We are entering a strange time in this country. We have elected a black President who appointed a black Attorney General and who has now nominated a Supreme Court candidate who is of Puerto Rican heritage. One would think that this proves racism is gone and we can all advance to the future as allies. What is happening ? This essay says what I think, and I wonder how many others are starting to think about this.
Michelle Obama describes the fear that Sotomayor felt at Princeton — and its lasting effects to this day — and then compares it, of course, to Michelle’s own ambiguous feelings toward the same Princeton campus (cf. Michelle’s thesis for the details), that one is willing to put up with for the education and prestige it gave, but does not really like for the presence of apparently so many stuck-up, rich, preppy kids and their ubiquitous exclusive campus culture.
Sotomayor was a radical activist at Princeton, advocating Puerto Rican independence, among other causes. Puerto Rican independence gained 2% of the vote in elections in Puerto Rico. I think that makes it a fringe position.
The Princeton thesis was written at a time of heated political debate over Puerto Rico’s future. Beginning in 1974 and continuing for nearly a decade, the paramilitary group Fuerzas Armadas de Liberación Nacional, or FALN, carried out bombings in the U.S. to push for independence for the island.
Ms. Sotomayor described the inconclusive debate over Puerto Rico, even after a 1967 plebiscite in which 60% of voters agreed with Mr. Muñoz Marin in favoring commonwealth status.
She had never lived in Puerto Rico, of course, but that is typical of left wing radicals.
Many Americans were terrified about our first year in college. Some left farms for sophisticated urban environments and were lost; others were the first in their families to go to colleges, and so on. The Ivy League is by definition snobbish to all outside its traditional insular orbit, whether white, black, brown, country folk, foreigners, etc. But by predicating such common discomfort on their own race and gender, Ms. Obama and Judge Sotomayor deprecate a universal human experience, and instead claim it as something unique to identity politics.
Some of us left home at age 18, traveled 2500 miles and knew no one when we started college in a strange city with very little money, no car and very limited experience of the world. The Ivy League may be snobbish but it can’t have been much more snobbish than 1956 USC.
Once more we see the schizophrenia of affirmative action, diversity, and identify politics — the university is both obliged to select students on the basis, at least in part, of race, class, and gender, but then almost immediately faulted for a climate that, in the eye of the recipient, stigmatizes those to whom it gives unusual consideration (what is the answer? — no race/class/gender consideration at all?; constant race/class/gender consideration that begins at admission and continues through graduation?; damned if you do, damned if you don’t?).
Affirmative action has had very mixed results for many beneficiaries. The anger of the well fed and prosperous members of Reverend Wright’s church suggests that the recipients of such beneficence are not always grateful for the support. It seems to feed resentment. Now, those people seem to be in charge of the government.
And the remedy for feeling separate at elite colleges is apparently to reemphasize separatism based on identification with the tribe (e.g., Justice Sotomayor’s senior thesis, like that once written by Ms. Obama, is predicated on ethnic and racial grievance).
The irony of the demands for racially segregated dormitories never seems to occur to the new generation whose parents and grandparents fought segregation.
All this should disturb Democrats because it fuels a general and growing perception (cf. Sotomayor’s white-male references, Eric Holder’s “cowards” remark, the serial Obama apologies abroad, the confusion about America being an important Muslim nation, etc.) among the public that something very strange is going on — a sort of generic anger being expressed at the highest levels of government that seems fueled by long past resentments against a perceived establishment that at times apparently is to roughly characterized as white, or white male, or rich, or Christian, or something other than poor, of color, or of female?
One would have thought with the presidency, or nomination to the Supreme Court, or with the office of Attorney General, or First Lady, such hurt feelings and old grievances might wane; but instead the resentment seems to be ubiquious, and growing, and the lectures will be with us for the next four years in almost every imaginable circumstance. If the administration is not careful, millions of Americans are going to begin feeling that they are caricatured pretty much as those once were in rural Pennsylvania.
I even feel a bit of this in the gay marriage arguments. It is not enough to have all the old grievances corrected. They must move on to new grievances and keep pushing the majority until the good will is exhausted. It will be a long four years.
More about Sotomayor here.
In her thesis, Sotomayor punctuated her radical nationalism by referring to the United States Congress as the “North American Congress” or the “mainland Congress.” At least she didn’t call it the “running dog imperialist Congress.” As Princeton’s former president William Bowen says, she was always respectful.
Always respectful. Now that she is about become a member of the “North American Supreme Court.”
Good piece, Mike.
“…Ms. Obama and Judge Sotomayor deprecate a universal human experience, and instead claim it as something unique to identity politics.”
This seems common on the left, take something than many others experience, that is not that unique but rather common and make it their own cross to bear. And it works.