I consider Mona Charen one of the smartest, most reasonable writers in the conservative movement, so I was a bit confused when I read the opening of her most recent column on the nomination of Judge Sotomayor.
The nomination of Judge Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court has already achieved a boon for our political culture: It has helped leading liberals and Democrats to discover that being tarred as a racist on flimsy grounds is unfair and deeply unpleasant. Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., for example, when asked on “Face the Nation” to respond to Rush Limbaugh’s and Newt Gingrich’s comments about Sotomayor, said, “That’s an absolutely terrible thing to throw around. Based on that statement — that one word ‘better than’ (sic) — to call someone a racist is just terrible and I would hope that Republicans would not do this.”
Sen. Feinstein is right as far she went. She avoided one undeniable fact though. If a white male nominee had been discovered to have said something similar — that he was better situated to judge due to his background and life experiences than a Latina woman — he would be cashiered so fast as to induce whiplash. Those are the unwritten rules that Limbaugh and Gingrich are attempting, one suspects, to expose for their one-sidedness. Nevertheless, the instant labeling of the woman, based on one unwise remark, is hardly fair
How is Senator Feinstein right at all? Those words, “better…than” are what make Sotomayor’s statement racist. Let me put it up here one more time.
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 is a racist statement by any reasonable definition of the word (and I say “reasonable” because Charen is trying to make a reasonable argument against the plain racism of the statement). But do you see how the word “better” is the key to the whole sentence? What she is saying, when you boil it down, is she expects that a member of one racial group would do “better” at something than any member of another group, simply because of the groups to which they belong.
Or….Generic Wise Latina > Generic White Male.
That is racism. Charen practically conceded that it is in her very next sentence. If a white man had made a similar statement — that he expected a wise white male would come to a better conclusion than a Latina — the outrage would have taken physical form and consumed the white male who uttered it. If it’s racist for a person of one group to say something like that, then it’s racist for a person of any group to do it.
The labeling isn’t instant. It’s logical. It’s reasonable.
Charen makes another mistake as well. Gingrich and Limbaugh didn’t draw their conclusions from just one sentence. They drew it from the entire speech. Rich Lowry, a co-worker of Charen’s at National Review, wrote a column on Sotomayor’s entire speech just today. The truth is, the whole speech was a giant layer cake of racist belief smeared with sweet rationalization icing and sprinkled with a few hollow caveats.
Charen says it’s not fair to snap off a quick charge of racism. She’s absolutely right. It happens far too often and we need to smack it down every time we see it. Newt Gingrich and Rush Limbaugh are not guilty of that, though. Their accusation is based on a speech that she took time to prepare which said exactly what she wanted it to say. I’ll note also that no defense of Judge Sotomayor has risen above the level of “nuh-uh!” or “she didn’t mean to say that”. That tells me the charge of racism is a pretty darned solid one.
On the other hand, when we catch a racist out in the open, we shouldn’t be afraid to shame them completely. Judge Sotomayor is, in my opinion, a racist who has felt comfortable enough in her liberal cocoon to let her racist flag fly. We should feel comfortable enough as decent human beings to reject her out of hand.
(via memeorandum)
Tags: Mona Charen, Racism, Sonia Sotomayor
