Highly recommended: a column in the New York Times by Charles M. Blow that calls out the loudmouths who are screaming that Judge Sonia Sotomayor is a racist. Blow makes the point that it is quite hypocritical for people who have a history of making racially charged comments to all of a sudden discover that racism is really a bad thing and level false accusations of racism against Sotomayor. It looks like we have a lot of what the psychiatrists call projection going on here.
Blow writes in part:
First, there’s former Chief Justice William Rehnquist. When the
Supreme Court was considering Brown v. Board of Education, Rehnquist
was a law clerk for Justice Robert Jackson. Rehnquist wrote Jackson a memo
in which he defended separate-but-equal policies, saying, “I realize
that it is an unpopular and unhumanitarian position, for which I have
been excoriated by my ‘liberal’ colleagues, but I think Plessy v.
Ferguson was right and should be reaffirmed.”
Furthermore,
Rehnquist had been a Republican ballot protectionist in Phoenix when he
was younger. As the Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen correctly
noted in 1986: Rehnquist “helped challenge the voting qualifications of
Arizona blacks and Hispanics. He was entitled to do so. But even if he
did not personally harass potential voters, as witnesses allege, he
clearly was a brass-knuckle partisan, someone who would deny the ballot
to fellow citizens for trivial political reasons — and who made his
selection on the basis of race or ethnicity.”
Then there’s John Roberts, who replaced Rehnquist as the chief justice in 2005. That year, Newsday reported that Roberts had made racist and sexist jokes in memos that he wrote while working in the Reagan White House. And, The New York Review of Books published a scolding article in 2005
making the case that during the same period that he was making those
jokes, Roberts marshaled a crusader’s zeal in his efforts to roll back
the civil rights gains of the 1960s and ’70s — everything from voting
rights to women’s rights. The article began, “The most intriguing
question about John Roberts is what led him as a young person whose
success in life was virtually assured by family wealth and academic
achievement to enlist in a political campaign designed to deny
opportunities for success to those who lack his advantages.”
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