Sonia Sotomayor: Court’s Right Wing ‘Out of Touch With Reality’
Simmering tensions over the high court’s approach to race burst into the open Tuesday morning when Justice Sonia Sotomayor, reading from her dissent in an affirmative action case, mounted a full-scale assault on the right wing of the court, calling her conservative colleagues “out of touch with reality.”
“The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to speak openly and candidly on the subject of race, and to apply the Constitution with eyes open to the unfortunate effects of centuries of racial discrimination,” Sotomayor wrote. “[W]e ought not sit back and wish away, rather than confront, the racial inequality that exists in our society. It is this view that works harm, by perpetuating the facile notion that what makes race matter is acknowledging the simple truth that race does matter.”
Sotomayor’s dissent was the most direct attack on a doctrine of “colorblindness” that has guided the conservative wing of the court’s attack on civil rights era laws designed to remedy the effects of racial discrimination. In a 2007 decision striking down a school desegregation program, Chief Justice John Roberts penned the battle cry of the movement when he wrote, “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.”
For Roberts and his conservative colleagues, government intervention to remedy the effects of centuries of racism are morally tantamount to racism.
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