A place for race on Obama's agenda

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By Karen Tumulty
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, July 23, 2010; A03


Two years ago, in a powerful speech in Philadelphia, presidential candidate Barack Obama warned that Americans will not be able to overcome their divisions if they continue to "tackle race only as a spectacle."

This week, however, the subject of race returned to the forefront as just that: A spectacle over a selectively edited Internet video that led to the hasty firing of Agriculture Department official Shirley Sherrod for seemingly making racist comments. Then came a rush of recrimination and vindication when a fuller version revealed that she had actually been giving a speech about overcoming prejudice.

On Thursday, Obama called Sherrod from a private study off the Oval Office to apologize for his administration's missteps, but Sherrod insisted that there was much more that he should do.

"The president, if he could actually look at this in the way that he should, he could help bring this front and center and do a lot to help at least start the process," she told Washington Post editorial writer Jonathan Capehart in an interview a few hours before she talked to Obama. "I don't think he can solve it by himself. But being in the position he's in, he could do a lot to help this nation get to the point where we can deal with it."

"What happened to me," she added, "was an attempt to run away from it."

Whether that is true or not, the subject of race has had a way of catching up with Obama.

His apology to Sherrod came on the one-year anniversary of a news conference in which Obama kicked up the first racially charged controversy of his presidency by declaring that the Cambridge, Mass., police had "acted stupidly" by arresting his friend Henry Louis Gates Jr., an African American professor at Harvard and one of the nation's preeminent scholars. The ensuing storm of criticism led to the "beer summit" at which Gates and the officer who arrested him shared brews in the Rose Garden with Obama and Vice President Biden.

Officials conceded privately that one of the reasons the White House kept its distance from the Sherrod controversy when it first erupted, with the posting of the misleading video by blogger Andrew Breitbart, was that it didn't want to ignite yet another round of racism accusations against the administration by conservative media.

As Obama himself has pointed out many times, it would have been naive to think that the election of the nation's first African American president would be enough to make the country a paradise of racial harmony.

"If there's a lesson to be drawn from this episode," Obama told ABC's "Good Morning America" in an interview taped Thursday, "it's that rather than us jumping to conclusions and pointing fingers at each other, we should all look inward and try to examine what's in our own hearts and, as a consequence, I think we will continue to make progress."

Though he rarely addresses the subject of race explicitly, Obama's advisers insist that he has not failed to honor the promises he made in that Philadelphia speech two years ago.

But it can require something of a bank shot to make that case. "Look at an issue like education," where the administration has launched an initiative to reward states that lift their standards, White House press secretary Robert Gibbs said. "Many civil rights leaders talk about education as a civil rights issue."

His allies say that Obama has so much else on his plate, with a recession at home and two wars overseas, that there is no room left for much else right now. And they contend that it would be difficult for him to lead a dialogue on race when he is the subject of some of its more corrosive story lines.

"You can't have this conversation when the political environment is so polluted," said Donna Brazile, an African American and a Democratic political strategist. "A healthy part of this conversation has to start with the fact that, since his election, those who oppose him have redoubled their efforts to somehow prove that he is not an American, to question his legitimacy."

Conservatives, meanwhile, say they are the ones who have had their legitimacy unfairly questioned. Since Obama became president, they say, accusations of racism have too often been hurled at his opponents when they have a difference with him over policy or philosophy.

"The left has used race as a weapon for a very long time," Erick Ericson wrote Tuesday on his RedState.com blog. "They have devalued what racism means -- which is a terrible shame if you actually care about stopping real racism or remembering it in our history. The word now connotes disagreeing with the left instead of what it actually means."

Although civil rights leaders say they do not expect -- or necessarily even want -- Obama to use the Sherrod episode to launch a dialogue on race, they say that it showed he still has work to do in one area: making sure that his own government reflects the country at large.

"I really believe there is an experience gap in this administration," a lack of diversity in its upper echelons, said House Majority Whip James E. Clyburn (D-S.C.), the highest-ranking African American in Congress. "I really believe those kinds of experiences need to be shared at the highest levels of government."

