Smearing Sotomayor

On Saturday, May 30, a 48-year-old man in New York City called the city's emergency services and said he intended to "blow up" Judge Sonia Sotomayor, President Obama's Supreme Court nominee. Police arrested the man and sent him to Bellevue Hospital for a psychiatric evaluation, where he remained as of this writing.

While this threat has not been previously reported, it would not seem unusual to prominent Latinos or Latino organizations, both frequent targets of what has become an extremely ugly and very public kind of racism.

At the Washington headquarters of the National Council of La Raza, a Hispanic advocacy group, the evidence arrives like clockwork. Whenever the organization's harshest critics mention it in the mainstream media, the number of nasty calls and e-mails skyrockets. Last year a man was convicted in North Carolina for e-mailing a death threat to members of La Raza.

"I've never seen such a mainstream acceptance of the kind of anti-Latino rhetoric that you now see," says Frank Sharry, the founder of America's Voice, a communications campaign that promotes immigration reform. Latinos are called criminals, disease carriers and a threat to the country, and few reject the accusations, he says.

Of course, those spewing the venom insist that they have nothing against Latinos as a people, that their targets are illegal immigrants, and that their only interest is in preserving the rule of law. But the ease with which many of these commentators have redirected their rhetoric toward Sotomayor has revealed their true ethnic intolerance.

In an interview on CNN, Tom Tancredo, a Republican former congressman and presidential candidate who ran on an anti-immigrant platform, called Sotomayor a "racist" due to her past affiliation with La Raza, which he called "a Latino KKK without the hoods or the nooses."

Mark Krikorian, the executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, questioned her "assimilation" to the United States in a blog post on the National Review's Web site because her "putting the emphasis on the final syllable of Sotomayor is unnatural in English."

Most recently, a conservative commentator named Debbie Schlussel asserted that Sotomayor was chosen solely because she is the descendent of Puerto Ricans and grew up in poverty in the Bronx, N.Y. The commentator has decided to start referring to her as "Justice J-Lo."

Under most circumstances, we all would be better off ignoring this display of ignorance and incivility. After all, if that is the extent to which people can criticize her, Sotomayor will be confirmed easily by the Senate and this ugly chapter will soon be forgotten.

But denigrating and demonizing attacks have consequences far beyond the possibility that Hispanic voters might reject the Republican Party.

In a poll by Bendixen and Associates released last month, nearly two out of every three Latinos said they believe anti-immigrant rhetoric has increased discrimination against all Hispanics in the United States. Also, three out of four agreed that anti-immigrant beliefs are becoming more common.

In light of those results, it's not surprising that federal crime data shows a 40 percent increase in attacks against Latinos between 2003 and 2007. John Amaya, a staff attorney at the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund says "it is very clear that there is a correlation between the toxicity in the immigration debate and the violence." Amaya says this atmosphere is also promoting impunity, as many Latinos are becoming afraid to press charges if they have been victims of attacks.

"Very few people are directly inspired to commit hate crimes by rhetoric of hate," says Phyllis Gerstenfeld, the chair of the criminal justice department at California State University, Stanislaus. Still, she thinks such rhetoric does create "a general atmosphere that it is OK to attack certain people."

During her Senate confirmation hearing, Sotomayor will likely face a much more civilized line of questioning. At that point, she may say that she regrets having disparaged the wisdom of white men in her now famous 2001 speech at the University of California, Berkeley -- a difficult apology to make during the current smear campaign.

And who knows, maybe at the end of this process, more people in this country will reject the absurdities hurled at Sotomayor. Maybe more people will realize that Latinos are diverse -- some are immigrants (though many are not); some speak Spanish and pronounce their names accordingly; but all have a right to be respected.

The potential for an improvement like that is a powerful secondary reason why Latinos, the fastest growing segment of the U.S. population, should be grateful for Sotomayor's nomination.