Before she was a Supreme Court justice, in 2001 already, Sonya Sotomayor claimed that a “wise Latina” judge would tend to “reach a better conclusion than a white male.” Now we’re hearing this prejudiced sentiment from many quarters. The latest is from Joe Biden’s (handlers’) State Department, where appointees have decried “white male dominated” diplomacy as leading to “systemic racism.” They essentially assert that minorities and women would do a better job.
As the Washington Free Beacon reports:
United Nations ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield and other senior State Department staffers bring a fixation on race to diplomacy and their criticisms of America’s history and internal agency policies. Multiple senior State Department officials have accused white diplomats of being complicit in systemic racism and said the agency should prioritize the hiring of women and minorities. Gina Abercrombie-Winstanley, the Biden-appointed diversity czar for the State Department, took issue with the “white male-dominated” national security sector in a December podcast and said, “As a woman and as a minority, I was probably better prepared than my male colleagues, certainly my European-American colleagues.” She defended her remarks in a statement to the Washington Free Beacon.
“One of the challenges leaders face in the Department as elsewhere is ensuring everyone feels welcomed and valued all the time,” Abercrombie-Winstanley said. “The Department’s rigorous entry process ensures America is represented by highly capable diplomats. I believe women and minorities gain these skills early because we must in order to be successful within our own greater American society.”
The Beacon then points out that the Biden administration has already infused State Department polices with Critical Race Theory, which is essentially “Whitey is Always Wrong and Everything American is Racist” theory.
You can decide, however, whether Abercrombie-Winstanley’s claim that she was “certainly” better prepared for diplomacy than her “European-American colleagues” is self-refuting. Some may say, after all, that it’s not exactly in the nature of a diplomatic comment. (Others may argue that her behavior during actual diplomacy would be different.) But the philosophy underpinning it certainly is self-refuting.
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That philosophy also was old even when Sotomayor made her remark. In fact, it’s such an old mistake that it was already quite stale when then-publisher of the New York Times, Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr., said in 1993 that we “can no longer offer our readers a predominantly white, straight, male vision of events and say that we, as journalists, are doing our job.”
(Sulzberger said nothing about abandoning the genocide-enabler vision, which was well displayed when the Times covered up the Holodomor genocide and downplayed the Holocaust. But, hey, “baby steps,” I guess.)
But if you thought journalists’ job was to bring people not a “vision” but the Truth, well, the leftists in question have no idea what that is — by their own tacit admission.
The folly in question here was evident in something Sotomayor said in 2001 just before uttering her “wise Latina” line. “Justice O’Connor has often been cited as saying that a wise old man and wise old woman will reach the same conclusion in deciding cases,” she stated, during a University of California School of Law at Berkeley speech. “I am not so sure … that I agree with the statement. First, as Professor Martha Minnow has noted, there can never be a universal definition of wise.”
Actually, there not only can be — there is. Wisdom is “knowledge of what is true or good.” Of course, Sotomayor and other leftists would counter that “true” and “good” are also matters of perspective. These ideologues are, as (lamentably) too many Westerners today are, moral relativists. They’re also peddling infantile, self-refuting pseudo-philosophy.
We learn as children about adjectives and their comparative and superlative forms. For example, “good, better, best.” Well, if “wise” is relative because “good” is relative, than “better” and “best” are also relative. If so, then it’s silly to say that you, as a minority female, were “better prepared than” your “European-American colleagues.”
It’s also silly to say that you, as a “Latina” judge, would “reach a better conclusion than a white male.” For “better” then just reflects a perspective. If everything is relative, shades of gray, then your concept of “better” is relative, too.
So what is these leftists’ yardstick for “good” that enables them to say what’s “better”? As I’ve pointed out before, the ultimate result of relativism is often to make everything relative to oneself. It’s very self-centered, really. But if you believe there’s no Truth (absolute, universal, and eternal by definition), why not deify the self in the sense of becoming your own source for “good”? After all, if what those antiquated thinkers call “morality” is just a construct authored by man, why defer to other men? You may as well do what feels right to you, what satisfies your wants, your psychological needs, your ego.
This relativism also helps explain today’s racial pandering. One result of believing there’s no Truth, the objective, is to treat everything as subjective. You then may conclude that there’s a “white perspective,” “black perspective,” “Hispanic perspective,” etc. and that races can only be given what they need by making their perspective into policy. This guarantees division, of course. For what’s being said is that there’s no objective universal to unite people by virtue of being universally true.
To be clear, much of what drives today’s anti-white wave is just Caucaphobia and power lust, base motivations both. Yet the aforementioned pseudo-philosophical foundation influences people; it’s the deeper error that enables secondary ones. Yet those in relativism’s grip generally don’t think matters through carefully enough to grasp the inherent contradictions.
Nor do most leftists care. Moreover, they have their own solution to the disunity problem created by their relativism: They intend to unite everyone, via tyranny’s iron fist, around their perspective.
