Midlands Voices: Life experiences inevitably influence Judge Sotomayor

The writer, of Portage, Mich., is an author and a retired professor, having taught at Creighton University and Loyola University of Chicago.

Some of the press criticisms — and, yes, even negative reactions — to the nomination of Sonia Sotomayor to the U.S. Supreme Court are certainly to be expected. After all, she is President Barack Obama’s first pick for the highest court in the land.

Consequently, keeping such gravitas implied for the position, the president did not mince words in the introduction of an extremely deliberative choice. He said she possessed “not only the knowledge and experience acquired over a course of a brilliant legal career, but the wisdom accumulated from an inspiring life’s journey.”

Wisdom, as we all know, is gleaned from multifaceted and complex sources of an individual’s personal experience.

In Sotomayor’s life story, this included the death of her factory-worker father when she was 9 years old. At that time, her mother, a nurse, was left to raise Sotomayor and her brother in public housing. During those years, her mother scrimped to pay for her children’s Catholic school education.

There’s the rub! Pundits seem to find it difficult to prescind from the destitute circumstances in the predicament of a poor Puerto Rican girl from the Bronx. They insinuate that she must have gotten into those prestigious institutions of higher learning because of affirmative action.

Observe that Sotomayor is a summa cum laude graduate of Princeton — earning the top academic award, the M. Taylor Pyne Honor Prize — and that she subsequently served as editor of the Yale Law Journal.

What appears to have exacerbated the ethnic issue is the criticism leveled against Sotomayor for having stated with candor that, “Our gender and national origins may and will make a difference in our judging.” This she told an audience at the University of California at Berkeley in October 2001.

She further amplified this view by saying that a “wise Latina” judge would often make better decisions than a white male. Critics hastened to use the statement as evidence that her jurisprudence is influenced by her ethnicity (and even gender). To this, “so be it!” is the unequivocal response of this writer.

As a retired professor, having taught more than 40 years, I submit that humans are not disembodied spirits and must be inevitably influenced by their personal background. Thus through decades of success in academia and the legal profession, Sotomayor retained an acute consciousness of herself as a Latina from modest circumstances. She can’t help it!

Any attempt by advocacy groups to use it to stoke ethnic pride is not incompatible with the genuine desire of a person to have and demonstrate a healthy self-esteem.

No apology is needed for this. Au contraire! Many young people and adults seek to recognize the need to develop such a healthy self-esteem to intersect effectively with their colleagues and make progress in their professional career. To deny this may gravitate more toward stereotype shaping of prejudice.

As a matter of fact, this writer wishes to advance the view gleaned from visits to numerous countries all over the globe, that virtually all nations foster a national pride. Here are just three examples: Spain, where Día de la Raza (“Day of the Race”) is celebrated; Argentina, characterized by the tango; and New Zealand, known by its Kia ora! greeting (“be well”).

Furthermore, countries like France have made known its unsuccessful attempts to diminish the use of American jargon in an effort to assert the character of its lovely French language.

In a world that is gradually shrinking into a global village — with the rapidity of travel and technological advances in communication — we interact with perceived lesser mortals as world citizens.

Perhaps if we learn to respect the ethnic identities of diverse people in our midst, we may yet discover that we live in a very beautiful world.

Carpe diem! Seize the day and enjoy the fullness of life.

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