Objectivity Lesson

News …

In the second day of her Senate confirmation hearings, U.S. Supreme Court nominee Judge Sonia Sotomayor addressed the accusations of some Republicans that her identity, experiences and her empathy might distort her rulings. According to the New York Times:

“We’re not robots,” the judge said at one point, as she described judges’ personal backgrounds as sources to enrich the law rather than warp it. But she did not walk that semantic tightrope nimbly enough for Mr. Sessions, as he made clear repeatedly, despite his courtly courtesy.

Later, under sharp questioning from Senator Jon Kyl of Arizona, the Republican whip, Judge Sotomayor tried to counter accusations from her detractors that she is an “activist judge” who might indulge in policy-making and decide issues by relying on sentiment rather than law and logic if put on the high court.

“Congress makes the law,” she said. “It’s up to the judge to apply the law.” At another point, she said, “We apply laws to facts; we don’t apply feelings to facts.”

The questions and comments by GOP senators over whether Sotomayor would be able to be “objective” in her judgments led to a flurry of blog posts about the idea of neutral identities and the myth of objectivity.

Don Wycliff at dotCommonweal linked to Washington Post editor Eugene Robinson’s op-ed piece that called out the notion that “being white and male is seen instead as a neutral condition, the natural order of things. Any “identity”–black, brown, female, gay, whatever–has to be judged against this supposedly “objective” standard.” Wycliff added:

I wondered in what cocoon these men have been living. They truly do seem to assume that an objective viewpoint apparently embodied in white males is the default, and any perspective other than that is an outlier.

Too bad they could not have been exposed to some of the debates and discussions that have taken place in newsrooms over the last quarter century, as journalists tried to expand their frames of reference and account for events in their communities that seemed to defy explanation by reference to their usual experiences.

Journalism, which I had thought was the last bastion of so-called objectivity, has long since replaced that notion with the idea of “balance” and these days reporters are expected, through blogs and social networking, to put their humanity up front for readers. It’s interesting that we’re realizing that the objectivity myth isn’t actually serving the public as a whole, but only the status quo.

Crooks and Liars has a video from CNN where commentator Jeffrey Toobin calls out Sen. Jeff Sessions for blantantly revealing his “objectivity.” Part of the transcript:

JEFF TOOBIN: What’s worth noting about what Jeff Sessions — the line of questioning, was that being a white man, that’s normal. Everybody else has biases and prejudices[,] . . . but the white man, they don’t have any ethnicity, they don’t have any gender, they’re just like the normal folks, and I thought that was a little jarring.

Toobin hits on a fact of our society that the Sotomayor hearings are digging up out of our skeleton-laden past: As far as society is concerned, white straight men don’t have gender, or ethnicity, or sexual orientation. Think about it: How often to we have to describe a white, straight guy as a white straight guy? Rarely. Try it sometime; when talking about someone you know, name their race/ethnicity, gender and sexual identity, if you know it. One of my professors did this once and it pissed everyone off for weeks.

The point I’m trying to make is, everyone does have a context and a racial, gender and sexual identity. Some of us just get to ignore it better than others. And I wonder how effective you can be if your objectivity is really your own invisible subjectivity?

Matthew Yglesias nails the Senate Republicans on this in his post up at the Daily Beast. All judgments, he says, are activist ones; it just depends on who you’re acting for. For white conservatives, they’re acting for themselves, while at the same time claiming impartiality:

Conservative commentators like George Will like to portray their outrage over the Ricci case as a principled stance in favor of racial blindness, writing of “the predictable price of failing to simply insist that government cannot take cognizance of race.” But looking at the record quickly reveals that Will, like most conservatives, rarely if ever bemoans instances of racial discrimination against nonwhites. They oppose racial classifications for the specific reason that they fear such classifications are being used to disadvantage white people, and seek to advance this pro-white agenda through, among other things, activist judging.

I was wondering if it’s actually possible for someone who cannot see that all viewpoints are subjective to somehow see it, but then this post from ThinkProgress caught my eye: Iowa Sen. Chuck Grassley realized after Monday’s hearings that he’d been holding a different standard for Sotomayor than he had for previous court nominees. ThinkProgress wrote:

Grassley never objected when Judge Samuel Alito said virtually the same thing during his confirmation hearing, when Alito testified he “can’t help but think of” his immigrant family when evaluating immigration cases:

When I get a case about discrimination, I have to think about people in my own family who suffered discrimination because of their ethnic background, or because of religion or because of gender, and I do take that in to account.

Then yesterday, Grassley admitted to applying a double standard to Sotomayor during an interview with NPR’s Robert Siegel. Siegel reminded Grassley that during Alito’s confirmation hearing, the judge said his background plays a role in his judicial philosophy — and Alito still managed to secure Grassley’s support

So maybe it’s possible. I only wonder what Grassley will do, now that he knows. And what can those of us who live with this subjectivity help the objectivists see that a subjective world isn’t just a scary place after all?

Analysis …

• (hat tip to the League of Ordinary Gentlemen) Robert Wright, author of The Evolution of God, explains how the usually dovish atheism has attracted hawks like Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris (Read more).
• Nate Silver tries to understand why the Blue Dog Democrats, whose districts are among some of the worst ranked for health care coverage, are holding up reform legislation that would bring more coverage to those areas (guess which district tops the list? (Read more).
• Speaking of health care reform, the Brookings Institution says the politicians feelings about what their constituents want is way off base (Read more).
• Truthdig points to an article in the Wall Street Journal about the role that faith may play in the Texas public schoolroom, and how theology could end up informing teachings about history (Read more).