Book Review - The History of White People

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THE HISTORY OF WHITE PEOPLE

by Nell Irvin Painter

Illustrated. 496 pp. W. W. Norton & Company. $27.95

Review by Linda Gordon

Nell Irvin Painter’s title, “The History of White People,” is a provocation in several ways: it’s monumental in sweep, and its absurd grandiosity should call to mind the fact that writing a “History of Black People” might seem perfectly reasonable to white people. But the title is literally accurate, because the book traces characterizations of the lighter-skinned people we call white today, starting with the ancient Scythians. For those who have not yet registered how much these characterizations have changed, let me assure you that sensory observation was not the basis of racial nomenclature.

Some ancient descriptions did note color, as when the ancient Greeks recognized that their “barbaric” northern neighbors, Scythians and Celts, had lighter skin than Greeks considered normal. Most ancient peoples defined population differences culturally, not physically, and often regarded lighter people as less civilized. Centuries later, European travel writers regarded the light-skinned Circassians, a k a Caucasians, as people best fit only for slavery, yet at the same time labeled Circassian slave women the epitome of beauty. Exoticizing and sexualizing women of allegedly inferior “races” has a long and continuous history in racial thought; it’s just that today they are usually darker-skinned women.

“Whiteness studies” have so proliferated in the last two decades that historians might be forgiven a yawn in response to being told that racial divisions are fundamentally arbitrary, and that deciding who is white has been not only fluid but also heavily influenced by class and culture. In some Latin American countries, for example, the term blanquearse, to bleach oneself, is used to mean moving upward in class status. But this concept — the social and cultural construction of race over time — remains harder for many people to understand than, say, the notion that gender is a social and cultural construction, unlike sex. As recently as 10 years ago, some of my undergraduate students at the University of Wisconsin heard my explanations of critical race theory as a denial of observable physical differences.

I wish I had had this book to offer them. Painter, a renowned historian recently retired from Princeton, has written an unusual study: an intellectual history, with occasional excursions to examine vernacular usage, for popular audiences. It has much to teach everyone, including whiteness experts, but it is accessible and breezy, its coverage broad and therefore necessarily superficial.

The modern intellectual history of whiteness began among the 18th-century German scholars who invented racial “science.” Johann Joachim Winckelmann made the ancient Greeks his models of beauty by imagining them white-skinned; he may even have suppressed his own (correct) suspicion that their statues, though copied by the Romans in white marble, had originally been painted. The Dutchman Petrus Camper calculated the proportions and angles of the ideal face and skull, and produced a scale that awarded a perfect rating to the head of a Greek god and ranked Europeans as the runners-up, earning 80 out of 100. The Englishman Charles White collected skulls that he arranged from lowest to highest degree of perfection. He did not think he was seeing the gradual improvement of the human species, but assumed rather the polygenesis theory: the different races arose from separate divine ­creations and were designed with a range of quality.

The modern concept of a Caucasian race, which students my age were taught in school, came from Johann Friedrich Blumenbach of Göttingen, the most influential of this generation of race scholars. Switching from skulls to skin, he divided humans into five races by color — white, yellow, copper, tawny, and tawny-black to jet-black — but he ascribed these differences to climate. Still convinced that people of the Caucasus were the paragons of beauty, he placed residents of North Africa and India in the Caucasian category, sliding into a linguistic analysis based on the common derivation of Indo-European languages. That category, Painter notes, soon slipped free of any geographic or linguistic moorings and became a quasi-­scientific term for a race known as “white.”

Some great American heroes, notably Thomas Jefferson and Ralph Waldo Emerson, absorbed Blumenbach’s influence but relabeled the categories of white superiority. They adopted the Saxons as their ideal, imagining Americans as direct and unalloyed descendants of the English, later including the Germans. In general, Western labels for racial superiority moved thus: Caucasian → Saxon → Teutonic → Nordic → Aryan → white/Anglo.

