-work the sentence again we get some interesting results. This time lets remove gender references. We could then (but would not necessarily) derive
- It is hoped that wise people make better decisions than unwise people.
I certainly hope wise people make better decisions than unwise people. This seams to make sense and is not really all that controversial. However reworking Sonia Sotomayor statement to derive (the converse of Gingrich’s reductio example) ‘my experience as a Latin woman makes me better than a white man’ dose not seam possible. First this derivative makes no mention of wisdom. Second Sotomayor is speaking of an ability to reach better conclusion’s and not qualitatively of people. While Gingrich’s claim is quite inflamatory and thus a bit more entertaining; it dose not seam to hold much water. I think what Gingrich intended to do was attack premise 4. Given:
- Better conclusions are made by wise people
- Experience can lead to wisdom or at least augment wisdom
- Latina women have had cretin experiences white men have not had
It would seam quite fare to argue that white men have had experiences Latina women have not had and that this should not help or hinder there wisdom. Thus premise 3 and 4 are disjointed and premise 4 can be rejected as both superfluous and impossible. I think Gingrich wanted to argue that all things aside from race and gender can not be equal. These things fundamentally impact who we are as beings and our ability to participate in wisdom; wherever they may fall in the spectrum of existence. Furthermore it seams Gingrich wanted to purport no one has an edge over anyone else specifically due to there race or gender. While it may be true; rich white men generally have a greater opportunity to succeed this dose not make them any ‘better’ as people; it just means we live in a fucked up society which tends to favor and perpetuate those in power.
What is frustrating here is Sonia Sotomayor was delivering what, she probably though at the time was, a motivational speech; Gingrich did the same. Sotomayor’s statements were intended to inspire and encourage; Gingrich’s claims were intended to marginalize and spin. Neither climes are logically sound and both are relatively nonsensical yet they seam to rally both the left and the right. I think what Sotomayor intended to say was something like:
“I would hope people who have struggled through adversity would have learned valuable lessons resulting in greater wisdom. White men, on the whole, have fewer economic and social barriers to success; thus a successful Latino may have some insight a white man in the same position may lack”
It seams apparent Gengrich really intended to say something like:
“Hey guys look at me, I’m still alive, relevant and matter…now watch me crash my political career into this pile of horse shit!”
