It’s a shame that Judge Sonia Sotomayor, the Obama nominee for the U.S. Supreme Court, chose not to defend her statement “I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life” at her nomination hearings this week.

We understand why she declined. When you’re a candidate for posts such as the Supreme Court or the presidency, there are certain types of dog poop into which you will not step. If you plan to step in them, you don’t bother applying for the jobs. So you claim you never said it or offer tortuous interpretations or just lie. As someone who thinks it’s often okay to lie, and sometimes right, none of that bothers me. But since she made a good point, which she now denies making, I’d like to defend it for her.

Let’s start here: There was nothing racist implied by what she said. It was not about being genetically Latina; it was about being experientially Latina. This includes poverty, deprivation, desperation and discrimination. Anyone who grew up without that experience wouldn’t be included by mere virtue of DNA. It’s about having lived the life, as in, among other associations, la vida loca, the crazy life.

Note that she refers to the richness, not the harshness, of the life. It doesn’t only embitter, it can enlarge. On a private level, most of us have been through things we’d never have chosen but — if we handled them or just survived — that enriched and improved us, put us more in touch with what it is to be human. In a way, it would have been a shame to miss them (but only in a way; these things are hedged with ambiguity). In the suburban, privileged community where I went to high school, kids often wrote short stories with stark endings, reflecting nothing they’d experienced — as if they sensed that, while materially advantaged, they might be experientially deprived.

This also applies to our experiences as members of groups. Speaking as a Jew, I think one reason North American Jews identify so powerfully with Israel is a sense that the soulfulness of past Jewish experience is missing in their generally comfortable lives. They’d never want to repeat the horror, but they miss the intensity. This is a familiar enough paradox.

So the southern white senator who whined that if he’d “said something like that or someone with my background,” he’d have no chance of reaching the Supreme Court — was wrong. He’d be fine if he repeated Sonia Sotomayor literally: that a wise Latina is more likely etc. I don’t really see why he doesn’t agree with her. Perhaps what galls people like him — and made her back off — is not the claim that the Latina would make a better judge but the chutzpah to say she has a richer life. Privileged people often share this sense but don’t expect to have their noses rubbed in it. It’s so uppity.

Having said all this, let me back off, too, since these are generalizations that aren’t worth spit when making a decision on a specific person. The judge herself voiced her thought as a pious wish (“I would hope …”). A person who has that severe, enlarging background might well miss the value in it, or exploit it to get ahead, abandoning what they acquired and forgetting what they learned. It’s good as a theoretical insight, useless for practical guidance. That doesn’t make it untrue, just inapplicable.

Toward the end, another white guy senator, trying to be jocular, said the judge might have a lot of ‘splainin’ to do, à la Ricky Ricardo in the old Lucy TV show. It had cringe-making potential, but I prefer to see it as typically human, in the spirit of the statement she forswore for tactical reasons: He was trying so hard not to say something offensive that he blurted it out. It was the most spontaneous, human moment in the whole, staged, event.

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Rick Salutin

Rick Salutin is a Canadian novelist, playwright and critic. He is a strong advocate of left wing causes and writes a regular column in the Toronto Star.