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![\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/02\/fe-logo-13-feb-09-250-px1.jpg?resize=250%2C133&ssl=1\" "\\"Fe")
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Watching the Senate Judiciary Committee’s confirmation hearings for Sonia Sotomayor as Associate Justice on the Supreme Court, these last\u0412\u00a0four\u0412\u00a0days have been an exercise in keeping the lid\u0412\u00a0on a\u0412\u00a0giddiness and\u0412\u00a0rage so perfectly blended that the feelings could almost be bottled up and sold as an emulsion. As a woman of color, I\u0412\u00a0watched another one rise up to the highest court of the land because she worked hard and deserved it. This was and is the original intent of Affirmative Action, and an original ideal of the founding of this republic — however imperfectly executed.\u0412\u00a0<\/p>\n
Affirmative Action is at the heart of the\u0412\u00a0confirmation\u0412\u00a0proceedings that took place this last week in the Senate Judiciary Committee, and the exchange of fire between Maddow and Buchanan. I cannot help but think of myself and the millions of other young men, women, boys and girls who walked through the gates of affirmative action in a land that, as Mr. Buchanan\u0412\u00a0says, “white men built”, and succeeded.<\/p>\n
Now Mr. Buchanan is right, in a way.\u0412\u00a0We do live in a world that\u0412\u00a0through rich white men’s largesse we have been allowed to breathe. That\u0412\u00a0they can\u0412\u00a0let you in and can kick you out in\u0412\u00a0a wink and a slap on your cute brown ass.\u0412\u00a0That has been the way of things since this country began. But Buchanan believes the surface of what we’ve been told about our country\u0412\u00a0and accepts the cartoon of our history,\u0412\u00a0not\u0412\u00a0our history’s\u0412\u00a0reality. The real people who built this country are invisible to people like Buchanan. By and large we’ve existed, survived and flourished under, around and in spite of this. And by the “we”, I mean men and women, poor, and from all over the planet. From kidnapped Africans in the 17th century,\u0412\u00a0impoverished, oppressed Europeans near the end of the 19th century, Asians, Central and Latin Americans in the 20th.<\/p>\n
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It is because of Affirmative Action that a lotus like Sonia Sotomayor could have been found on the streets of the Bronx and rise to the highest court in the land. And that is probably why people like Pat Buchanan are terrified enough to call a program providing equal opportunity to people not like him –\u0412\u00a0watching them prosper to positions above him as\u0412\u00a0“evil”.<\/p>\n
The\u0412\u00a0white, old and mostly Southern Republicans\u0412\u00a0questioning the integrity and validity of experience<\/strong><\/a> of a distinguished judge with 17 years on the federal bench\u0412\u00a0— more experience than Chief Justice John\u0412\u00a0Roberts, was insulting but not surprising. They questioned whether or not she came up the judicial ladder on her merits or through affirmative action.\u0412\u00a0Whether she was capable of making decisions for the highest court without bias for her race or gender.\u0412\u00a0Questioned\u0412\u00a0whether she was able to\u0412\u00a0suppress her\u0412\u00a0empathy<\/em> with plaintiffs (of color) to\u0412\u00a0adjudicate fairly, adhering to the law without prejudice, saying in effect, when placed in a position of public responsibility, she could not be trusted to\u0412\u00a0be “disloyal” to her own race and culture while doing her job.<\/p>\n
But she responded in kind, as befitting a person who earned the respect she got by deflecting the blows they tried to hurl with\u0412\u00a0a coolness that indicated her years on the bench. She did it on her own in the white man’s world,\u0412\u00a0obeying the\u0412\u00a0rules, even legally interpreting the rules. Ironically, her testimony\u0412\u00a0provided a matronly appeal calming the fears of some of these poor little rich white men\u0412\u00a0sitting behind their microphones on the dais.\u0412\u00a0\u0412\u00a0And they couldn’t rattle her for a second.<\/p>\n
The confirmation hearings provided a useful lesson on the ritual of preserving white male privilege — what it has been the last two hundred years. But in those senators’ questions and in Mr. Buchanan’s reactions on Maddow’s show, the underlying fear is that of losing control of what they’ve known. With an African-American President in the White House and the first Latina justice on the Supreme Court, the world is moving forward without them.<\/p>\n
The fading lights in the eyes of the old, rich white men don’t just come from the\u0412\u00a0eclipses<\/strong><\/a> that sandwich these proceedings. They\u0412\u00a0are the dimming of\u0412\u00a0the glimmering lights of a world they thought they still owned, but now and in the future, have to share.<\/p>\n
Yours and truly,<\/p>\n
Fe Bongolan<\/strong>
\nSan Francisco<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Dear Friend and Reader: Before we begin, let’s take a few moments to watch this exchange between Rachel Maddow and Pat Buchanan. It comes on right after President Obama’s speech at the NAACP, which is a perfect prelude. Watching the Senate Judiciary Committee’s confirmation hearings for Sonia Sotomayor as Associate Justice on the Supreme Court, … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"generate_page_header":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[1527,29,1788,52,1531,1530,1529,1528],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16460"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16460"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16460\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16460"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16460"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16460"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}