The American Race

Diversity and Sotomayor in Obama Time-II

As this Wash Post piece notes, Supreme Court Justice Sam Alito had no problem—during his 2005 confirmation hearing—declaring that his Italian-immigrant background would influence his thinking:

"When I get a case about discrimination, I have to think about people in my own family who suffered discrimination because of their ethnic background or because of religion or because of gender. And I do take that into account."

But my point: we never worried about the influence of "diversity" on how judges thought until it became necessary to make distinctions about how the race/ethnicity of non-white nominees thinking might be influenced by who they were.

As it comes up in so many dimensions of understanding race at the core of American identity, nominal whiteness (including assimilated "other" European "ethnics") is the unexamined given. Rather than give this framework for evaluating the merit of leaders a well deserved funeral, the diversity/multicultural thought matrix suggests its better to value people on contribution of their ethnic particularities than their individual talents, professional accomplishments and maturation into fully-formed human beings. (The "empathy" Obama said was desirable in a Supreme falls into that last category).

Of course Sotomayor's roots as a Puerto-Rican American (redundant already) from the Bronx matter. But it mattered most in 1972, when she needed—and deserved—affirmative action to make up for the legacy of discrimination and disparity associated with those roots to help get her into a school like Princeton where her talents could find full expression for the benefit of society.

The end of the story should be a about the judge Sotomayor became, not the faux, retroactive justification for the affirmative action that helped her get there offered by the diversity establishment thinkers.

And the extension of such thinking to make such confessions of identity thinking, as Alito's 2005 testimony, to white ethnic or other (gay, disabled etc.) "diverse" groups a valid part of our vetting process is not justice. It's an almost cruel joke on the premise that the American dream is one people created out of many.

Diversity and Sotomayor in Obama Time

I have many good excuses for not writing much since last Fall, but here’s the one to move things forward again: I’ve been terribly bored and disappointed by the current state of public conversation on race, identity and culture that’s been the core of my writing for over 20 years.

The disappointment has lingered for quite some time. But I didn’t know how bored I was until the nomination of Sonia Sotomayor, and the inevitable framing, vilification, posturing and plain stupidity—from many sides—that ensued. Predictable? Yes. But, in the age of Obama, I had expected this kind of appointment drama to take new direction, from a new script that reveals something meaningful about the turn we’ve taken as a nation.

Yet instead of cleaning up the conversation, the gush actually got more stupid and dirtier to boot. At times it’s seemed like a violent torrent, trying to swell itself to  join the pro-gun, Obama-as-Socialist, anti-abortion terrorism, Holocaust Museum assault tide.

Who wrote this into the millennium?

 Then this NYT piece in the stream—like a Proustian madeline (yes, I’ve actually been tackling Proust instead of writing to you!)—opened some sense inside me that I need to start getting out. The piece left a taste on my mind’s tounge: the promise I savored as I  walked into a store on Fordham Road in the Bronx in the Spring of 1970 to buy a Yale tee-shirt, because I had been accepted and would be attending in the Fall.

I didn’t know anything about affirmative action. What I felt was affirmation, and the sense of it extending to entire generation. I felt secure about the “better days” my mother always said were coming. 

And now there is Obama. But his triumph stands in stark contrast to the utter failure of multiculturalism and the claims of the diversity industry to making America a better place. At least the right-wing reaction—the naked terror, paranoia and race for arms against the face of change—is openly (appallingly?) transparent, if not honorable. The multi-culty left, with all it’s courtiers pressing Obama to establish their power in government, is still in denial as to what they have and have not won.

The diversity people still don’t know what time of day it is. It’s not a quarter after the ritual filling of the mosaic-tiled salad bowl of American identity. It’s a quarter to (and holding) the full reality of  America as the first truly non-racial, non-ethnically defined nation.

Meet Aneesa

Aneesa is a teacher in Minneapolis who heard some of my 'conversation' with Greg from Rochester from last August here in The American Race, and later here on NPR's Weekend Edition Sunday.

When she first wrote, she was:

...struck by the fact that both you and Greg have ten year olds attending racially isolated schools.  I too teach at a racially isolated school.  That racial isolation in schools insulates white kids and black kids from a world that is not racially isolated.  I believe justice can prevail, and our society could be set up to heal our racial wounds if we could figure out how to intentionally plan integrated schools.

To that end, and a larger goal of harnessing her faith to the challenge of racial reconciliation, Aneesa is  a leader in ISAIAH, the Minnesota chapter of the faith-based Gamaliel organizing network. She summarized ISAIAH's belief and mission:

To create our health and the health of our democracy, major societal change is necessary.

• We will move our democracy and public institutions to:
• Create racial and economic equity with reparation for past harms
• Expand and protect that which must belong to all of us
• Pool our collective resources into public investments for the common good
• Create deep democratic participation in all aspects of our common lives
• Ensure hat "citizenship" extends to all stakeholders in our democracy

On Sunday, ISAIAH sponsored the fourth in a series of events  gathering people of faith, public officials and other leaders in Aneesa's community to rally and share the new vision. Some 4,000 people attended the third one; Aneesa had every hope that the latest one would draw at least that many.

I hope to get a report from Aneesa soon on how it turned out. Thank God for the means to seek His revelations from a much wider range of people than one could ever reach naturally, and the means to propagate the works of the Spirit in this way.

Like me, from this blogs Vision and call to The Revival, Aneesa says she feels called to bear witness and serve, "a special moment in history; a call to the revival first issued during the Civil Rights Era."

I very much welcome Aneesa to The Conversation.