Podcast #59: Sonia Sotomayor on Education and Color Blindness
Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor has lived and continues to live with passion, vigor, and curiosity. In her memoir My Beloved World, Sotomayor recounts her childhood living in The Bronxdale Houses, public housing since renamed the Justice Sonia Sotomayor Houses; the death of her father; and her rise through the ranks of the judiciary. It is a huge honor to present Justice Sotomayor on this week's New York Public Library Podcast. She discusses her advice to college students, the importance of community service, and color blindness.
A Bronx native, Sotomayor attended Princeton University and Yale Law School before becoming the 111th appointment to the SOTUS. She suggested that college students find their communities but also challenge themselves to create connections with those of different backgorunds:
“My advice—and I say it in my book—if you're going to college today, in my situation, find your community who's going to support you, but make sure you learn about the other people in your environment. Make friends with people who are different than you. They will teach you valuable things that you can't even anticipate. Sometimes, and for some people, it's how to use a knife and fork. That sounds strange, but it helps. I had a friend teach me how to do interviews. I had no innate knowledge. I had a parent who couldn't help tell me how to do an interview, and I had a friend who in college took me aside and said, 'This is the kind of research you have to do before you go, and you have to have a list of questions prepared. You have to think about the institution and what's it's mission and what is it that attracts you to it so you can articulate your interest in the job. And then you need to manage to talk about the skills you think you're giving them.' All of these things are things I didn't or wouldn't have known, except because I made friends outside my own circle.”
As a college student, Sotomayor began volunteering in Trenton, New Jersey. It's an experience she hopes to see become a part of every student's experience:
“I speak mostly at law schools. I think law schools should force their students to do community service of some type. My model is Columbia Law School, which among the New York schools, first started the mandatory fifty hours of community service while you're in school. They defined community service very broadly, and I think that's a good thing, but they require students to do that, and I think you can't instill in someone who doesn't want to do something a desire, but you can expose people who have no idea of its value to something that they will continue doing, and I think that's what those programs do. They help people understand when you're in the community how good it feels to do something nice and how good it feels to do something meaningful.”
One of Sotomayor's more meaningful contributions to the Court has been her dissent in Schuette v. Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action. When asked if she believes America should be color blind, Justice Sotomayor explained her view in relationship to the case:
“Can America ever be color blind? Can any society? Look, in my dissent in Schuette I wrote about people's unconscious color sensitivity. They see a dark Hispanic and people will talk up to them and talk Spanish to a kid who was born in America and hasn't spoken a word of Spanish in their entire life. You will see a person playing sports who's African American and you expect them, you pick them for your team, because you think they're going to be a great basketball player. And if they flunk the test, how angry are you? But who says that because you're African American you have to be a great basketball player? Those are not color blind assumptions. It's in the nature of our differences that they will always be noticed, sometimes not with bad intent, sometimes with perfectly benign intent, but it will be there, and it shapes those expectations of people, what you know of them or don't know of them is going to shape your reaction to them. So, I don't know that we can ever be color blind, but we can be sensitive enough to pause and say, 'What's motivating me?' Can we reach a point in our society that before people react, they think about where that reaction's coming from? That, I think, will go a long way to making us better able to deal with one another, and I don't think we're quite there yet. Regrettably, the discussion on affirmative action shows that we're not there yet, that we still need to have this conversation and that two groups or groups are so divided on its importance suggests that we just haven't found the right compromise that will show us how to deal with that issue and many involving race in a more progressive and a more productive way.”
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