A wise Latina woman

Though Ta-Nehisi Coates disagrees, I think Sotomayor’s Very Controversial Statement here is correct:

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.

Coates objects mainly to the unified concept of whiteness underlying the statement, and that’s fair enough, but I think it misses an important point: non-whites and non-males really are in an advantageous position when it comes to discerning injustice. Everyone from outside the mainstream of culture has to learn to communicate with that mainstream, but they also have a critical distance due to their lack of “belonging” to it. And unless we’re to assume that she’s either an idiot or a straightforward racist, we have to recognize that Sotomayor’s “white male” refers to that mainstream, not to some actual person who’s supposed to fully embody it. Coates is right that no particular white male fully fits into the “white” category — but that’s exactly what makes it so powerful, what makes it a point of identification (rather than automatic identity).

Someone who has to figure out a way to negotiate her existence vis-a-vis an identity she knows for a fact she is never going to be able to fully assume is going to have a richer understanding of that identity than someone who’s anxiously trying to fill that role in the (false) belief that he actually can. On the other side, a white male fighting for justice on behalf of those excluded from the mainstream identity is going to have his work cut out for him fighting against the inertial force of that identity — he can always fall back on white privilege, and so if the fight fails, he will be “fine.” That makes a huge difference, a much more important and powerful difference than the differences in experience among males whose skin color or ethnic origin puts them in the category of “white.”