The angry white males are raising Hell, fomenting hatred among the small-minded for the sake of their ratings and to stir up the worst of the Republican base. Guys like Rush and Newt demonstrate why white men get a bad rap. You can no more generalize about white men than other groups, especially in these days of the sensitive metrosexual. Still there are some dominant features amongst the dominant crowd.
As one who looks much like other white males, I’d have to admit to have shared in some of the benefits granted as a matter of course to my race and gender. In my own mind and amongst those uncomfortable with gay men, I also can empathize with others who feel or are treated as outsiders. As a gay man of a certain age, having come into adulthood as AIDS was becoming known, I know what it is to be among friends who have experienced the same discriminations as I have.
Judge Sonia Sotomayor’s statement:
“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,”
even taken out of contex, does not trouble me. We who strive for legitimacy and integrity in a culture where straight white men are more frequently presumed to posess these qualities, develop our own myths to give us strength and help us see the value in our many diversities.
Our myths, our stories that convey what is transcendently true for us, may acknowledge what we don’t have that the dominant culture takes for granted, but more importantly, the stories are about what we’ve gained through our coming to terms with our unique gifts and attributes. For me, while I lack the easy self-assurance that I admire in other guys, there are compensations in a quality of empathy and self-awareness that can only be earned. A person who has been taught through many subtle messages that favor the white, the male, and the straight, that they are good, that they’re somehow complete, may not have the motivation to see the best in a diverse people, largely foreign to themselves.
I don’t know what is to be a wise Latina woman, but I find it not at all offensive, that she, among her sisters, would share a story about themselves, what they have learned and experienced that others likely will not have learned.
That people would get upset about the word “better” is ludicrous in this context of a shared myth. When we’re telling stories, hyperbole is just one of the many tools of the storyteller.
