Does race really “matter” to Justice Sotomayor?

The Volokh Conspiracy ^ | October 3, 2014 | David Berstein

[right-wing agnostic]

Judging from her dissent in the Schuette case last term, the answer is, “only when the concept can be manipulated to support her political agenda.”

Here’s an excerpt from my Cato Supreme Court Review article on that case.

Perhaps the most notable thing about Sotomayor’s opinion, however, is that, as Walter Olson puts it, she “gerrymanders the word race itself a way convenient to her purposes, using it to include Hispanics (who, as official forms remind us, ‘can be of any race’), while breathing not one word about Asian-Americans.”….

It’s bizarre to treat Hispanics but not Asians as a racial group. Hispanic Americans (like Americans in general) can be descended from Europeans, indigenous people, Africans, Asians, or any combination of those. The idea that a white American whose father is of German descent and whose mother is a Chilean immigrant of Italian ancestry is in the same “racial” category as a Peruvian immigrant of pure Incan descent and an Afro-Costa Rican immigrant should offend the common sense of anyone who takes a moment to think about it…. While there are many white Hispanics—not just Hispanics with only partial Hispanic ancestry, but descendants of Spanish and Portuguese immigrants, descendants of Europeans who settled in Latin America, Sephardic Jews, and so on—there are by definition no “white Asians.”

[WayneS]

I get the impression that little ELSE maters to her.

[WayneS]

...matters...

[Paladin2]

Justice Sotomayor?

The White Hispanic Heterophobe?

[WayneS]

Race matters to a young person addressed by a stranger in a foreign language, which he does not understand because only English was spoken at home.

I know. I HATE it when people speak to me in Swedish...

[Paladin2]

[WayneS]

“Race matters” is an odd rallying cry from a justice who for all intents and purposes treats Asian Americans as indistinct from whites. Nor does she provide a rationale for limiting the scope of her concerns for minority groups to African Americans and Hispanics.

There is no rationale. She is, quite simply, a racist.

[WayneS]

Excellent!

[Paladin2]

[chesley]

I’m just glad ther is a burning Hell for these people if they don’t come to Jesus.

[Arthur McGowan]

Asians are smarter than Whites. Therefore, Asians are not a race.

What could be more obvious?