Jenny Damon (Edison): Supreme Court Nomination

   The nomination of Judge Sonia Sotomayor for Supreme Court justice is an excellent study of the balance between life chances and determination.  According to an article by Sharon Theimer with the Associated Press, Judge Sotomayor was born with poor life chances given her ethnicity, gender, and economic status.  In a speech entitled “A Latina Judge’s Voice”, she described herself as a “Newyorkrican” which she defined as “a born and bred New Yorker of Puerto Rican-born parents who came to the states during World War II”.  The White House, media, and her own speeches have emphasized her rags-to-riches rise fulfilling the “American Dream” against the odds.  She is proud of her Puerto Rican roots, but does not necessarily like others to call attention to it.  She was born in a South Bronx housing project into a blue collar family.  Intragenerational mobility was evident as she spent most of her youth in a middle class neighborhood attending private schools, going on to Princeton and Yale.  After law school, she moved up the ladder in Washington becoming part of the wealthy power elite.  She now earns over two hundred thousand dollars a year and lives in a million-dollar plus community.  Her brother is a physician in New York whose practice does not accept Medicaid or Medicare.  This debate for Judge Sotomayor’s confirmation will be intensive as it involves the highly charged aspects of ethnicity, sexism, tax brackets, racism, and the power elite.  She has nearly framed the argument by her own comments of being “more qualified as a judge (female, Hispanic) than a white male”(paraphrased from a speech in 2001).  Her rise in this country to such a powerful level from hard work and determination is a testament to the American Dream, but will certainly be highly scrutinized. 

This entry was posted on 30. May 2009 at 16:06 and is filed under Introduction to Sociology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.