navyhusband

Sonia Sotomayor scares me.  A lot. It’s not her record, her accomplishments, or anything that she has done in her professional life to this point that scares me.  It’s her thought process that does, because it reflects one of the most important lessons I learned in high school.  That lesson is that while everyone is taught that for a white person to judge a minority by the color of their skin is wrong, there’s nothing wrong with a minority judging a white person by the color of theirs. And this lesson is being extrapolated today in the case of Sonia Sotomayor.  Sotomayor 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.“  Now, to be fair, this has been taken out of context by many people to fit their deep seeded needs to demean anyone different than them.  Later on in the same speech, she praises the 9 white men who ruled in the case of Brown V. Board of education.  But what doesn’t change about it is what was said, who said it, and the response people are giving because of it.  Reverse racism is something that many people are victims of, but is never reported.  Reverse racism, for those who have not figured it out yet, is the racism of minorities against whites.  I will never forget the day I learned the harsh truth of this.  Growing up in Hazel Dell, a small part of Vancouver, Washington, I had very little true contact with minorities.  That all changed when I hit 6th grade and was sent to a school in the middle of north Portland.  There I was introduced to a new spectrum of people, but still within my comfort zone as I was still a member of the majority, white people in other words.  But even then at that age I didn’t truly consider myself as white. I was something different, a subculture within that race if you will.  I was Irish.  Then I went to high school, De La Salle North Catholic, located on Delaware and Lombard, dead center in the ghetto of north Portland.  White people were not the majority here, not even close.  It was also here that I learned the meaning of being a minority, and the meaning of reverse racism.  I was at a school that prided itself on giving young men and women of color a better chance to go to college.  I spent two years listening to a basketball coach say “my best defender will be in my starting lineup” and four years watching the best defender on the team (who was actually lebonese, but had such light skin he was considered white) ride the bench.  I spent three years being told by a track coach that my abilities were nowhere near another african-american kids, even though I was the only male to reach state for our team.  I was told by a teacher that while they were OK with turning black history month into a month celebrating achievements by blacks, hispanics, and asians, it was racist of me to want one that celebrated blacks, hispanics, asians, and whites.  I spent four years watching clubs that were made to help young minority men and women, no whites allowed, and being told that a club doing the same thing for young white men and women was racist.  And what opened my eyes to everything was a single speaker our class had on Martin Luther King day in 2002, right after the bombing of the world trade center.  She was an african-american woman who started her speech off by asking all the white males to stand up.  She then proceeded to tell us that we were automatically racist and oppressive simply because of the fact that we were white and male, and that all white males had always been that way.  I took offense to this, seeing as how I had spent my entire life being told not to judge according to gender or skin color.  I took double offense to it because of my heritage.  The Irish, you see, were the ones given all the jobs deemed “too low” for slaves to do back in the 1800’s.  Here I was being told by somebody whose race had been superior to mine when hers was at its lowest, that myself and all of my ancestors, my family, were racists.  Telling somebody who’s future included a wife who is portugese, and who makes in one month more than I ever have in three, that I am oppressive.  I have found since then that the people who feel that they have had a harder time in life also have a greater sense of superiority and entitlement.  The african-american girl and the latina girl who grew up in the suburbs had none of the racial problems than the african-americans and latinos that grew up in the much less affluent areas.  African-american guys had less racial problems than african american girls.  They were all a study of opposites.  The ones who viewed themselves as the most opressed did the most opressing, and vice versa.  And this reasoning, to come full circle, is exactly why Sotomayor scares me.  Sotomayor comes from a background in which she views herself as the most opressed denominator.  Sotomayor’s comments reflect this to the fullest.  And to my way of thinking, the day that racism is universally accepted as being someone having a problem with another person based on the color of their skin, and not as a white person having a problem with a person of color based on the color of their skin, is the day someone like Sotomayor should be inducted into the supreme court

Trackback URI | Comments RSS