The following is an abridged version of a presentation at a New York City PSL forum June 12.
On May 26, Barack Obama nominated Judge Sonia Sotomayor to the highest court in the country, the U.S. Supreme Court. We have all been told about her many academic achievements as if this was a strange novelty, as if it should be surprising to us that one of our people could be smart and educated.
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Having said that, however, Latinos, particularly Puerto Ricans, are rightly proud that one of their own is being recognized. The pride has been matched by a slew of reactionary racist commentary by the right wing.
The right wing has been critical of Sotomayor for having said at one time that her experience as a Latina woman gives her a perspective different from that of a white man. This is hardly a revolutionary statement—it is something we all see as a fact of life. Yet even that harmless single statement is viewed as dangerous. Of course, the message is that white upper-class men are impartial and above class because they do not talk about racism and oppression.
Our party stands against any racist attack, no matter who is the target. We understand it as a ruling-class effort to maintain order by pitting our class against itself. We must be very clear that racist attacks of any type cannot and will not be tolerated or ignored.
The Obama era has opened the door to a new situation, and the ruling class is at a bit of a crossroads. Some elements are comfortable with multinational faces in high administrative positions as long as property relations do not change. Others need to hang on to racism at all levels as a vital function in class repression. You can see that this is not an easy matter for them to resolve. Even the right-wingers had to retract some of their statements because it could harm them more than help them.
Working-class people are asking, is Sotomayor progressive? Should we support her since she comes from an oppressed community? She has decided 96 race-related cases in the past 11 years in her tenure at the court of appeals. In about 78 of these cases, she ruled against the claim of discrimination and agreed with the discrimination claim about 10 times—all but one of these decisions was unanimous. This means she has ruled in favor of the plaintiffs in race-discrimination cases about 10 percent of the time, but we do not know if this is average, below average or above average.
She has supported a felon’s right to vote, which is something we also support, but she has also ruled in favor of the NYPD, supporting the free speech rights of a racist cop who compared African Americans to animals.
How the Supreme Court works
Sotomayor will bring her own perspective to the court, but the biggest misconception is that she will change its nature and impact on social progress—that if only she could convince her other eight colleagues in the court to view things from a working-class perspective, things would be different.
This misconception has plagued the women’s rights movement for several decades now, neutralizing its vitality. The existing women’s movement, currently shackled to the Democratic Party and bogged down by bourgeois liberalism, has focused on electing people into office so they can then nominate pro-choice judges, basically only waiting for a change in the court to achieve justice. In the meantime, millions of women in this country already cannot find an abortion clinic and must travel long distances to receive this basic element of women’s health care.
Not only are we essentially devoid of clinics in most parts of the country, fascist anti-women organizations are allowed to function unanswered, something that has unfortunately led to the recent killing of Dr. George Tiller in Kansas. His murderer was a neo-fascist egged on by a virulent anti-women campaign led by the likes of Bill O’Reilly and Operation Rescue.
Unfortunately, the bourgeois women’s organizations simply expect justice to come from individual justices within a system rigged against working-class and women’s interests. The result has been deadly.
The Supreme Court’s ‘impartial’ history
Since its inception, the Supreme Court has been a pillar of the capitalist state at the service of the ruling class and its interests. This unelected body of appointed justices who serve for life can even overturn the decisions of the supposedly democratically elected Congress on constitutional grounds. The Supreme Court claims to be impartial and above class. The truth is that how they interpret the Constitution and the law is ultimately based on the needs of the ruling class at any particular time. It is an integral part of the capitalist state apparatus, which also includes the police and the prisons. The history of its decisions shows this to be the case.
In the 1857 Dred Scott v. Sandford case, the court found that Scott, a slave who sued for his freedom, could not sue in federal court because Black people were not citizens. This was the “impartial” interpretation of the Constitution at the time.
During World War II, the Supreme Court approved the internment of 100,000 Japanese Americans. This was in line with the ruling class’s need at that time to scapegoat people of Japanese descent in order to go to war. Interestingly, this never happened with people of German descent, only the Japanese.
Historically, the Supreme Court has also routinely sided with the bosses in decisions involving the labor movement, pushing to weaken existing labor laws. However, despite the deeply right-wing nature of the Supreme Court, it has occasionally been forced to respond to the mass movement and outside political pressure.
Lessons from Brown v. Board of Ed
A good example was the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education ruling that struck down the “separate but equal” clause allowing segregated public schools. That decision could not have passed through the racist-dominated Congress in 1954, but sectors of the ruling class knew it was critical to the U.S. standing in the global struggle against the Soviet Union and the growing tide of anti-colonial and socialist revolutions. The Supreme Court judges, who did not have to face election, were the preferred vehicle for this important concession to the Black community.
At that time, Jim Crow apartheid was discrediting U.S. imperialism around the world while the Soviet Union and China gave material support to the anti-colonial movements. The global communist trend pointed to the existence of apartheid in the United States as irrefutable evidence of the criminal character of U.S. capitalism.
At home, after suffering years of terrible oppression, the Black community was ready to resume its struggle for freedom, but on an even greater scale in the South. Important sectors in the ruling class anticipated that this new movement against the racist police state in the South would lead to a massive social explosion.
These factors, not any one judge, had a decisive impact on the court’s 1954 decision. The decision laid the legal basis for other achievements by the civil rights movement, like the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
These laws were only passed after millions of people were in the streets. The ruling class understood quite well that concessions were needed if their rule over the means of production was to continue.
Similarly, the decision that legalized abortion, Roe vs. Wade, was the result of a massive women’s movement. The women’s movement, influenced by the civil rights and anti-war movements, fought tooth and nail for equality and control of their own bodies, with millions of people in the streets demanding basic human rights.
With masses of people on the march, the court had to recognize a woman’s right to choose. In every instance, the background of the justices sitting on the court—primarily white and conservative—did not have anything to do with the decisions that today protect basic civil rights.
Sotomayor’s background and persona will not make a fundamental change in the court. No matter who sits on the court, the institution is there to protect the ruling class’s interests.
Do not expect racism to be decided away, do not expect police brutality to disappear, do not expect equality to be voted in by nine individually hand-picked judges. With or without Judge Sotomayor, do not expect to find justice at the Supreme Court. It is only found in the power of the people. Our job is to patiently explain this fact to our class and to organize, organize, organize.
