Sotomayor and Race in America

• • Latinos, racism, women

sotomayor_poster
(Cross-posted from http://www.newracialstudies.ucsb.edu/blog; Image from Presente.org)

The point is simple – clichéd, even.  But this simple point is so often denied in the United States of 2009.  The point is that race matters.  More specifically, race matters in how we interpret the Constitution of the United States. Debates over the constitution, especially at the Supreme Court, often willfully ignore or obscure the living and continued significance of race and racism.  The racial category you belong to plays a significant part in your life, if you’re an American, but American legal doctrine over the last several decades has refused to accept this fact.

Much as they did during the 1800s, today’s American courts allow entrenched racial discrimination to continue.  Throughout the 19th century and into the 20th, the courts used openly racist thinking to enforce policies like slavery, segregation, and whites-only citizenship.  Today, the courts use colorblindness to brush aside the reality of race and racism aside.  They overturn and restrict race-conscious policies designed to help alleviate racism faced exclusively by people who are identified as racial and ethnic minorities.  The courts can and should consider the impact of race when it deals with cases like voting rights, sentencing for drug use, law enforcement strategies that roundup random Muslim and Middle Eastern Americans, and the legality of practices and policies that drove nonwhite families into needlessly expensive “subprime” mortgages.  But instead, legal scholars (including a majority of the Supreme Court Justices) regularly disagree with the need even to recognize the mere existence of socially constructed race.

It’s not a coincidence that Judge Sonia Sotomayor’s nomination to the Supreme Court has already become contentious on the issue of race.  Sotomayor’s views on race and racism are becoming an object of public debate, thanks to coverage by national media (and thanks to well-publicized and ridiculous accusations that Sotomayor is herself “racist”).  Her rulings during her illustrious career show that while she’s hardly a radical, Sotomayor does favor a reality-based judiciary that understands and considers the impact of race and racism.  Because of this (and in part because she is Latina), she has already faced more questions about race than any other nominee to sit on the Supreme Court than anyone else in quite a long time.  And she hasn’t even sat for confirmation hearings yet.

Before Judge Sotomayor arrives on Capitol Hill for confirmation hearings, I’d like to take a moment to consider why legal scholars argue against recognizing the existence of race in America.  And then let’s consider how the next decade in legal thought might be influenced, thanks to Sotomayor’s presence on the Court.

The legal argument for denying reality – for denying the existence of race – is rooted in the colorblindness doctrine.  My understanding is that the basic idea behind colorblindness is: only by ignoring race can we truly transcend it.  You see, if we keep talking about race, if we acknowledge it, then we allow the race concept to persist.  So, what we should do is pretend that race isn’t there.  If we adjust our thinking to a colorblind world, then in time, reality will catch up with our thinking.  This kind of thinking has been proven wrong again and again, most thoroughly by Eduardo Bonilla-Silva.

The colorblindness perspective didn’t come out of nowhere.  Continue reading…

Von Brunn, Bad Apples, and Hegemonic Whiteness

• • racism, white supremacists

At least for this week, the nation focuses on the fatal shooting of officer Stephen T. Johns at the Holocaust museum on 10 June by alleged gunman, and white supremacist, James W. Von Brunn. Various networks such as CBS, Fox , MSNBC , and ABC provide palatable narratives on how such a distasteful act came to pass. For example, on NPR’s 12 June edition of “Tell Me More” Mark Potok, from the Southern Poverty Law Center and Randy Blazak, a sociology professor at Portland State University, spent the allotted radio time responding to host Michel Martins’ introductory question: “… there are plenty of people who seem to want to ‘talk trash,’ you know in leaflets, on websites, or whatever, but do we have any sense of why and when this crosses over into violence, is there some tipping point?”

Martin’s query seems to miss the point. Reflecting on the program and what is left unsaid helps us recognize how framing Von Brunn as the proverbial “bad apple” mystifies white supremacy in the everyday. Dominant folk wisdom tells us “racism” is something practiced by overt hate-mongers, therefore Von Brunn is merely a manifestation of a rare kind of white male exceptionalism. This portrayal creates a picture of social reality in which battle lines are clear: the racists are easily identified, victims sympathetically portrayed, and the difference between the “good” and “bad” whites is certain.

Such thinking can hold severe repercussions. For example, the Department of Homeland Security was recently pressured to backtrack on an April report which suggested (drawing from examples like Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh) that disaffected veterans with military training might serve as recruiting targets for right-wing, racist extremists. Many folks, particularly American Legion National Commander David K. Rehbein, took issue with the report’s insinuation that mainstream, patriotic, even military veteran, whites could become vehicles for white racial supremacy and domestic terrorism.

Moreover, in my doctoral work, “White Guise: The Common Trajectory of the White Antiracist & Racist Movement,” I found that white male racists and white male anti-racists relied on strikingly similar racist worldviews. (For example, both groups relied upon and often accepted views of blacks and Latin@s as culturally or biologically dysfunctional and dangerous, while simultaneously treating racial “otherness” as a kind of “epidermal capital” which served as a temporary alleviation of their collectively-shared understanding of whiteness as “bland,” “boring,” and “meaningless.”) These shared dimensions of what I call “hegemonic whiteness” were solidified in the nation’s founding as a white male supremacist state. And while these racialized and gendered violent foundations may be invisible to most, their influence is continuously present among varied contexts of predominantly white male groups like white supremacists, American Legion outposts, and even some “white antiracists.”

From this perspective, the logic motivating Von Brunn, evident in his book “Kill the Best Gentiles,” his website, and various leaflets such as the one he left in his car on 10 June that states “The Holocaust is a lie. Obama was created by Jews. Obama does what his Jew owners tell him to do,” is commensurate with the dominant logic and performances expected of white men across varied contexts. Whether acting on the impulse that whiteness is a stigmatized or even oppressed racial identity in need of (violent) defense, believing in the biological or cultural pathologies of non-whites, justifying segregation as “natural,” harboring a white-savor complex, or appropriating items and practices marked with the “exoticism” of racial “otherness”—the various dimensions of “hegemonic whiteness” are not limited to that of Von Brunn, and Von Brunn is anything but a “bad apple.”

~ Matthew W. Hughey is assistant professor of Sociology and African American Studies at Mississippi State University. He can be reached at MHughey@soc.msstate.edu. (See his blog at http://mississippilearning.wordpress.com/).