Ruben Navarrette: GOP needs ‘crash course in Latinos 101′
Posted by Keith Kamisugi | Filed under Opinion
San Diego Union-Tribune columnist Ruben Navarrette writes today:
Sonia Sotomayor once said that, when she arrived at Princeton University fresh from the Bronx, she felt like “a visitor landing in an alien country.”
Well, after needlessly subjecting Sotomayor to a four-day spectacle of interrogation, humiliation and condescension, the seven Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee should feel as if they were the ones who just visited an alien country.
It’s startling just how sheltered many of our political leaders really are. With Latinos on the way to representing a third of the U.S. population by 2050, many in Congress are still acting as if it is 1950.
Given how they related to the Supreme Court nominee with curiosity and suspicion, you would think that the senators’ preconceived notions of Latinas were limited to Hollywood images of the nanny, maid or seductress.
Given how some of them seemed fearful of the group LatinoJustice PRLDEF, on whose board Sotomayor served for several years, you would think that these senators had never heard of a civil rights organization for Latinos even though there are other groups that serve black, gays and lesbians, the disabled, etc.
Tags: gop, Latinos, Republicans, Ruben Navarrette, sonia sotomayor
