Sonia Sotomayor and the rise of the ghetto nerds

Judge Sonia Sotomayor visits with students from her alma mater, Cardinal Spellman High School (White House handout)

Judge Sonia Sotomayor embodies the rise of a new and increasingly influential player in American life: the ghetto nerd. If she’s confirmed by the U.S. Senate this week, as expected, she’ll join other ghetto nerds who have also made it big recently, gaining access to rarefied spheres of American life usually reserved for the super-privileged. Just to name a couple: former U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell and Pulitzer-prize winning novelist Junot Díaz, who might be described as a champion of the ghetto nerd concept, if not its originator.

As reams of reductive newspaper biographies have pointed out, Sotomayor grew up in the South Bronx, to working-class parents from Puerto Rico. Her father died when she was still young, and Sotomayor was raised by her mother, a nurse. She went on to gain admission to Princeton University and Yale Law School. Colin Powell, for his part, was also raised in the Bronx, by Caribbean immigrant parents.

Junot Díaz, the writer, was born in the Dominican Republic but grew up in gritty New Jersey suburbs near a landfill.  Shortly after Díaz’s received his Pulitzer for The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao in 2008, journalist Carolina Gonzalez  described it as a victory for ghetto nerds everywhere, kids unlucky enough to be born bright and ambitious in the worst of contexts:

Under the guise of a streetwise tale about a lovelorn “ghetto-nerd” and a cheating would-be hoodlum, [Díaz] does nothing less than place us at the center of history … Which “us” do I mean? I mean us the brown, us the immigrants, us who work without respite or benefits, us the young, uncertain whether our futures hold promise or violence, us the smart ones who try to hide it lest we compromise our street cred, us who have come a long way and keep trying to forget the pain that brought us here, us who all too often feel powerless, silent, unseen.

During this month’s nomination hearings, Sonia Sotomayor, who once famously referenced herself as a “wise Latina,” was certainly at the center of history, and will remain there when she’s confirmed as member of the exclusive nine-member court. Efforts to paint her as some sort of affirmative action extremist were flattened by the sheer weight of Sotomayor’s experience, thousands upon thousands of respected legal opinions, and at least a half-dozen Republicans will jump ship and vote with Democrats to confirm her. In reality, ghetto nerd fairy-tales aren’t just about the race wars, it’s a brute simplification to boil them down to that. They’re also about overcoming class, urban blight, and, as Gonzalez says, the anti-intellectual bias so pervasive in America’s streets, outside the middle class’s college prep mentality.