With President Obama’s nomination of Judge Sonia Sotomayor to the U.S. Supreme Court, we are hearing from certain quarters (Republicans, conservatives, some white guys) complaints about the judge’s invocation of her Puerto Rican cultural heritage as an important part of who she is and why she might make a good Supreme Court Justice. Moreover, President Obama made a big deal of Judge Sotomayor’s personal story, along with her stellar legal credentials, when he announced her nomination to the nation’s highest court.
This matter of her cultural heritage and background – as well as the fact that she is a woman – re-animates a continuing debate in America about power and equal opportunity. It’s often labeled “identity politics,” which is a battering ram in the quarters that are whining about Judge Sotomayor’s invocation of her cultural heritage to pummel those of us from the historic margins of American life – women, and non-white ethnic minorities.
Frankly, I’ve wearied of shouting out my ethnic heritage, not because I am ashamed of who I am (working-class Chinese American son of illegal immigrants from China), but because our body politic since the great civil-rights wars of the 1960s and 1970s has tried to shame us for exhibiting pride in who we are, and for trying to expand the truth of the historical record of America as a place that once shamelessly and legally discriminated against women and non-white people (but that has also made impressive progress, the election of Barack Obama as president being the prime example).
Remember, “liberal” and “affirmative action” have become dirty words in certain establishment circles that abhorred and possibly feared the advancement of women and non-white minorities through affirmative-action programs spurred by the civil-rights legislative victories.
Yet, the old white-guy establishment, aided and abetted by some women and some of our “colored” brethren, resisted and fought back, and is still doing so, despite the inevitability of America becoming a more multicultural, multi-racial society, to say nothing of being part of a much more interdependent world. Thank goodness for what seems to be a natural progression toward social justice, slow and bumpy as it may be at times.
When Barack Obama launched his seemingly quixotic bid to become President of the United States, I was most taken by his personal story of coming from the margins of American life. As an Asian American, I was especially drawn to his experience living among Asian Americans (in Hawaii) and Asia (Indonesia). That -- along with his smarts, his being a community builder, and his liberal politics -- was enough for me to volunteer for and monetarily support, for the first time in my long adult life, a presidential candidate.
When I read of Judge Sotomayor’s life in The New York Times (“Woman in the News,” May 27, 2009), I felt the same way about her that I felt about President Obama. I confess to even tearing up when I read details of Judge Sotomayor’s personal background of living in a Bronx housing project and her helping break gender and cultural barriers in the haughty and once white-male-only Ivy League institutions of Princeton and Yale.
One’s life experience – such as for President Obama and Judge Sotomayor – ought not be THE determining factor in rising to the top in American public life because other qualities and achievements are equally important. But the kinds of personal journeys taken by President Obama and Judge Sotomayor enrich their other qualifications to make them – and others like them hitherto invisible to (and perhaps threatening to?) the old white-guy establishment – superbly capable of leading our nation.
Whatever public decisions President Obama and soon-to-be Justice Sotomayor make are surely shaped in some way by their life experiences – as is the case with all of us, white guys included – and that’s a reality that continues to inform the way we Americans live our lives. And that’s the kind of progress all of us should celebrate.
William Wong is a freelance writer, former journalist, and author of Yellow Journalist: Dispatches from Asian America, Images of America: Oakland’s Chinatown, and co-author of Images of America: Angel Island.
Comments