Conservative criticism of Sonia Sotomayor’s Supreme Court nomination reflects the nation’s struggle with race and ethnicity in politics.
From the time President Barack Obama introduced Sonia Sotomayor as his U.S. Supreme Court nominee to the day of her confi rmation as an associate justice, conservative criticism of her nomination remained vocal and unrelenting.
While some conservatives focused on Sotomayor’s positions on gun rights and abortion, many seemed fixated with her comments regarding race and ethnicity. Their opposition, which continued up to the moment of the 68-31 Senate vote last month, appeared to be based on the notion that her ethnic background precluded her from judicial objectivity.
This might have been a typical conservative outcry to a left-of-center court nominee, but many scholars say the fi ght over Sotomayor is indicative of a larger struggle over the politics of identity. They say the Sotomayor nomination, on the heels of the election of the country’s first Black president, appears to be an attempt by White conservatives to control the discourse on race and ethnicity.
Dr. Ronald Jackson, associate dean in the College of Media and chair of the African- American Studies department at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, says some of the GOP senators who opposed Sotomayor’s nomination backed her appointment as a federal judge under President George H.W. Bush in 1992. Jackson says those same lawmakers might have felt pressure from conservative constituents wary of nominating a Latina to the nation’s highest court.
“It could be argued that people are nervous,” says Jackson, whose research has focused on the construction of Whiteness. “The whole confi rmation turned into a spectacle.”
Media coverage of the comments and discussions didn’t place histories of race and issues such as affi rmative action into proper context, University of Minnesota journalism professor Dr. Catherine Squires says.