The spread of evolutionary theory required a series of theoretical shifts, to cope with changing understandings of what is heritable. When hereditary thought produced eugenics, the effort to breed superior human beings, it relied mostly on inaccurate genetics. Nevertheless, eugenic “science” became authoritative from the late 19th century through the 1930s. Eugenics gave rise to laws in at least 30 states authorizing forced sterilization of the ostensibly feeble-minded and the hereditarily criminal. Painter cites an estimate of 65,000 sterilized against their will by 1968, after which a combined feminist and civil rights campaign succeeded in radically restricting forced sterilization. While blacks and American Indians were disproportionately victimized, intelligence testing added many immigrants and others of “inferior stock,” predominantly Appalachian whites, to the rolls of the surgically sterilized.

In the long run, the project of measuring “intelligence” probably did more than eugenics to stigmatize and hold back the nonwhite. Researchers gave I.Q. tests to 1,750,000 recruits in World War I and found that the average mental age, for those 18 and over, was 13.08 years. That experiment in mass testing failed owing to the Army’s insistence that even the lowest ranked usually became model soldiers. But I.Q. testing achieved success in driving the anti-immigration movement. The tests allowed calibrated rankings of Americans of different ancestries — the English at the top, Poles on the bottom. Returning to head measurements, other researchers computed with new categories the proportion of different “blood” in people of different races: Belgians were 60 percent Nordic (the superior European race) and 40 percent Alpine, while the Irish were 30 percent Nordic and 70 percent Mediterranean (the inferior European race). Sometimes politics produced immediate changes in these supposedly objective findings: World War I caused the downgrading of Germans from heavily Nordic to heavily Alpine.

Painter points out, but without adequate discussion, that the adoration of whiteness became particularly problematic for women, as pale blue-eyed blondes became, like so many unattainable desires, a reminder of what was second-class about the rest of us. Among the painfully comic absurdities that racial science produced was the “beauty map” constructed by Francis Galton around the turn of the 20th century: he classified people as good, medium or bad; he categorized those he saw by using pushpins and thus demonstrated that London ranked highest and Aberdeen lowest in average beauty.

Rankings of intelligence and beauty supported escalating anti-Catholicism and ­anti-Semitism in early-20th-century America. Both prejudices racialized non-Protestant groups. But Painter ­misses some crucial regional differences. While Jews and Italians were nonwhite in the East, they had long been white in San Francisco, where the racial “inferiors” were the Chinese. Although the United States census categorized ­Mexican-Americans as white through 1930, census enumerators in the Southwest, working from a different racial under­standing, ignored those instructions and marked them “M” for Mexican.

In the same period, anarchist or socialist beliefs became a sign of racial inferiority, a premise strengthened by the presence of many immigrants and Jews among early-20th-century radicals. Whiteness thus became a method of stigmatizing dissenting ideas, a marker of ideological respectability; Painter should have investigated this phenomenon further. Also missing from the book is an analysis of the all-important question: Who benefits and how from the imprimatur of whiteness? Political elites and employers of low-wage labor, to choose just two groups, actively policed the boundaries of whiteness.

But I cannot fault Nell Painter’s choices — omissions to keep a book widely readable. Often, scholarly interpretation is transmitted through textbooks that oversimplify and even bore their readers with vague generalities. Far better for a large audience to learn about whiteness from a distinguished scholar in an insightful and lively exposition.

Linda Gordon is a professor of history at New York University and the author, most recently, of “Dorothea Lange: A Life Beyond Limits.”

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Census Figures Challenge Views of Race and Ethnicity

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By SAM ROBERTS

New census figures that provide a snapshot of America’s foreign-born population are challenging conventional views of immigration, race and ethnicity.

What it means to be African-American, for example, may be redefined by the record number of blacks — now nearly 1 in 10 — born abroad, according to the report from American Community Survey data, which was released Wednesday. It found that Africa now accounts for one in three foreign-born blacks in this country, another modern record.

More than 1 in 50 Americans now identify themselves as “multiracial.” But the pattern of race reporting for foreign-born Americans, is markedly different than for native-born Americans. The foreign born are more likely to list their nation of origin when identifying race or ethnicity.

For example, while 87 percent of Americans born in Cuba and 53 percent born in Mexico identified themselves as white, a majority born in the Dominican Republic and El Salvador, who are newer immigrants, described themselves as neither black nor white.

