“You’ve come a long way, baby!” I guess that’s what I keep hearing in the background of the Senate Confirmation Sessions for Sonia Sotomayor. “And once you’ve come that long way, you should act like a (white) man, and not rock the boat with your ‘difference.’” Those white, male Senators don’t ask questions about impartiality when white, male judges are being confirmed, because, by definition, those men are unbiased, the norm, hey — they look the same and act same as the Senators asking the questions, so hey — they must be impartial.

But Sonia Sotomayor has bright, red toenails, which we can all see, because of her broken ankle. And she looks like she’s Hispanic. And as Joanna Russ (in The Female Man) said many years ago, when she walks into the hearing room, she “might as well be wearing a sandwich board that says: LOOK! I HAVE TITS!” Given all this difference, I guess Sotomayor has to write off her “wise Latina” comment as a “rhetorical flourish that failed.” And she’s probably smart to remain calm, unruffled, and unemotional or as Maureen Dowd called her “robotic.” These hearings are not the place to educate the elite about hegemony (and US Senators certainly count as the elite; just look at their health care packages!).

But I think hegemony is something that we need to talk about if we’re to understand what’s happening in the Senate these days. Hegemony is defined as “control or dominating influence by one person or group over others.” One of the insidious things about this kind of cultural dominance is that the people who have it usually don’t know that they’re privileged. They just think everybody else is like them.

Why is that? It’s not the elite’s fault that they turn a blind eye on the rest of us. They’re surrounded by people like themselves, with concerns like their own, children like theirs, who they want to succeed like they have. They go to the same clubs, speak the same language, have the same financial advisors, and worrry about the same thing. That’s the basis of their hegemony. They create the norms and values that our culture considers…well, normal.

The lives of the elite don’t take them to the South Bronx. They’ve never been poor. And they don’t need to speak Spanish. But for Sotomayor to succeed she had to leave the South Bronx, leave her poverty behind, and learn to speak English. And not just that, she had to learn how to operate by the norms of the dominant culture. Because in order to make it in the US, you need to know the rules of success, and white men wrote them years ago and update them as times change. Sotomayor more than learned those rules; she mastered them.

Nevertheless, Sonia Sotomayor will have to demonstrate that she won’t let her personal life color her legal opinions. Because the hegemonic world view creates an understanding of humanity as white and male, relegating women and people of “color” to the status of out-groups. Even the term “people of color” demonstrates this out-group standing, as if white weren’t a color, or at least a different color.

All of this is too bad, because Sotomayor was right when she said 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.” Women and people of color DO have a richness of experience that most white men don’t, because they live in two worlds, their own subculture and (if they have succeeded like Sotomayor) the dominant culture as well. As Elizabeth Quintero (another successful, wise Latina) said today in the Huffington Post

I can see things in the most fair way, because I know what the struggles of people are like. That doesn’t mean I’ll be unfair to the other. It means I know all the sides, the good sides and the bad sides, and it will make me see them both more fairly.