More Than One Way to Define Diversity

Yesterday, May 26, 2009, President Obama nominated the first Latina for the Supreme Court. If confirmed, Sonia Sotomayor will be the third woman to serve and possibly the first Hispanic. There is some question about the ethnicity of Justice Benjamin Cardozo who served from 1932 to 1938. Apparently Cardozo did not identify or describe himself as Hispanic.

The Washington Post ran an article yesterday describing the composition of the Court beyond race and gender. The composition is homogenous in terms of education and experience. Eight of the current justices attended either Yale or Harvard Law School. Justice Ginsburg attended Harvard, but was awarded her law degree from Columbia University. Justice Stevens is the exception. He was educated in the heartland of America and received his law degree from Northwestern Law. Sotomayer will join the majority, having received her law degree from Yale Law School.

A second striking similarity the article describes is that the current court is the first in history to be made up solely of judges who came directly from the appellate ranks, and that only two justices, Stevens and Kennedy, are from courts that are not on the Eastern Seaboard. Sotomayer joins the majority, serving in the U. S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the 2nd District in New York.

Some of the striking differences beyond race and gender are religion. The article reports that there are currently five Catholics, two Jews and two Protestants on Court. Currently, Justice Souter is the only justice who has served on a state court. The last justice who served in an elected office was Sandra Day O’Connor who brought a unique measure of practicality and problem-solving from that experience.

Discussion in the popular press about diversity is often focused on those visible dimensions of diversity such as race and gender. Yet, it was in 1991 that R. Roosevelt Thomas, Jr. published “Beyond Race and Gender” and challenged organizations to unleash the power of their total workforces. If we are going to truly understand and celebrate diversity, it is imperative to move beyond the visible and the obvious. What Sotomayer brings is a diversity of experience within the legal profession, including work as a prosecutor, work in private practice representing corporate interests and serving as a trial court judge before her appointment to the appellate court. Her diversity of experience, combined with the diversity of her heritage, is what makes her unique. We all need to get in touch with our personal diversity across many dimensions and celebrate our own uniqueness.