We are all Wise Latina Women now Tom Smith

Supreme Court nominee Judge Sonia Sotomayor reportedly remarked that she hoped as a wise Latina woman she would be able to make better decisions than a white man.  Others have wondered what people would think if a white man said something like that.  This is a good question.  I would wonder what a white man was doing thinking he was a Latina woman.  But then I would realize, what would I, as a white male man know about what it would be like to walk a mile in the very fashionable footwear of a white man who thought he was a Latina woman? Very little indeed, I should think.  And who would know how wise this man was? Perhaps he would be wiser than us all. Or maybe not.

The first Hispanic Justice designate not counting Sephardic Jews could have said "I am woman, hear me roar" and I think we can all agree that would have been worse.  "Wise Latina woman" is at least a curious phrase.  It makes me think there is some ethnic stereotype at play I am not clued in on.  Is a WLW different or the same as a wise white woman?  Do they know about different herbs or something?  I also must dissent from the implication, if there is one, that white men somehow fall short in the wisdom department.  There is Moses, assuming he was not Sephardic, or rather, pardon me, even if he was. There is Ronald Reagan, Gandalf and Dumbledore, just to name a few, all quite white and quite wise. Trying to come up with the name of a wise Latina woman, the only one I can think of is our Lady of Guadalupe, and I'm not sure she should count, since Hillary Clinton didn't even know who she was.  No doubt I could come up with more were I not a white man, or if I were a wise white man.  But if I were a wise white man, I would probably not be writing this post. Nevertheless, one does wonder, would a wise Latina woman even make the claim that a wise Latina woman could make a better decision than a white man?  So even if this statement is true, might Judge Sotomayor's making it suggest she is not one of them? Food for thought, indeed.

Still you have to admit we have all known people who were so white you really had to doubt their wisdom.  Many of us knew clueless preppies in college, whose idea of diversity was having both a metal and a wood tennis racket.  But I sort of like the idea of a clueless preppy on the Supreme Court, as long as he or Muffy were sufficiently learned in the law.  I am not trying to be racist here, I just think he or she would be kind of cute.  There was a Justice White on the Supreme Court but he was neither clueless nor a preppy, nor cute in the least, though I think you would have to concede that he was white.