Race and Gender Issues

Anita Hill

Wednesday night I saw Anita Hill speak on campus, and she was awesome.

From her speech, I really took away some good food for thought: she said when it comes to Supreme Court nominees, we need to worry more about judicial philosophy as much as we do about credentials. She said the fact that credentials are emphasized over philosophy is elitist (looking for Ivy League degrees) sexist, and racist.

She also said that the way that Bush introduced Harriet Miers versus the way he presented Samuel Alito and John Roberts shows his own sexist bias. Bush emphasized Alito's and Roberts's experience and legal pedigrees while saying of Miers that he "knows her heart."

To be fair, Miers has no experience as a judge, while Roberts had at least two years and Alito has 15 years.

At the end of the speech, I asked her who she would pick for the Supreme Court. She mentioned Sonia Sotomayor, a Yale classmate of hers. But she emphasized that if the president were looking for qualified women, that the list is long.

A little incoherence

I began to notice on oh, Tuesday, that the overwhelming majority of the people photographed as being stuck in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina and its horrible aftermath were black.

I'm disappointed that I cannot find the "offending" picture and caption, in which an Agence-France Presse photographer wrote that a white family had "found" some food, while in almost every other caption, black families had "looted" food.

Protecting people who have little protection themselves is, at base, what I believe the job of the government is. The president would have you believe that that is the role of Christian organizations. (Let's get something clear — "faith-based programs" are really all Christian-based programs.) But they don't have the money, resources, power, and planning mechanisms to relieve suffering. For goodness sakes, the government wasn't even allowing the Red Cross into the center of New Orleans until yesterday.