Dear Emily Bazelon and David Newman,
I absolutely loved your “Supreme Court Shortlist” article, and learned quite a bit from it. However, I must take issue with your continuing portrayal of Justice Benjamin Cardozo as “Hispanic.”
I know you were quoting, perhaps a bit wryly, from Dahlia Lithwick’s earlier article where she examined his ethnic background. However, even Ms. Lithwick’s link to further information examined Justice Cardozo’s Sephardic Jewish ancestry, and other sources—like Andrew Kaufman’s excellent biography—examine how truly important his ethnicity as a Sephardic Jew was to him.
By repeating this “fact” that he was Hispanic, you oddly deprive a still-prominent figure in the law (at least according to Judge Posner) of the ethnicity he himself embraced. I suppose it further frustrates me because of all the hay made at the time of his appointment over his ancestry and geographical location (the joke was that there was no way he’d be appointed, because the Court already had a Jew and a New Yorker—Justices Brandeis and Stone, respectively).
Your perpetuation of a mistruth (because I recognize that it is not untrue—for instance, the first line of Justice Cardozo’s entry in the second edition of The Oxford Companion to the Supreme Court of the United States notes that he “was born into a community of persecuted Spanish and Portuguese Jews”) just leaves a bad taste in my mouth.
Otherwise, a fine, fine article, and thank-you for it.
Yours,
Gorjus
I think this is the funniest post you’ve ever done. Kudos!
I think this highlights how inflexible our (whoever “we” is—let’s say “America” or “white patriarchy”) conceptions of race are; it’s like we really don’t have time to think of the variety and complexity that “Otherness” or “non-whiteness” might take on, so we just slap on a label that indicates “different” and assume that’s enough. Think, for instance, of all the racial epithets that are just the n-word with an adjective—sand, yellow, or what have you modifying it.