Sotomayor

I hope to do an actual substantive post later today about Sotomayor, but I want to take a moment first to note my initial idiosyncratic reaction to the nomination of a Newyoriqueña to the U.S. Supreme Court.

See, my bestest girlfriend from the age of 14 is a Newyoriqueña. In fact, she went and wrote an award-winning book about immigration patterns between Chicago and Puerto Rico and did some postdoc work at Hunter College's Centro for Estudios Puertoriqueños. I'm dying to find out what she has to say about Sotomayor's nomination, and if I can pin her down sometime for an "interview" I'll post some of her responses here.

In the meantime, my friendship with Dr. Perez has really helped me pay a little attention, over the years, to "the" Puerto Rican experience in the U.S. And just, like, wow. We'll hear a lot about Sotomayor being the first Hispanic nominee, and it's certainly a deal that the first Latino nominee happens to be a Latina. But if you don't know, Puerto Ricans are sort of on the bottom of the Latino hierarchy; sort of like how the Bronx (where Sotomayor's from) is at the bottom of the New York boroughs, or how (in my own personal history) being from the CA central valley is at the bottom of the California place hierarchy. (Okay, maybe it's more crappy to be from, like, Needles, but seriously: in graduate school one of my CA-born students was super-impressed by my street cred when he found out where I'd grown up. And yes, that's hilarious, but it does sort of illustrate the point).

So I'm a little more inclined than your average white girl, probably, to feel sisterhood with Puerto Rican women, maybe. And if I'm at all "down with the brown," as someone once said in a comment thread, that's a big part of why. And yeah, because of that this nomination feels a little more personal, a little more moving, than it otherwise might.

You know that all the Republican talk is already about how Sotomayor is "only" the nominee because of her ethnicity, and how she's not going to be properly "objective" as a judge because she'll favor people like her, and that this woman who graduated summa cum laude from Princeton and then went to Yale Law is not all that smart, and other racially-coded panic talk. And there will be a lot of pointing to her professional record as a response (like I just did, noting her Ivy League pedigree). So I wanna say something right here at the outset of her confirmation process:

Fuck yes I'm glad she's the nominee BECAUSE she's a Puerto Rican woman from the Bronx. Fuck yes.

That shit is the entire fucking point of America. At least, it is to the 70s-era "Free to Be, You and Me," bicentennial, Sesame Street generation I belong to. When the President, a Hawaiian-born black man from a broken home, nominates a Bronx-born Puerto Rican woman to the Supreme Court, you can't help but feel like maybe the Constitution and the Separation of Powers and Equality Under the Law and We the People and all that stuff really, actually, might be true.

I hope that when we argue for Sotomayor's "qualifications," we don't forget that hell yes her ethnicity and gender are part of that package. Hell yes her ability to "empathize," as Obama put it, with people who have historically "not counted" as "real Americans" is a big part of why she belongs on the court--not least because real Americans can empathize with her. She reminds a lot of us of our sisters, our aunties, our mamas, our best friends.

And that recognition, that sense of belonging, is the foundation of the American ideal of equality. Which is the entire point of the Supreme Court.