Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor, "The Wise Latina" and Puerto Rican Pride

Quoted via The Root:

Whenever I read Justice Sonia Sotomayor's now-famous 2001 lecture, “A Latina Judge's Voice,” I think of my maternal grandmother's words at the kitchen table: "¡Ay nena, no tienes que decir que eres negra!" Yes, my Mama Cristina had a thing about my choosing to say I was black.

My mother is a white woman born of a Puerto Rican mestiza and a second-generation Puerto Rican criollo. She happened to have married a black man from a few towns over and spawned the two negritos among my grandmother's mass of grandchildren. And this one negrita grandchild decided one day she didn't want the color of her skin nuanced to the people who would ask her blond, green-eyed mother, "So who's the child with you?" Calling myself "negra" back when I was still a child was a very deliberate choice. Sonia Sotomayor reminds me of that choice when she writes: “In this time of great debate we must remember that it is not political struggles that create a Latino or Latina identity. I became a Latina by the way I love and the way I live my life.”

Princeton professor Melissa Harris-Lacewell brilliantly contextualized the politics of humiliation that we all witnessed during the Senate Judiciary Committee hearings. The unfortunate spectacle of bigotry in which every single white Republican male senator participated, especially the "pro-Sotomayor" Lindsey Graham, was absolutely about putting the “wise Latina" in her place. Yet the point I made to Melissa, Joan Walsh and others during an intense online discussion of the matter goes a bit beyond the fact that these senators were testing her ability to bear up under public degradation as a test of worth because she's Latina. Sotomayor was vilified for choosing to call herself a woman of color, a proud Puerto Rican, a wise Latina. more