“The concept of race and how we view it culturally has changed,” said Elizabeth M. Grieco, chief of the Census Bureau’s immigration statistics staff, which analyzed 2007 data. “It’s a part of not knowing where they fit into how we define race in the United States.”

Image by Birdie Holsclaw via Flickr

Recent arrivals “might not be sure how to classify themselves,” Dr. Grieco said. (The census treats race and Hispanic origin as separate categories.)

The changing perception of race is being driven largely by immigration and higher birthrates among the foreign born. While immigrants account for 13 percent of the population, the share of recent births to foreign-born mothers rose to 20 percent. As a result of intermarriage with native-born Americans, a growing number of American children — now more than one in four under the age of 6 — are being raised by at least one foreign-born parent.

“It’s fair to say that we are approaching the shares seen at the peak of the last great immigration wave” at the beginning of the 20th century, said Jeffrey S. Passel, senior demographer at the Pew Hispanic Center.

Kenneth M. Johnson, senior demographer at the Carsey Institute at the University of New Hampshire, noted that more that two-thirds of the growth of the Hispanic population last year came from births, not immigration.

“You could shut off immigration tomorrow and the impact of the foreign born on U.S. demographic trends would still be a powerful force,” he said.

Among the nation’s 37.3 million blacks, more than 8 percent are now foreign born, compared with 1 percent in 1960. Of those, more than half came from the Caribbean. Some 34 percent emigrated from Africa, compared with 1 percent in 1960.

The census recorded 10,500 American blacks born in Africa in 1970; in 2008, the number of African-born Americans topped one million for the first time.

Seventy-eight percent of native-born Americans reported their race as white, followed by 13 percent who said they were black. Among the foreign born, 46 percent identified themselves as white and 23 percent as Asian.

Since 2000, the Hispanic foreign-born population has increased 45 percent, to 18.5 million from 12.8 million. Latin Americans represent more than half of the foreign-born population.

Among all who identified themselves as Asian-Americans, which is often understood to mean born here, 67 percent were, in fact, foreign born.

How immigrants translate their own backgrounds and report their adopted identities “have important implications for the nation’s racial and ethnic composition,” the Census Bureau said in the report.

Nicholas A. Jones, chief of the bureau’s racial statistics branch, said that given the likelihood that foreign-born people would identify themselves as German or Irish or Nigerian instead of black or white, the bureau might eventually encourage people to provide more detailed write-in answers to how they define themselves.

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The Nut Graph | “Forget about race”

By Deborah Loh
deborahloh@thenutgraph.com

Azran Osman-Rani

AZRAN Osman-Rani is Air Asia X's chief executive officer. Because he doesn't have an office to himself, for the interview with The Nut Graph on 11 Sept 2009, we sit down at a table in a corner of an open-floor office in full view of other staff at their work stations. Azran shares the same work space as his staff with no cubicles to separate each desk.

The atmosphere at the Air Asia X office in the Low-Cost Carrier Terminal in Sepang is casual and informal. But there's a hum of efficiency. Perhaps there is more to the airline's "no-frills" ethos than just budget flights. Doing away with the excess fat and bureaucracy does give one more time and space to develop the values that matter.

Speaking with heartfelt conviction about the values that matter to him, Azran talks about the need for concerted effort to shape a multicultural environment for his children and the company he works in.

TNG: Where were you born and where did you grow up?

Azran (at the back), with maternal grandmother Sajidah Salleh, parents Safiah Osman and Osman-Rani Hassan,
and siblings (all family pics courtesy of Azran Osman-Rani)

I was born in 1971 and I'm 110% KL, from the General Hospital to Kampung Pandan for my first couple of years, then Bangsar Telawi for four years, and then Taman Tun [Dr Ismail] from Standard One right up to Form Five.

I've also been lucky to have had a number of overseas living experiences. At age one to two, my dad did his PhD in Manila. When I was nine and 10, my mum did her PhD in New York. I studied in the United States and after coming back, I was able to spend a year working in Thailand, then a year in Indonesia, then Singapore and a year in Korea. It provided useful perspectives in seeing what's out there in the world and [allows one the ability] to appreciate [one's] own culture and roots when [one] is overseas.

