Justice at Trial: Dramatic Ironies of the Postracial State

Abstract

This article challenges the celebration of Sonia Sotomayor’s confirmation to the Supreme Court as the realization of the American dream and Court diversity in a colorblind era. It analyzes the epistemological compromises Sotomayor had to make in order to comply with what I call the prevailing legal metanarrative of postracial impartiality. Prime among these compromises was Sotomayor’s retraction of her prior critique of the disembodied and de-raced perspective this legal metanarrative presumes. I read the confirmation hearing and its aftermath as a performative ritual in which both her interrogators and Sotomayor herself restore the normative hegemony of the ideal of colorblind objectivity. I argue that this ideal functions ideologically to maintain both normative and material white and masculine privilege, precisely as state decisionmaking institutions become increasingly sexually and ethnically diverse. I draw out the dramatic ironies of the participants’ strategic disavowals – Sotomayor’s denial of the roles personal experience and empathy play in judgment, and state officials’ denial of the persistent material relevance of race in the contemporary United States. I show that trading in these rhetorics has pernicious, and paradoxical, repercussions for the national racial order.