Jan 31, 2011 3
Pierce Hawthorne’s nominal allusion to the writer Nathaniel seems calculated as an ironic comment on his own rank immorality in the form of an anti-minority bias worn with shimmering scarlet pride. But Pierce’s racism is one unsavory aspect of his hopeful way of being human: inveterately deploying an insult and awaiting the closeness it will inevitably bring him with the insulted. Pierce’s racism is a racism of love.
Jun 19, 2009 0
U.S. Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor has been roundly accused of judicial bias in matters of race. Comparative analyses of “judicial bias,” even ones that give somewhat reliable comparative measures of various jurists’ work, operate by postulating a spectral fixed point of neutrality against which the scrutinized is measured. But where is this point? What constitutes it? What allows us to say that the contingent result of Sotomayor’s intellectual collaborations with dozens of individuals, absent Sotomayor’s views as such, constitutes a universal norm? Why should we presume that the average of the biases of multiple others represents a default lack of bias?
