Sotomayor Was Right - A Wise Latina Will Have Better Judgement Than The Average White Guy

[Leo The Cleo]

I know this is well beyond the news cycle, but stay with me.

I believe that wise people in general will have better judgment than the average person. I don't believe that the average person is a "wise" person. However, the average person may be wise in very specific things.

But it is very apparent that our politicians and many lay people think otherwise. They think it is racist to believe a wise Latina cannot make better decisions than an Average white guy. They think Sarah Palin can make man better decisions than a wise black guy or a wise white guy like Joe Biden.

So, it's obvious that wisdom is not being held at a premium. After the last Bush presidency don't we deserve a little wisdom? Maybe we don't. Maybe we need more Bushs and more Palins. I don't know. I just wanted to throw that out there.

[tazkcmo]

1. And a wise dirt clod will have better judgement than any Bush n/t

[democracy1st]

2. I think its time to lay off the white crap and start focusing on the conservative mindset rather

than just flat out saying white

[cali]

3. the average white guy has not and never will be nominated to the SC

[retread]

5. None of the 106 white men out of the total 110 Justices were average white men? n/t

[retread]

4. We can only hope Sotomayor is everything the Buchanan's and the Limpball's of

the media say she is. I will try not to be disappointed when it turns out she isn't.

[Igel]

6. This post bothered me yesterday, when it was fresh.

I didn't stop to figure out why until today, when I saw it again.

Consider this: An adjective assigns an attribute to an object. If I say "red cup" I'm saying "there's a cup, and it has the attribute 'red'." Big words, simple enough idea. Same if I say "clay cup", right?

Turns out that color adjectives aren't routinely taken to be contrastive. If you have a set of cups, one of which is white and clay and another red and plastic, and all the rest white and plastic, you'd think that 'red' and 'clay' would serve to ID specific, unique cups. "Pick up the red cup" should have people moving before they hear the word 'cup', and "pick up the clay cup" should have the same effect.

If you thought that--as most linguists did until recently--you'd be wrong. "Red" is background noise--it adds information, but you need the word "cup" before you deal with that information. "Clay" is automatically taken to be contrastive.

I say this by way of background. Adjectives can be contrastive, serving to contrast a person or thing with another. Or they can merely state attributes. When an adjective is contrastive, it's usually considered a bit 'off' to be redundant because, well, it's redundant. But if it's merely emphasizing an attribute, that's fine. "Tall giant" makes little sense, but it can be contrastive ("No, don't look at Hagrid's brother, look at the *tall* giant") or not ("Gee, look at that tall *giant*"). Crucially, intonation matters, and wasn't included in the adjective study ("red" vs. "glass"). You can make adjectives contrastive. "John, pick up the *red* cup", where "red" is louder, emphasized. Then it's contrastive and John, no doubt, would start to pick up the red cup before he encounters the word 'cup'.

Now, when you plan on emphasizing something, it affects how you organize what you say. After all, if it's emphasized, it's important. You put it in prominent places. If you don't emphasize something, you use default word order, you put the information in places where it doesn't stick out.

When Sotomayor used the "wise Latina woman", she wasn't emphasizing "wise". If she had been, it would be equally true that a wise white man, a wise Asian woman, or a wise Latino would, it's hope, reach better decisions than an average white man, or Latina, or Asian. The text isn't skewed that way, and to read it as skewed that way creates a stumbling point right at "wise Latina". The logical flow is disrupted, for no good rhetorical reason, and the rhetorical flow is disrupted for no good logical reason, because the syntax and logic stress *Latina*, not *wise*. Now, if you read "wise" as simply adding an attribute in a non-contrastive way, the logic and rhetoric match, and Sotomayor's words flow naturally. You can accept that all Latina women are wise or that she's just talking about the set of Latina women who are wise, but there's no contrast implied between "wise" and anything. It's redundant at worst, underplayed at best, but it can't be read, as you do in isolation, as contrastive.

The contrast she's set up in her speech, both rhetorically and logically, is between "Latina female" and "white male". Now, "Latina female" is for some people redundant (since, after it, it's pointless in another language) but is apparently common in some circles (precisely one such circle was Sotomayor's audience). However, the logic of the argument pushes her to use both words: 'wise' isn't contrasted, but 'female' and 'male' are contrasted, as is 'Latino' and 'white'. She could have made it a three-part contrast, had she wanted to. Apparently she fails by not giving the speech you think she should have, but what she said was clear and logical (even if I find it fairly nasty, it's still popular in some circles).

In other words, your claim fails, unless you really want to say that Sotomayor is an utterly incompetent and inarticulate speaker, even reading from a prepared, edited text and using the same tropes from speech to speech. That runs counter to how most people describe her, of course, and it's a fairly bad trait in a justice.

[robcon]

7. It was a racist statement then, and it still is.

The excuses given for the statement are troubling to me.