Prejudice Is More Insidious Than Naked Race Hatred

Adam Serwer has a sharp article up on the fact-free smear-mongering going on right now over potential Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor:

The reaction to Sonia Sotomayor makes the perfect case for why we still need affirmative action. She's been a federal judge since the early 1990s, she served as an ADA in Manhattan, she's worked in private practice. On paper, she's qualified, but yesterday Jeffrey Rosen, admittedly knowing next to nothing about her, wrote that the summa cum laude from Yale Law School Princeton might not be "that smart." The folks at National Review got the signal. "So she's dumb and obnoxious. Got it," wrote Mark Hemingway. Responded John Derbyshire, "Judge Sotomayor may indeed be dumb and obnoxious; but she's also female and Hispanic and those are the things that count nowadays." This from someone who believes that social statistics prove that whites as a group are smarter than say, black people. Mark Krikorian concluded that "I'm sure Mark H. is right about Sotomayor's being dumb and obnoxious, just as Derb is right about her being female and Hispanic is all the matters," but that "an Hispanic Supreme Court justice is an almost mandatory consolation prize for the amnesty folks."

In short, everyone agrees that Sotomayor is an idiot, based on an anonymous quote solicited by Rosen, who admits that he hasn't "read enough of Sonia Sotomayor’s opinions to have a confident sense of them," and that he hasn't "talked to enough of Sonia Sotomayor’s detractors and supporters to get a fully balanced picture of her strengths."

This is exactly what affirmative action is meant to correct: People coming to the arbitrary conclusion that someone is "an idiot" despite all evidence to the contrary, except if you consider not being a white man evidence. Sotomayor's detractors see themselves as Frank Riccis, white men whose greatness isn't recognized because we're too busy giving brown people who can't tie their shoes certificates of achievement. But the truth is that in life and in employment, discrimination rarely manifests itself the way it did against Ricci, as something as easy to quantify as an unfair test. It's far more insidious -- a rumor, a feeling, a notion that the person standing in front of you who doesn't look like you is just "dumb and obnoxious." So you throw their resume in the "no" pile because you don't like their name, you seat them in the back of the class, you promote another person. You just can't really explain why. It's... just a feeling.

In my view, that last paragraph sums up the essence of most of the racism and prejudice that exists in our country today. All too often, people defend themselves against charges of racism by comparing themselves to extreme examples of blatant racism in the early part of the 20th century and washing themselves of guilt by exclaiming "See, I don't lynch people or call them niggers so I can't be racist!"

Racism, homophobia and other forms of reflexive prejudice are usually far more subtle than white-hooded rednecks driving around in pickups lynching darkies who had the gall to eyeball white ladies. As Serwer notes, prejudice usually takes the form of a "feeling" of being somehow "uncomfortable" with someone with no rational basis. Take, for example, the subtle, reflexive prejudice that manifested itself all over greater Appalachia during the 2008 campaign. Remember all the interviews with West Virginians who said they just weren't "comfortable" with Obama for some unexplained, nebulous reason? Remember the batty old lady who told McCain "Obama is an Arab" without having any reason for believing it?

For my money, I don't think that most Americans are mature enough to ever truly confront the full breadth of the latent prejudice that still infects most of our public discourse. Unfortunately, the only way I see any of this changing is through natural attrition: i.e., elderly bigots dying off and younger, less prejudiced people growing up to replace them