Good Little Colored Girl

In a post perfectly titled "Sotomayor and the Politics of Public Humiliation," Princeton professor Melissa Harris-Lacewell explains why the all-white, all-male repug members of the Senate judiciary committee got to spew racist, sexist insults and hysterical accusations at a nominee for the Supreme Court, while that nominee had to sit there and swallow it all.

One of the most enduring images of the Civil Rights Movement is of Elizabeth Eckford. She is being harassed and taunted by a group of white students, parents, and police on her way to desegregate Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas. On that morning Eckford missed connecting with the eight other African American students of the Little Rock Nine and their NAACP leader, Daisy Bates. Eckford was alone when the angry crowd surrounded and confronted her.

The photo is now iconic. Eckford's dignity, strength, and self-possession are stunning counterpoint to the contorted, hate-filled faces of those following her.

This image of Eckford kept returning to me as I watched the Senate confirmation hearings of Sonia Sotomayor. Although Sotomayor herself deplores metaphor and analogy, Eckford's harassment seemed an apt comparison to the hearings. Although her confirmation was nearly certain, Republican senators were determined to make Sotomayor walk a gauntlet on her way to the Supreme Court.

SNIP

Like Eckford, Sotomayor has been praised for her dignity, her stillness, and the evenness of her voice as she responded to hostile mischaracterizations. She managed to laugh off sexist jokes. She didn't flinch when she was repeatedly interrupted. Senator Lindsey Graham warned that her confirmation could only be derailed if she had "a complete meltdown." The rules of the game were set: the Senators could mischaracterize her record, accuse her of racial bias, and mispronounce her name but she could not respond in kind. She could not be hurt or offended or angry. She had to remain a pillar of rationality and neutrality and control.

The hearing was a performance of a broader set of social rules that govern race and gender interactions in American politics. Women, and most especially black and brown women, have to prove their fitness for public life by demonstrating the ability to endure harsh brutality without openly fighting back. The ability to bear up under public degradation is a test of worth. America's favorite black woman heroine is Rosa Parks, a woman who is remembered as silently enduring the humiliation of being ejected from a public bus for refusing to comply with segregated seating.

SNIP

The Republican attacks on Sotomayor were not meant to derail her nomination. They were meant to degrade and humiliate as a warning: if you attempt to assert your equality within a system still dominated by white male racial privilege you may get a place at the table, but not without public punishment.

Read the whole thing.