Geroge Will is a white dude. There is nothing wrong with that. Hell, I’m a white dude. Being a white dude is pretty cool and I have no complaints. Up until this January, every president in the history of his country had been a white dude. We get to run stuff and order affairs to our liking. It’s always been that way. In the entire history of this country, we’ve only had two women ever serve on the Supreme Court. Two women and two blacks…every other Justice in American history has been a white dude. And the white dudes who have made and interpreted our laws have done a pretty good job, for the most part. But, occasionally we get clunkers like this:
“We consider the underlying fallacy of the plaintiff’s argument to consist in the assumption that the enforced separation of the two races stamps the colored race with a badge of inferiority. If this be so, it is not by reason of anything found in the act, but solely because the colored race chooses to put that construction upon it.”- Justice Henry Billings Brown, writing for the majority in Plessy v. Ferguson
Plessy was one-eighth black, so he had to ride in the colored car on the train. White dudes on the Supreme Court (who were, as they supposed, zero-eighths black) had a striking lack of empathy, don’t you think? Which brings me to George Will:
Her ethnicity aside, Sotomayor is a conventional choice. The court will remain composed entirely of former appellate court judges. And like conventional liberals, she embraces identity politics, including the idea of categorical representation: A person is what his or her race, ethnicity, gender, or sexual preference is, and members of a particular category can be represented — understood, empathized with — only by persons of the same identity.
Democrats compounded confusion by thinking of the court as a representative institution. Such personalization of the judicial function subverts the rule of law.
What Monsieur Will calls ‘personalization of the judicial function’ most people call ‘perspective.’ White dudes have one perspective. Everyone else has another. I don’t think liberals want to see a diverse race and gender Court because they expect those Justices to dole out favors like machine politicians. They want a diverse race and gender Court because a court of white dudes tends to lack perspective into what it was like to grow up in South Bronx Puerto Rican public housing during the 1950’s and 1960’s. They don’t know what it’s really like in the ghetto, with the payday lenders and various other ‘legalized’ scams people develop to keep people down. Believe it or not, a Supreme Court Justice must often exercise judgment as to intent, harm, causation, and other matters that are not detailed in statutory language. And, in weighing those things, perspective matters. What is the human cost of segregated public facilities? Nine white dudes are probably not the right panel to ask.
Whether you call it perspective or empathy, the modern conservative movement has now declared this non-white dude point of view to be verboten. Here’s my question for Mr. Will. Isn’t the whole premise of your argument that you don’t need blacks and latinos or women on the Court because White dudes are perfectly capable of understanding their concerns under the law? Isn’t that what we call ’empathy’? You’re saying white dudes have empathy, but then you’re saying that they shouldn’t have it. A bunch of white dudes without empathy gave us Plessy v. Ferguson, which gave us Jim Crow. Do you see why we keep accusing your party of being racist? Is it that hard to see why? Why do you think that is, Mr. Will?