What did your parents do and how did they influence your upbringing?

Azran, at age six

Dad was a former professor of economics at Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia and mum was a former professor of education at Universiti Malaya. They did their academic work regionally so our household had a lot of exposure to people of different cultures.

Our parents always allowed me and my siblings to engage with their friends. Our household was not one where kids were seen and not heard. We sat at the dinner table and had conversations with our parents' friends.

At age four, I got to talk to professors and academics from other countries. At that age I was really into art and drawing, and every painting I did I would show to my parents' friends. That gave me a lot of self-confidence as a kid. When you become familiar with differences, you can attract and talk to older people and people from diverse backgrounds. Some of my mum's friends today say they still remember my paintings.

Can you trace your ancestry?

Leftenan Hassan Yassin, Azran's paternal
grandfather

There is an element of multicultural heritage. On my maternal side, my grandfather is Indian-Ceylonese Muslim. But I don't know whether it was he who migrated or his parents who migrated. He died before I was born. He was a technician with a surveying department in the government.

My maternal grandmother is of Bugis descent and was from Linggi, Negeri Sembilan. She was an orphan and a second wife to my grandfather. They raised nine kids. In that environment raising kids during the Japanese occupation, all the older kids had to work and sacrifice so that the younger kids could get an education. My mum was number eight. Number seven, eight and nine were the ones who got full education all the way up to university.

Azran as a baby with paternal grandmotherOn my paternal side, my grandmother is an ethnic Chinese who was adopted by a Malay family. My paternal grandfather was considered a war hero, Leftenan Hassan Yassin, who fought during the Japanese occupation and against the communists in the 1948 insurgency. He died in a communist ambush in Gua Musang in 1948. They exhumed his body from Kelantan and brought it to Makhamah Pahlawan in Port Dickson where his whole regiment was buried. He died when my father, who was the eldest, was barely six years old.

So my young grandmother, who worked as a midwife, had three small kids and suddenly lost her husband. She raised them in Ipoh. Reflecting on both sides, I see how both my dad's and mum's parents and siblings did everything to get them into university.

Growing up, I wasn't very aware of my family history but knowing it now, it's a source of pride to say that I have Chinese, Indian, and Indonesian blood.

What memories do you have of inter-racial childhood friendships?

Azran (third from left) in Standard One at the Methodist primary school, with his "Rasa Sayang" concert troupe

Growing up in KL, we didn't talk about being inter-racial. It was just part and parcel of life. I went to the Methodist kindergarten in Section 5, Petaling Jaya. We had no issues about singing hymns at kindergarten. Now, we're a lot more conscious about race but growing up we were never aware of it. We judged our friends based on whether we shared the same activities.

When did you become aware of race and how did that happen?

When I came back from overseas. Malaysia in the last 10 years has become a lot more inward and ethnic-focused. It's come to a point where [my wife] Azreen and I pulled out our son from Sekolah Kebangsaan Bukit Damansara because it was a very different school environment from when we were in school 20 years ago. It's now very Malay-centric and very religious. We've put our son in Sri KDU.

As parents, our challenge is that government schools are a lot more polarised these days. We now have to actively look for environments to raise our kids which still provide a multi-racial and multi-cultural experience. You have to actively do this or your kids get sucked into the polarised mainstream.

Are there any aspects of being Malaysian that you struggle with?

None really except that these days we tend to be way too focused and sensitive about race. I think a lot of it has to do with the political system that's polarised and has labelled people. We are missing out on the vast opportunities that come from embracing diversity. Instead, we're becoming more homogenous in thinking and approach.

Azran (left) at age six, with brother Azrul and sister Azleen

That's why [I] actively ensure that [my kids] have friends from different races. In the work environment, in my years of working as a management consultant, I saw that a lot of companies were still very homogenous in their shareholding and management structure. There are very ingrained cultures, for example, the very Malay [Malaysian] government-linked companies and very Chinese [Malaysian]-centric banks and companies. I learnt that you have to actively address this.

