New America Media, Commentary, Roberto Dr. Cintli Rodriguez June 2, 2009

The president’s nomination of Judge Sonia Sotomayor to the U.S. Supreme Court has come during a most awkward time in the history of U.S. journalism, which many analysts claim is in serious decline, if not on life support.

What her nomination clearly shows us is that what this nation needs is more incisive journalism, not less. Yet, to be sure, the rise of right-wing media, which include FOX News and virtually all the known right-wing radio talk show hosts, is the antithesis of journalism.

Their coverage of the Sotomayor nomination points to the need for honest debate, not simply on the issues of race, but on the right wing’s aversion to truth. It also points to the right wing’s pompous beliefs, on every topic, including affirmative action, that their positions are “American.”

Extremist politicos Newt Gingrich and Tom Tancredo, both of whom have zero credibility but are stars of right-wing media, have led the charge that Sotomayor is a racist. They have been joined by the usual wingnuts: Rush Limbaugh, Gordon Liddy, Glenn Beck, Pat Buchanan, Lou Dobbs, to name a few. Even Juan Williams of NPR, has parroted the claim that Sotomayor’s (out-of-context) statements are racist. The fact that the nation’s discussion centers on whether she is a racist or not -– or that she is an “affirmative action” pick (Buchanan) -– points to both the power of the wingnuts and also to the virtual impotence, or complicity, of mainstream media.

Historically, mainstream journalists have been taught that critical analysis constitutes injecting subjectivity into their reporting.

All this brouhaha is based on the Sotomayor statement that the experiences of a Latina might allow her to make better judgment in court than a white male. Her detractors say that if a white male had made similar statements he would have been automatically disqualified. They conveniently ignore the fact that the Supreme Court has been virtually all-white for most of the nation’s history. It also ignores the fact that throughout U.S. history, white males have generally not been subjected to apartheid discrimination and segregation, let alone extermination, slavery, forced removals, extra-legal brutality and false imprisonment.

The charges against Sotomayor have a familiar ring. Staunch segregationists used to charge that Martin Luther King, Jr. was both un-American and a racist. President Ronald Reagan institutionalized that kind of thinking in defense of South Africa’s apartheid regime. For him, Nelson Mandela was a terrorist, while the outlaw South African regime constituted a “democratic ally.”

Such thinking was also “normalized” during the affirmative action debate; those who attempted to dismantle the vestiges of racial discrimination were deemed “racists” or “reverse racists,” or communists by those working to maintain it. A reverse racist is precisely what Limbaugh labeled both Sotomayor and President Obama.

Those doing this labeling have well understood the nation’s changing political climate; they could no longer campaign as the defenders of white racial supremacy. Instead, they generally cloaked their views under the conservative-Republican mantle and wrapped themselves in the American flag.

They also knew that to win a debate required further subverting the nation’s political language. These same “patriots” began to reinterpret MLK Jr.’s quote about the dream of a color-blind society. In public, they gladly accepted the “dream” without accepting the societal responsibility of dismantling and remedying centuries of institutional racism and discrimination in this country.

While the majority of Americans can see through the false arguments and the “clever” subversion of the political language by these so-called patriots, this does not hold true for the mainstream media. As we are seeing with Sotomayor, all it takes is a handful of “extremists” to control and shape the media debate.

Perhaps the only upside is that Americans can now clearly see that the politics of Gingrich and Tancredo are the same as that of Limbaugh, Liddy, Beck, Buchanan and Dobbs. These pundits who daily rant against “illegal aliens,” and who daily clamor on the need to fortify the U.S.-Mexico border, are quoted as credible sources by the mainstream press. They are generally the same ones who promote the politics of fear and hate, who believe in the use of torture, and who also believe that the United States is endowed with the God-given right to conduct permanent war against the rest of the world.

Truthfully, who can discern a difference between these right-wing fanatics and the positions of mainline conservatives within the Republican Party?

Rodriguez, who writes for New America Media, including Arizona Watch, can be reached at: XColumn@gmail.com

The original article can be viewed at New American Media.

