June 10, 2009
This oped by Thomas Sowell, a black conservative from the Hoover Institution, really pissed me off, almost as much as news of the ascendancy of modern niggers in Esquire did. Sowell believes that struggle and empathy should have no bearing on SCOTUS nominee Sonia Sotomayor's suitability for the bench. "But the cold fact is that [empathy] is a poisonous doctrine for any judge, much less a justice of the Supreme Court," he says. "That kind of empathy would for all practical purposes repeal the 14th Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, which guarantees 'equal protection of the laws' to all Americans."

I cannot, for the life of me, understand black/brown people who live in the denial and/or self hate of judicial conservatism. I think of Dred Scott, I think of the separate but equal doctrine, and I would no sooner rest on the merits of American justice than lose my head by it. And to use the 14th Amendment, guaranteeing equal protection to black/brown people, as an argument against an empathetic Latina Supreme Court justice seems hopelessly absurd.

I don't know what these Sowell-type folks are really after -- maybe a pat on the back for having beaten the system against all odds, by their own merits? As if the rest of us choose to remain mired in the murky waters of inequity, injustice, and Katrina. Truth is, I think injustice is so real you can reach out and touch it with your hand, but that certainly doesn't make it any easier to fix. And I really hope with Sotomayor we get a little closer to an understanding of what that fix could look like. She may not change the world, but she'll be a hell of a sight better on the bench than that damn Clarence Thomas.