Here, the Air Asia X team is very diverse but it is intentionally constructed that way. If I left it to everyone, as with most organisations, the finance team would probably be primarily Chinese [Malaysian], so would the IT team, and the engineering team would be very Malay [Malaysian].

Motto in the Air Asia X office

How do you implement diversity in Air Asia X, through quotas?

It's not done in a structured way, but rather than quotas, what's more important is the values that we live. What I stand for, what my team stands for, how we talk and how we interact. The softer parts for me are more important. It's how we govern ourselves rather than by policies or quotas.

For example, how do we inculcate in the heads of department to hire more women pilots and women engineers, and ensure that we have all races in all departments. And it doesn't end with hiring, because even if you hire them, people stick to their own little cliques. You still have to create the right forums, especially informally, so that people socialise together. Leaders have to do their part because if you rely on quotas and systems, you'll still get microcosms of homogeneity.

What do you think makes you Malaysian?

Actually, where I am now, I'm trying to break out from that. Rather than thinking of ourselves as Malaysians, let's embrace an Asean identity, or an Asian identity. Partly because that's Air Asia's business model. We've moved on beyond the whole Malay, Chinese or Indian thing. We're looking at how to make someone in Thailand think of Air Asia as a Thai airline, or making an Australian think that this is an Australian airline. Localisation is important.

Azran (right, seated), was a member of the ultimate Frisbee team at university in the United States

As Malaysians, we should be the ones more open to a multi-cultural set of values compared to more homogenous societies in neighbouring countries. We should be the ones leading that in terms of work, and socially.

Describe the kind of Malaysia you would like for your children and future generations.

To have openness, not just along ethnic and gender lines, but also regionally and globally. It's a matter of necessity.

We are acutely aware that Malaysia as a market is way too small. We're surrounded by huge markets like China, India and Indonesia. Even Thailand, Vietnam and Philippines are more than double the size of Malaysia, so as a matter of survival we have to reach out and participate actively on that scale. We've got to move away from being driven by political agenda in terms of the whole divide and conquer thing, and move on beyond race.

Forget about race. There's a bigger battle between Malaysia and the rest of the world. It means that in all our respective roles we have to consciously and actively create those opportunities. We have to shape and nurture a set of values among the people we are responsible for. It's a big part of my role as a parent, and in the company.

Where Sonia Sotomayor Really Stands on Race

by Jeffrey Rosen

Of the thousands of cases Sonia Sotomayor has heard during nearly 17 years on the federal bench, the one likely to raise the toughest questions during her Supreme Court confirmation hearings, which begin on July 13, involves affirmative action. In 2007 Sotomayor, as a member of the Second Circuit Court of Appeals, heard arguments in the case of Ricci v. DeStefano. In that case, white firefighters in New Haven, Conn., challenged the city's decision to ignore the results of a promotion test after there were no black firefighters among the top scorers. One of 20 white firefighters who brought the case, Frank Ricci, is dyslexic and paid an acquaintance more than $1,000 to read study guides for the test onto audiotapes. Ricci scored sixth out of 77 — high enough to merit the promotion. But the city, fearing that it could be sued for discrimination, decided to promote no one.

During the oral argument for the case, Sotomayor was an active questioner, but the decision eventually released by her three-judge panel was a brief, unsigned order. With little explanation, it affirmed the lower-court decision dismissing the firefighters' claim that the city discriminated against the white firefighters by throwing out the test. In a subsequent opinion, one of Sotomayor's colleagues and longtime mentors, Judge José Cabranes, criticized the panel for disposing in such a cursory way issues that were "indisputably complex and far from well-settled." Ricci and the others appealed the panel's ruling, and the case is now before the Supreme Court. (See pictures of Judge Sonia Sotomayor.)