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By Richard Cohen

Tuesday, June 2, 2009

With the nose of a trained columnist, I detect the whiff of elitism-cum-racism emanating from the nomination <http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/05/26/AR2009052601313.html>  of Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court. The whiff does not come — Rush Limbaugh and Newt Gingrich <http://arktype/read.php?id=37551&yr=2009&pass=read&xsl=read.xsl&bdysrch=sonia!sotomayor!limbaugh>  notwithstanding — from Sotomayor’s own statements; nor does it come from her controversial decision upholding race-based affirmative action. It comes, instead, from the general expression of wow about her background. Imagine, someone from the projects is a success!

“Nobody expects you to be chosen someday for the Supreme Court when your father was a welder with a third-grade education,” wrote <http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1901348,00.html>  Richard Lacayo in Time magazine. He is right — the expectations are all otherwise. You can see them on display in many of the reports about Sotomayor’s background. She was raised in public housing projects. She grew up in the Bronx, which the average person must think of as a particularly nasty part of Mumbai, and she is, finally and incriminatingly, Puerto Rican. This is all, apparently, very hard to imagine.

It once was not. It was generally recognized that being poor was not necessarily destiny. This was the gift of liberalism, especially New York City-style liberalism. The city would provide housing — about 400,000 now live in public housing — and it would provide good schools, and later, with good grades and the proper attitude, it would offer an excellent higher education: City College, Brooklyn College, Queens College and my own beloved Hunter College. The vast poor were the city’s oil fields. Any kid could be a gusher.

The New York Times recently supplied us <http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/31/nyregion/31projects.html>  with the names of some public housing alumni. They included Jay-Z, the rapper, and Wesley Snipes, the actor, and Mike Tyson, the brute. They also include Gary Ackerman, the wittiest person in Congress (sorry, Barney), and Lloyd C. Blankfein, who runs Goldman Sachs. Howard Schultz, who conceived the current Starbucks, came out of the projects and so did Ursula M. Burns, who is black and a woman and now is the CEO of Xerox. Copy that, please.

The projects also produced Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and the former Caryn Elaine Johnson, who performs as Whoopi Goldberg <http://www.biography.com/articles/Whoopi-Goldberg-9314384> . She lived in the Chelsea Houses. The Times mentioned them both. It did not mention, though, Millie Torado, who grew up in the Redfern projects and is an old, old family friend, or Joel Klein, the New York City school chancellor, who lived in Woodside Houses (Queens) and was told when he entered Columbia University that not all that much was expected of him. He disappointed by going on to Harvard Law School. No mention was made either of Ken Auletta, the media writer for the New Yorker. Obviously, there are far too many to list.

Inevitably, what these people have in common are one or two dedicated parents or guardians who knew that housing, public or otherwise, is where your body spends its time. Your mind can live anywhere. In the case of the young Sotomayor, it was between the covers of Nancy Drew novels and watching Perry Mason on television. She imagined she could become a lawyer. Now, maybe, a girl like her can imagine becoming a Supreme Court justice.

Franklin D. Roosevelt was a true American aristocrat, rich and landed, yet the poor never had a greater champion. The man who preceded him in the presidency, Herbert Hoover, was raised in poverty yet forgot who he had been. He feared government welfare programs would sap the poor of their industry. It’s always dangerous to generalize. It is impossible to predict.

I do not agree with Sotomayor on the New Haven affirmative-action case <http://www.slate.com/id/2219037/>  and have written a column <http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/05/04/AR2009050402945.html>  saying why. But if it can be said she sided with minorities over white men, recognize that two of the New Haven firefighters unjustly affected on the basis of race are Hispanic. But I agree with what Sotomayor meant when she said in her famous 2001 speech <http://berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/2009/05/26_sotomayor.shtml> , “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.” Yes, in some cases. That is the virtue of diversity. You’re instructed by your own life.

Sotomayor’s life instructs her that the projects are chock-full of people like her. They are propelled by the greenest of fuels, their indomitable parents, and they are nourished by wonderful teachers, determined principals — and the opportunities provided by a generous government. Sotomayor’s coming out of the projects is no miracle. The tragedy is that we think it is.

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