In a stroke of irony, as the Senate Judiciary Committee closed three days of testimony in the confirmation hearings for Judge Sonia Sotomayor, the Missouri History Museum opened its doors for a viewing of Borrowed Time, a documentary from the Color of Justice film series detailing the Reggie Clemons case.
This transition is ironic because of the insistence of Republican lawmakers, like Senators Jeff Sessions of Alabama and John Cornyn of Texas, that the nominee for the highest court in the land reject previous public statements that her perspective – as a 55-year-old, Hispanic woman – makes her a more qualified interpreter of the law.
The prospective justice – who would be the first Hispanic, only the second woman and the sixth Catholic to serve on the Supreme Court – is being considered for a seat atop the very system of justice that, as Borrowed Time illustrates, exercises bias toward communities of minority status. It seems to me a “wise Latina woman” is one of many voices needed to correct our history of systematic injustices.
But, the greater issue at hand is that representatives of a party, Judiciary Committee and Senate dominated by middle-aged, white men whose limited experiences as empowered keepers of the system are calling on the most qualified Supreme Court nominee in recent history to do something that they have not done and that is actually impossible: to make meaning of facts and interpret information apart from experience.
We need look no further than the pulpits of our centers of worship to recognize that our experience shapes how we understand life, love, the law and the Lord. From the same Bible, Africans enslaved in America constructed a theology from their social position, while the slave masters did the same.
The Christian faith of the slaves lifted up the Old Testament story of a people enslaved, like them, yet divinely liberated in miraculous spectacle. The Exodus experience of Hebrews and the formation of a great nation of Israel is the lens through which Black Christians see the movement of God and the ministry of Jesus.
On the other side of the coin, slaveholders found justification for their status in the words attributed to the apostle Paul in the New Testament, encouraging slaves to obey their masters and to yield to their acts of oppression. Further support for the status quo was built on passages encouraging prayer for those in leadership and humble submission to authority.
These interpretations – based on personal and communal experience – have shaped divergent church traditions and the American story from its earliest days. Not only is seeing the world through the lens of one’s culture and social location historically and theologically consistent, it is American in the most patriotic sense of the word.
In the end, we received assurances from the good senators from the South that Judge Sotomayor will be confirmed, as her past rulings measured up to their standards of “mainstream” legal reasoning, leaning on the concept of color-blind (and ultimately ‘culture-blind’) justice. The difference is that the senators’ perspective is presented as “mainstream.” Sociologists will remind us that this is the beginning of White privilege: the belief and establishment of one group’s perspective as the norm. The second move in this game is to diminish the importance of seeing color, or culture, altogether.
Witnesses giving testimony against this concept of culture-blindness opened their hearings as the Judiciary Committee closed theirs. In St. Louis, Reggie Clemons, the Reynolds family and concerned citizens testified in film and forum that the “mainstream” is not colorblind, but color-biased.
And perhaps, the first African-American president of this nation submitted a certain witness of warning to individuals like Sessions and Cornyn from the NAACP platform in New York. There he recalled his experience of standing in dungeons for slaves awaiting auction before passage from Ghana to America, nestled beneath a church on the surface above as a message about “saying one thing and doing another.”
The Rev. Starsky D. Wilson is pastor and teacher for Saint John’s United Church of Christ, an inter-racial congregation in North St. Louis.