Republican critics of Sotomayor are planning to use the Ricci decision as Exhibit A in what they hope will be confirmation hearings focused on her views about race. Exhibit B is a speech she delivered in 2001 that included the following 32 words: "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." Since President Barack Obama nominated Sotomayor to the court on May 26, that remark has become the main source of conservative attacks. Former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich told his followers on Twitter that Sotomayor was a "Latina woman racist" who should withdraw. (He later apologized.) Sotomayor expressed regret about her word choice to Senator Dianne Feinstein. But after the Senate Judiciary Committee released Sotomayor's complete list of speeches, it emerged that she had delivered many versions of the same stump speech — seven by one count — between 1994 and 2003. In all of them, she suggested that a judge who was a "wise woman" or a "wise Latina woman" would issue a better opinion than a male or a white male judge.

Sotomayor's defenders say that those words were taken out of context and that her appellate opinions are hardly radical on race. Tom Goldstein of SCOTUS Blog has estimated that of the 96 race-related cases other than Ricci she heard on the Court of Appeals, "Judge Sotomayor rejected discrimination-related claims by a [ratio] of roughly 8 to 1." (See the top 10 Supreme Court nomination battles.)

So, what does she actually believe? An examination of Sotomayor's career supports the idea that on the bench, she has been a racial moderate, not a radical. At the same time, her opinions and speeches suggest that her views about race, multiculturalism and identity politics are more nuanced, complex and provocative than either her critics or her supporters have allowed. And for that reason, if confirmed, she could influence the racially charged issues the Supreme Court will confront over the next few decades in unexpected ways.

The Richness of Experience

The first speech in which Sotomayor introduced the "wise Latina" theme was delivered in Puerto Rico in 1994 and focused not on race but on gender. Sotomayor was responding to an article written by a colleague, Miriam Goldman Cedarbaum, a federal judge in New York. Cedarbaum, like Justice Sandra Day O'Connor and Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, was an "equal treatment" feminist, who had expressed concern about the premise that women judges necessarily approach cases differently than men do. "Generalizations about the way women or men are," Ginsburg famously said, "cannot guide me reliably in making decisions about particular individuals."

Read "Four Enduring Myths About Supreme Court Nominees."

Watch TIME's video "Sonia Sotomayor: Bronx (and Baseball) Role Model."

Sotomayor, in her speech, takes a very different view from Ginsburg's and O'Connor's. She sympathizes with "difference feminists" and then says she is not sure she agrees with O'Connor's reputed statement that "a wise old man and a wise old woman reach the same conclusion in deciding cases." Sotomayor concludes, "I would hope that a wise woman with the richness of her experience, would, more often than not, reach a better conclusion" — and then defines "better" as a "more compassionate, and caring conclusion." She also recommends a 1993 article in Judicature, a legal journal, that found that women judges reached different conclusions from men in employment-discrimination cases but not in obscenity or criminal cases. The claim that gender makes a difference in some categories of cases is widely accepted today, but academic theorizing about women's essential differences still remains hotly debated.

When Sotomayor gave her speech in 2001 at California's Berkeley School of Law, "A Latina Judge's Voice," she added "people of color" to the earlier passages that focused on gender. "I wonder whether by ignoring our differences as women or men of color we do a disservice to the law and society," she wrote in a 2002 article based on the talk. And yet it is hard to portray her speeches as those of someone committed to the view that all women and minority judges have essentially different perspectives than white male judges. "No one person, judge or nominee will speak in a female or people-of-color voice," Sotomayor said in her "wise Latina woman" speech, citing Justice Clarence Thomas as representing a "part but not the whole of the African-American thought on many subjects." In other speeches, she has emphasized that her view of justice requires understanding the different perspectives of the clashing parties rather than imposing her individual perspective. In a public-service dinner at Columbia Law School in 1999, she said, "I am learning that to begin thinking about justice, you must constantly step out of the role you are in and not just listen to your adversaries but learn to respect and appreciate their perspectives." She added that prosecutors, defense attorneys and civil attorneys should appreciate one another's roles and practice in a fair and procedurally correct way.

Sotomayor does not appear to be a crusader for radical change. She has always sought change from within the system rather than fundamentally challenging its premises. As a student at Princeton, she co-chaired a Puerto Rican student organization and filed a complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission about Princeton's affirmative-action failures, leading to the hiring of the first Hispanic dean of students. But she acted in such a constructive way that William Bowen, then university president, helped select her for the Pyne Prize, the highest honor Princeton bestows on undergraduates. Sotomayor's experiences as an outsider in an Ivy League world seem to have made her pragmatic rather than rigid, leading her to thrive within the Establishment even as she sought to improve it.

