Ally Jacobs and Lisa Campbell prove Sotomayor was right
Here’s an interesting commentary today by Lainey Feingold in the BeyondChron blog, postulating that the actions of Ally Jacobs and Lisa Campbell that lead to the discovery of kidnap victim Jaycee Dugard support the controversial “wise Latina” statement made earlier this year (at UC Berkeley, no less) by then Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor.
But Jacobs’ hunch echos the one line of Justice Sotomayor’s stellar written and spoken record that was grist for the right-wing media mill: “I would hope,” Sotomayor said during a speech on the UC Berkeley campus in 2001, “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.” After several others in law enforcement let Garrido slip through their fingers, the richness of Jacobs’ and Campbell’s experience saved the life of a young woman and her two young daughters.
via BeyondChron: San Francisco’s Alternative Online Daily News.
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That is racist and sexist, unfortunately – as was Sotomayor’s comment:
Suppose that Sotomayor had instead said: “I would hope that a person who obtained their wisdom by overcoming prejudice and economic hardship would more often than not reach a better conclusion than someone who reached the bench through a life sheltered in privilege.”
*That* would make some sense and, indeed, that seems to be about what she actually meant. It’s not what she said. She instead referred the matter to ethnic heritage and sexual gender.
It gets even more confusing because it’s *completely true* that, statistically, a Latina woman who makes it to her stature is much more likely than a white male of similar stature to have overcome prejudice and economic hardship; the white male more likely to have grown up sheltered in privilege. She could have said that, too, but she didn’t. She could have said that a young Latina girl was more likely to encounter hardship but that she can work hard to overcome it and if she succeeds, the experience conveys upon her benefits – but she didn’t say that, not quite.
It makes a difference because what we’re really hopefully talking about in these conversations are distinctions of virtue and decadence – qualities or defects to which all people have access (or at least we so presume in a liberal democratic society). If it is wrong to racially profile Professor Gates, then it is just as wrong to racially profile Justice Scalia, so to speak.
What I find especially troubling about the treatment these officers are getting in the press is the growing sentiment that they cracked the case *because* they are women and *because* at least one of them is a mother.
If we take that line of reasoning to its logical conclusion we are forced to admit that parole officers and cops missed cracking the case for 18 years *because* they were male. The officers who screwed up for 18 years are innocent. They couldn’t help themselves. They didn’t choose to be born with XY chromosomes! Perhaps the courts should order Antioch to hire a certain number of women not because of any past pattern of discrimination, but simply as a social policy that only a woman is qualified for certain kinds of police work.
Obviously that would be absurd and obviously that is not what anybody (or, at least almost nobody) *intends* to say and yet that’s what the words people are choosing imply. (That is why Sotomayor justly received the criticism she did and, because we can give a reasonable reading to what she meant instead, why her confirmation is also just.)
There is another unfortunate aspect to this whole “only a woman and a mother could have cracked this csae” sentiment: it’s rude to the officers who cracked the case.
They were well trained, experienced, observant, thorough, and careful. Those are all virtues which they worked very hard to achieve. If a male had cracked the case, people would be saying “Wow! That’s a skilled cop!” Instead, we’re coming dangerously close to saying “Wow! Good thing there were some chicks on the job!”
-t