[Peace-discuss] Race & class

[Jenifer Cartwright]

As I recall, one of the reasons given for Sotomayor's nomination is that she was raised in the projects. Here's the wiki entry on that and a bit more (the law is less stressful than detective work????):
"Sotomayor was raised a Catholic[3] and grew up among other Puerto Ricans who settled in the South Bronx and East Bronx; she self-identifies as a "Nuyorican".[12] At first, she lived in a South Bronx tenement.[16] In 1957, the family moved to the well-maintained, racially and ethnically mixed, working-class Bronxdale Houses housing project[16][17][18] in Soundview (which has at times been considered part of both the East Bronx and South Bronx).[19][20][21] Her relative proximity to Yankee Stadium led to her becoming a lifelong fan of the New York Yankees.[22] The extended family got together frequently[16] and regularly visited Puerto Rico during summers.[23]Sonia was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes at age eight,[8][20] and began taking daily insulin injections.[24] Her father died of heart problems at age 42, when she was nine years old.[7][16] After this, she became fluent in English.[8] Sotomayor has said that she was first
 inspired by the strong-willed Nancy Drew book character, and then after her diabetes diagnosis led doctors to suggest a different career from detective, she was inspired to go into a legal career and become a judge by watching the Perry Mason television series.[8][22][24] She reflected in 1998: "I was going to college and I was going to become an attorney, and I knew that when I was ten. Ten. That's no jest."[22]"
 --Jenifer

--- On Thu, 5/13/10, John W. <jbw292002 at gmail.com> wrote:

From: John W. <jbw292002 at gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [Peace-discuss] Race & class
To: "C. G. Estabrook" <galliher at illinois.edu>
Cc: "peace discuss" <Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net>
Date: Thursday, May 13, 2010, 9:33 PM

A big part of this trend toward "diversity" is that the US Supreme Court has set it in stone, more or less, in terms of the legal structure.  Race and gender are protected classes and can elicit greater judicial scrutiny.  But with only a few very narrow exceptions, class (i.e., poverty) has never been considered by the Supreme Court to be a protected class worthy of any special legal protection.  Hence the saying by Anatole France is as pertinent in America as it is just about everywhere else:

 
"The law, in its majestic equality, forbids all men to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread - the rich as well as the poor."


 
On Thu, May 13, 2010 at 7:28 PM, C. G. Estabrook <galliher at illinois.edu> wrote:

 
Walter Benn Michaels, "Chav chic, and respect the poor" (Le Monde diplomatique):

   ...at a time when class difference in the US is as high as it’s been in the last hundred years, we’re being urged not to talk about what we never talk about (the inequalities produced by capitalism) and to talk lots more about what we always talk about (the inequalities produced by racism). Why?


   Well, one answer, of course, is the absolutely central role race and racism have played in our history. But it’s not a very good answer. The extraordinary inequalities of the last 30 years were not caused by racism and the catastrophic consequences of the current crash will not be alleviated by anti-racism. Indeed, these days anti-racism is as much a part of the problem as it is the solution. In every neoliberal society, the response to more inequality has been a call for more diversity because the core commitment of neoliberalism is that the only inequalities we need to do anything about are the ones produced by prejudice.


Walter Benn Michaels on anti-racism and diversity from "The Trouble With Diversity":

   We would much rather get rid of racism than get rid of poverty. And we would much rather celebrate cultural diversity than seek to establish economic equality.


   Indeed, diversity has become virtually a sacred concept in American life today. No one's really against it; people tend instead to differ only in their degrees of enthusiasm for it and their ingenuity in pursuing it.


   There’s no reason why people with a certain set of genes ought to be reading a certain set of books and thinking of those books as part of their heritage, or why, when they read some other set of books, they should think of them as part of someone else’s heritage. There are just the things we learn and the things we don’t learn, the things we do and the things we don’t do.


Benn Michaels, from The Chronicle of Higher Education:

   The argument is that anti-racism today performs at least one of the same functions that racism used to — it gives us a vision of our society as organized racially instead of economically — while adding another function — it insists that racism is the great enemy to be overcome. But all the anti-racism in the world won't take any money away from the rich and won't give any of it to the poor.


       ###


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