When you get into a discussion online about race, you can count on the people who wallow in vanilla flavored privilege for fun and profit letting the word 'racism' flow freely from their lips. Sociology 101 defines racism as prejudice plus power, be it economic, social, police, military or political, used by the majority group or members of it to retard the progress of a minority group.
But those peeps who are the beneficiaries of WP try to flip the script and project their BS onto the people they oppress. They attempt to deliberately confuse prejudice and racism by arguing that racism is an INDIVIDUAL failing.
The vanilla flavored privileged refuse to acknowledge or as they angrily hiss at minority groups, refuse to take responsibility for their actions.
Prejudice is individual. Racism is taking your individual prejudices, combining them with political, economic or military/police power to use to oppress a minority group and retard their sociopolitical progress.
As I see it, in their minds, the privileged person's definition of racism is any comments, opinions, statements of facts or analysis of historical situations by people of color or progressive whites that criticizes or calls the continued hegemony of white males into question.
So when the conservative movement and the predominately monoracial GOP went 'nucular' over an out of context cherry picked comment by Judge Sonia Sotomayor, that definition of 'racism' was ensconced in their right-wing hive minds.
In a 2001 University of California-Berkeley speech, she stated, "I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn't lived that life."The vanilla flavored privileged see it as racism, I see it as stating the obvious.
How many times throughout United States history have privileged while male judges ruled in favor of corporations, the wealthy, the police, conservative governments making power grabs, against civil rights for minorities, the poor, unions, et cetera?
The cumulative weight of evidence of atrocious rulings such as Plessy v. Ferguson, The Dred Scott Decision, Korematsu v. US have been more often than not on the wrong side of the moral arc of the universe than they have on the justice bending side.
So yes, a Latina justice on the Supreme Court, in a case involving a Latino/a or on any other issues, would probably depending on the facts of the case look at it in a different way than a privileged white male justice would before applying the applicable legal statutes in rendering their decision. So would a Black male or female justice who isn't a right wing sellout, as the late Justice Thurgood Marshall proved time and time again.
And that's all good in the Supreme Court hood to me.
There has only been one ethnic group that has had the power in world history to retard the progress of others, and they don't hesitate to use it.
I have to laugh at the proposition that the 'rule of law' is sacred to the vanilla flavored privileged since they have selective memory about the numerous times they blatantly broke it or ignored it when it suited their purposes.
So spare me the faux conservaoutrage anytime that a person of color calls out prejudicial and racist behavior.
