We're getting a bit away from Jeff Rosen and Sonia Sotomayor here, but I think this statement from Reihan Salam is interesting:
More broadly, I have a profoundly unrepresentative sense of how ethno-somatic difference is experienced in American life. My own experience was of growing up in a very diverse environment, and my friends and I tended to navigate our differences through a near-constant stream of appalling ethnic jokes. For whatever reason, this built up a lot of trust across “racial” lines. I decided early on that the really horrible thing was to say one thing to one ethnic audience — this is what I say to my Bengali friends — and another to another ethnic audience — this is what I say to my Dominican friends. So it does matter to me that I sincerely believe that Rosen would have said pretty much the same things about an analogous Asian American judge. Yet of course the weight of these remarks varies across groups, depending on historical perceptions, etc.
I have only experienced the kind of trust Reihan is talking about as something between individuals. It's one thing for me to laugh at moreno jokes from my Puerto Rican friends and respond in kind -- that's what happens between friends. But that trust doesn't, and shouldn't, exist between me and someone I don't know. You can do certain things with certain people that you can't do with others. That's not hypocrisy, it's intimacy.
While Rosen might have been able to get away with his troubling statements in private company, there was no reason to make those allegations publicly without substantiation. It's one thing for Reihan to trust Rosen, it's entirely another to expect strangers to do the same, especially given that Rosen has spent more than a decade publicly fretting that an emphasis on diversity harms the intellectual quality of liberal judges.
Reihan also writes that "One of my central failings — I have many — is an undue emphasis on personal loyalty. Because I know Rosen is a mensch, I'm inclined to interpret anything he says or writes in the best possible light." I've seen a lot of these blanket defenses of Rosen as a "good person" and I think they are beside the point. One of the most striking parts of Obama's race speech last year was when he described his grandmother confessing a fear of black men. The point of that story wasn't that his grandmother was a bad person -- it was that good people, even exceptionally good people, sometimes fall victim to their prejudices.
*Reihan writes in to ask that I include the first part of his statement, which I have above, and which is rather less than a "blanket" defense. My point was that other than Reihan, I've heard a number of people vouch for Rosen's personal qualities, which I think are irrelevant to whether or not he was operating from a predetermined conclusion based on factors not having to do with Sotomayor's relevant qualifications. -- A. Serwer
