MULTICULTURALISM ON THE CHEAP

Sam Smith

If there's one thing I've learned from the Puerto Rican branch of my family it is that all Puerto Ricans don't agree. So when Sonia Sotomayor was nominated to the Supreme Court, my first question was: which one of my Puerto Rican relatives does she most resemble. After considerable research I reached two conclusions: (1) None and (2) my nephews, nieces and sister-in-law are far more interesting.

The reason is simple: Sotomayer seems yet another boring lawyer. The three institutions that most endanger the preservation of any culture are Wal-Mart, TV and law school. Each imposes its own style, values and habits on those it influences making it hard, as Harvard Law School grad Barack Obama has already proved, to retain one's roots.

This, of course, does not dissuade the conventional media from its infatuation with ethnic iconism, turning any rising public figure who doesn't look like David Gregory into a totem of multicultural triumph while ignoring such facts as the paucity of blacks and latinos in the Senate.

To someone who's voted almost all his life in Washington, which means making repeated choices between black candidates, this obsession always seems peculiar, as I was reminded recently when a couple who are longtime friends recalled Mayor Marion Barry's first run for reelection in 1982. The husband, another man and I had sponsored a fundraiser for Barry, but our wives - turned off by Barry - refused to join us. That was 27 years ago and in the capital, ethnicity was already taking a back seat to more important things such as drug and sex habits and whether someone was lying to you. Furthermore, despite our disagreement, we're all still married.

Our present black mayor, who won every precinct in the city, three years later garners only big bucks from business contributors but scarcely a kind word from anyone else, black or white. That's the way multicultural progress is meant to work, although I'm not sure that Judge Sotomayor would agree with it. She once said:

"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. . . I am not so sure that I agree with the statement. First. . . there can never be a universal definition of wise. Second, 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."

When I read that, I asked myself just which one of the wise Latina women in my extended family I should listen to instead of myself and quickly realized that was a dangerous choice I had deftly avoided for a number of decades. Then I thought of Clarence Thomas, and the richness of his experience and how little good it had done for him. And finally I imagined Sotomayer relying on her own diagnosis of an illness, since her doctor had not share the richness of her pain.

But at least she said something controversial. The media has been struggling to make her story interesting, a desperate NY Times even using as a large type pull quote this gem:

"Congress has already specified the relationship between cost and benefits in requiring that the technology designated by the EPA be the best available."

Scanning her decisions, they are a pretty bland lot. Some good, some bad, with few signs of eloquence or particular insight. Thus I wasn't surprised to read that "Judge Sotomayor's culinary tastes range from tuna fish and cottage cheese for lunch with clerks in her chambers, to her standard order at the Blue Ribbon Bakery: smoked sturgeon on toast, with Dijon mustard, onions and capers."

I suspect that she will please progressives in some decisions and annoy the hell out of them on other occasions. The rest of the time I imagine she'll be a bit like Obama: a fading symbol of something a lot of people thought they were getting on the cheap, with a single election or appointment, instead of through the far harder but more meaningful path of real political and cultural change.