Word: latinas
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Washington politics may not be good at producing health-care reform, but it's great at creating catchy new lingo. Getting "Borked." "Hanging chads." "Lipsticks on pit bulls." The latest is "wise Latina," two words that have been repeated ad nauseam since the middle of May, when conservatives started flogging the text of a 2001 speech given by Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor at the University of California, Berkeley. In that talk - on the subject of a Latino presence in the American judiciary - Sotomayor now famously said, "I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness...
...sure, the idea of a "wise Latina" is a new one to a lot of people. Before the Sotomayor speech was made available, finding the words wise Latina in articles of any sort was exceedingly rare. Latinas are frequently described as "fiery" or "caliente" or "curvy" - but rarely "wise." A cursory Nexis search reveals only a single book review, from 2000, of a sci-fi tome called The Fresco, in which a heroine who communes with aliens is described as the daughter of "a wise Latina lady and her salvage-yard husband." Clearly a page turner. (See Sonya Sotomayor...
...July 14 hearing, the nominee explained that "wise Latina" was her attempt to play off a quote by retired justice Sandra Day O'Connor, who said that "both men and women were equally capable of being wise and fair judges." Sotomayor said that "my play fell flat. It was bad." But Sotomayor is just trying to ameliorate her critics without having to make them look... unwise. She has nothing to apologize for - and neither have other politicians and judicial nominees who have said the same thing in their own words...
...government in Washington has provided political employment to pest exterminators, grade-B actors and Alabama Senators who think of the 1965 Voting Rights Act as a "piece of intrusive legislation." (I'm talkin' to you, Jeff Sessions.) And I, for one - a Latina who has spent her whole life watching her ethnicity and gender reduced to a pile of red lipstick and high heels - am ready to see a wise Latina in that...
...Justice Samuel Alito acknowledged that, when presented with certain cases, he takes into account the experiences of his immigrant ancestors and the ethnic, religious, and gender discrimination suffered by his Italian family members. Why do we find it so difficult to accept that a judge, who is also a Latina, when she exercises her own particular wisdom, may reach a more informed conclusion than another judge without the benefit of her experiences when those experiences are relevant and helpful to understanding the facts of a particular case? This factual assessment does not mean that she will fail to uphold...