"I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn't lived that life,"
This was a speech at Cal.
It would help if there entire context of the speech was available but the charges that she is a racist is according to this quote from 2001. From Limbaugh, Fox News, and now Glenn Beck all point to this as a racist comment and if a white man said this he would be indicted for being a racist. :eyes: Anyways the comment doesn't at all seem racist, in fact I would hope the same thing to.
Anyways here is the full story at media matter.
SUMMARY: Megyn Kelly and Jan Crawford Greenburg misrepresented a remark that Sonia Sotomayor made in a speech published in 2002, claiming that Sotomayor suggested, in Kelly's words, "that Latina judges are obviously better than white male judges."
Fox News host Megyn Kelly and ABC correspondent Jan Crawford Greenburg misrepresented a remark that Judge Sonia Sotomayor, President Obama's nominee to the Supreme Court, made in a speech delivered at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law, claiming that she suggested, in Kelly's words, "that Latina judges are obviously better than white male judges." In fact, when Sotomayor asserted, "I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn't lived that life," she was specifically discussing the importance of judicial diversity in determining race and sex discrimination cases. As Media Matters for America has noted, former Bush Justice Department lawyer John Yoo has similarly stressed that Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas "is a black man with a much greater range of personal experience than most of the upper-class liberals who take potshots at him" and argued that Thomas' work on the court has been influenced by his understanding of the less fortunate acquired through personal experience.
During the May 26 edition of Fox News' America's Newsroom, Kelly described Sotomayor's remarks as "reverse racism" and said it was "
ike she's saying that Latina judges are obviously better than white male judges." Kelly later added, "I've looked at the entire speech that she was offering to see if that was taken out of context, and I have to tell you ... it wasn't." Similarly, in a May 26 report on ABC's Good Morning America, Greenburg claimed that Sotomayor "suggest that a wise Latino may actually be a better judge than a white man, and that white men have had some attitude adjustments and reached moments of great enlightenment, but there's a long way to go."
Contrary to Kelly and Greenburg's claims, Sotomayor did not say or suggest that Latina or Latino judges are "better" than white male judges, but was instead talking specifically about "race and sex discrimination cases." From Sotomayor's speech delivered at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law and published in 2002 in the Berkeley La Raza Law Journal:
http://mediamatters.org/research/200905260050