Lyndon Furst's
A Different Perspective
"Race, Bias, and Preference"
POSTED 6/22/09
Race, Bias, and Preference
Issues of racial bias and preferences have been in the news recently. It started with President Obama’s appointment of Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court. For those of you who have not been paying attention, Sotomayor is an appellate court judge, who was initially appointed to the federal bench by President George Bush senior and later elevated to a higher court by Bill Clinton. She comes to the appointment process as a very well-qualified candidate, having many years of experience as a federal judge. What has caused the current furor is a statement she made several years ago that “ a wise Latina woman” might “reach a better conclusion than a white male.”
As might be expected, Rush Limbaugh went ballistic in response to the discovery of that statement, while Newt Gingrich followed suit by labeling her a” racist.” It is unfortunate that these two men, who have such a strong influence on an important segment of the American population, so quickly jump to such a broad generalization about a person based on a statement made several years in the past. They, of course, have no bias against female or minority judges. They are just committed to rooting out the last vestiges of racial discrimination in America, or so one would think by listening to them.
Beyond that one seemingly biased statement is a ruling by the Appellate Court in which it upheld a lower court’s decision in the Frank Ricci case. This was a situation where a white firefighter in New Haven, Connecticut studied hard and got a high score on a promotions test, but the city threw out all the scores because no black person passed the test. Being a good American, Ricci sued, claiming discrimination. The lower court denied his claim, and Sotomayor voted to uphold the lower court’s decision. This is enough for some commentators to brand her as biased against all white men.
What seems to be missed in all this is that Judge Sotomayor did not decide on the facts of the case if there was or was not discrimination. She only ruled that the lower court had appropriately applied the law in arriving at its own decision. In this she strictly adhered to the traditional role of the appellate courts in applying the law while leaving it to the lower courts to determine the facts of the case.
President Obama had stated prior to his appointment of Sotomayor that he wanted somebody with empathy on the court. Conservative commentators are all in a roar over such a concept, saying that empathy has no place in the law and judges should put aside their personal feelings while strictly applying the law as it is written. From my perspective, only a psychopath could judge cases on the basis of cold hearted, mean-spirited, lack of feeling and be totally objective. All the justices on the Supreme Court are influenced by their feelings, their past experiences, and their personal view of the world. There is no such thing as total objectivity.
A good example of this business of bias and objectivity is found in the college admissions process. Not many years ago much furor was raised over the use of race as one factor in making the admissions decisions at public colleges and universities. The Supreme Court basically struck down such preference for racial minorities at publicly funded institutions. However, a recent news report revealed that one major university gave special preference to applicants whose parents were politically well-connected or were big donors to the school. I rather imagine that this is a fairly widespread practice. So much for objectivity and bias free decision-making.
A final example of the current state of racial bias came from Pennsylvania. There, a woman made a frantic call on her cell phone to the police claiming that she and her young daughter were being kidnaped by two black men who had locked her in the trunk of their Cadillac. This tragic story seemed plausible enough because we all know that black men favor driving Cadillacs and they have a proclivity to abducting white women.
The nation was horrified at the thought of such a thing happening. However, it was soon discovered that the whole story was a hoax. The harried white woman simply wanted a luxury vacation and needed a story to cover her tracks while she was gone. It seems that such hoaxes involving white women as victims of black men have been perpetrated numerous times in the last few years. Why are such tales so credible? Could it be that our society has a built-in bias that makes them believable? If so, that’s something the American people better learn to deal with if we are ever going to achieve a degree of racial harmony in our fair republic.