Moderate on the Bench

Although Sotomayor's speeches raise legitimate questions about her views on essential race and gender differences, the best evidence that she is no radical multiculturalist in the courtroom is found in her judicial opinions. Here she appears to be an incrementalist rather than a radical of any stripe. In a survey of Sotomayor's 226 majority opinions, Stefanie Lindquist, a law professor at the University of Texas at Austin, found that only 38% could clearly be characterized as liberal, while 49% could clearly be considered conservative. When the criminal cases (in which appellate judges are encouraged by Supreme Court precedent to be relatively pro-prosecution) are taken out of the mix, Sotomayor's record looks about 46% liberal and 36% conservative.

On civil rights cases — including race, gender and immigration appeals — Sotomayor tilts more to the left; Lindquist characterized her majority opinions as 54% liberal and 46% conservative. But when you break out the seven majority opinions involving race, only three rule in favor of the discrimination plaintiffs. It's in the immigration and gender cases that Sotomayor shows clearer signs of liberal leanings: out of 28 majority opinions in immigration cases, Sotomayor decided in favor of the immigrant in 17, or 61%. And in four gender cases, involving sex discrimination and sexual harassment, she decided in favor of the plaintiff all four times.

Read "The Limits of Empathy for Sonia Sotomayor."

But it's in dissents rather than in majority opinions that appellate judges often reveal their true feelings. Of Sotomayor's 19 published dissents, only three dealt clearly with racial issues, and they pointed in different directions. In a 1999 case, Gant v. Wallingford Board of Education, Sotomayor would have allowed a 6-year-old African-American student to challenge as racial discrimination his school's decision to demote him from first grade to kindergarten. In Pappas v. Giuliani (2002), Sotomayor would have held that the New York City police department may have violated the First Amendment when it fired a police officer for his racist, anonymous speech. And in Hayden v. Pataki (2006), Sotomayor said that a New York State law barring felons from voting violated the federal Voting Rights Act. Sotomayor does not appear to be an outlier in race cases, although she seems to have no overarching theory about how to decide them. For that reason, she seems unlikely, in the short term, to affect the balance on the Roberts Court in cases involving race. At the moment, the court is divided among four color-blind conservatives who are suspicious of affirmative action, four liberals who are sympathetic to it, and Anthony Kennedy, who is skeptical of racial classifications but reluctant to strike all of them down, in the middle. On most cases, Sotomayor can be expected to assume David Souter's current spot as the fourth member of the liberal bloc.

Future Fault Lines

But Sotomayor's unique background and views about race and gender are likely to become more important over time. In coming years, there may well be challenges to the death penalty, for example, on the grounds that it is imposed in a racially discriminatory way. The court rejected that claim in 1987, but Sotomayor might be sympathetic to it. In 1981, as a member of the board of directors of the Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund, she was part of a committee that recommended that the fund oppose the reinstatement of the death penalty in New York State on the grounds that "capital punishment is associated with evident racism in our society."

Sotomayor's more liberal inclinations in immigration cases may also make a difference on a court that will increasingly have to wrestle with legal distinctions in the U.S. between citizens and aliens. As Obama disappoints civil libertarians by reaffirming aspects of President Bush's antiterrorism policies — including the claim that terrorism detainees held by U.S. forces in Afghanistan have no legal right to challenge their detention in U.S. courts — some of these policies may reach the Supreme Court. Sotomayor could prove skeptical of the claim often made by the government that the rights of aliens differ sharply from the rights of citizens in the war on terrorism and in other cases.

If Sotomayor is confirmed, as expected, the only thing one can confidently predict is that the cases involving race and diversity that she will confront are very different from the ones we are thinking about today. In that sense, the evolution of Sotomayor's thinking in the years ahead may be more consequential than what she has said in her past.

Rosen, a law professor at George Washington University, is the author of The Supreme Court: The Personalities and Rivalries