I Would HOPE,,,

Yeah !!!  I LOVE her !!!

Peter,

Thanks. That was the fastest I have ever been notified of a comment.  Glad you agree,

Right on. Our thoughts flow the same.

I really like your statement, "...I will smile and feel proud every time Justice Sotomayor challenges the pride of bigots..."

 Carol L.,

What I now know of Sotomayor is she is a success, is a very capable person. I simply have a concern that anyone who believes in the superiority of people because of their race or gender has a flawed logic and is at risk of an irrational bias when making conclusions.

"...Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male..." the differentiation here is simply ethnicity and gender. You may want to rationalize that is "Hope" that changes the meaning of what was said but hope is only based of desire and belief. If you want to use the more often as the turn in the sentence, it only suggest that Latina women can make mistakes but they will predominate and are smarter than white men.

 I take her at her words, she feels that Latina women would make better conclusions than white men.

If she does believe what she said and wasn't pandering to whoever she was talking to then I wonder what she feels about the US Constitution. It was written by white men over 200 years ago. Does she believe that since it was written by white men that it needs to be changed by a Latina woman? Will she make every effort to make those changes by her rulings on the highest Court?

I wonder how she will respect the rest of the Justices' since she feels that their (except for a couple) ethnicity and gender make them less intelligent than a Latina woman.

To suggest that the experiences are unique to one race or gender and that makes people wiser is at best self delusional. If the suggestion that Latina women have somehow experienced something so profound that it has make them wiser than all others or specifically wiser than white men seems to ignore that there is no experience that (save child birth) that isn't experienced by people of all races and gender.

I have found that women make as many bad decisions as men, that no race has a corner on bad decisions, or that people all over the world make bad decisions. I also have found the converse that there is no one group based on race, gender that doesn't make good decisions. I look at people as individuals and have never found a superior race or gender, and question anyone who says that there is such superiority.

There was a sports announcer who felt that the ability to swim was race based, he lost his career over that remark. And now we have Supreme Court nominee that says Latina women would reach better conclusions than white men, and we are expect to believe that having those kinds of biases she should be elevated to a position judicial prominence with no review.

"Many variations on the statement  that could be made," that is true of everything said, but we must deal with what was said and all the implications.

Duane.

Reading impliications into someone else;s words is not dealing with what was said.  I dealt with what Sotomayor said. You read implications into them so you could imply that they meant something they did not say.

Carol L.,

You are reporting she said, "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 reads to me that wise Latina women would more often reach a better conclusioin than white men. That sure sounds like that Latina women make better conclusions than white men. If they make better conclusions than some how Latina women are better than white men. No inferences straight forward more and better means smarter.

The only difference being Latina women and white men. That is a gender/ethnic bias.

I will acknowledge that since she didn;t specify a Latina woman that leads to belive that she meant any or all Latina women. Simlarly she didn;t specifiy a white male that leads to she included any and all white men. The male could include boys, but since all childrens minds are still developing I would not include children. 

I will admit that I have yet to meet someone with a bias that didn't have their bias influence their thinking.

Erik,

"White men... better!"  Why bother with specifying race when you start off with the bogus premisis that men are better.  As for who has chosen to make better movies, I don't go to the movies very often so I have no basis for judging.  Even my DVD collection consists of mostly of movies that were  made before 1970. 

Carol, you wrote: "As a woman I can relate to the statement, and I suspect that those critics who claim Sotomayor's statement was something else do so because they are bigots whose sense of superiority has been challenged and insulting the person who challenged is the only response of which they can think."

This is from my comment on my post Group Identity Politics: A Shield and a Weapon: "So say the reverse of her quote: 'I would hope that a wise Caucasian man with the richness of his experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a Latina female who hasn't lived that life.' Does that sound racist?"

Now let's flip your quote: "As a man I can relate to the statement, and I suspect that those critics who claim my statement was something else do so because they are bigots whose sense of superiority has been challenged and insulting the person who challenged is the only response of which they can think."

Now, I know you weren't referring to me, because I didn't say that Judge Sotomayor's statement was racist. I simply asked if people would consider the converse as such. Also, I didn't put her quote in my original post, because I was focusing on other aspects of her nomination.

I have to commend you on parsing her statement correctly. "I would hope" is the key phrase in her statement, though she still said "better," not "as good as." If she had said "most White males," instead of "a White male," I would have less concern about it.

It's also interesting that you feel free to judge Rush, Ann, and Newt so harshly, but object to them judging Judge Sotomayor similarly.

Chris,

I didn't judge either Ann Coulter and Rush Limbaugh based on one statement.  They both have provided multiple examples of their bigotry and tendency to go on the attack and demean those who challenge their sense of superiority.

Newt surprised me a little. I would have expected better of him if I had been put in the position of predicting his response.  While I do not share his political philosophy he is smart and capable of a more intelligent and considered response than the one that caused me to lump him in with the likes of Coulter and Limbaugh.  Since he has since taken back some of his initial remarks I think a little retrospective thinking on his part led him to conclude he had erred and he has enough confidence in his own abilities to admit it.