"Sotomayor's vainglorious lecture bromide about herself as "a wise Latina" trumping white men is a vulgar embarrassment - a vestige of the bad old days of male-bashing feminism"

Camille Paglia is aiming a barbed critique at the rhetoric surrounding identity and merit. By calling Sonia Sotomayor’s “wise Latina” remark “vainglorious,” she paints it as self-congratulatory and inflated, a self-promotion of identity as a credential. “Lecture bromide” suggests a canned, moralizing cliché, something recited to signal virtue rather than to illuminate. The phrase “trumping white men” dramatizes the implication Paglia hears in the original remark: that identity itself confers superior judgment, a claim she sees as both intellectually thin and socially corrosive.

Labeling it a “vulgar embarrassment” underscores her view that elevating one demographic’s presumed wisdom over another’s is a lapse in taste and judgment, especially in the judicial sphere, where impartiality is prized. The court, ideally, is the realm of universal principles and reasoned argument; asserting identity-based superiority risks undercutting the ideal of blind justice. Paglia’s discomfort isn’t with experience shaping perspective, an uncontroversial point, but with essentialism: the idea that belonging to a group guarantees better conclusions.

Her phrase “a vestige of the bad old days of male-bashing feminism” positions her critique within feminist debates. She distinguishes between a feminism that expands opportunity and civil equality and a strand that, in her telling, built itself on denigrating men as a class. To her, the “wise Latina” formulation replicates a zero-sum posture, lifting one group by implying the inferiority of another, and thus feels dated, reactive, and politically unwise.

The broader implication is strategic and ethical. Identity can enrich deliberation, but when framed as superiority, it breeds resentment and weakens coalitions, reviving stereotypes of feminism as anti-male rather than pro-equality. Paglia warns that such sloganeering diminishes the speaker’s authority and distracts from substantive accomplishment. In her view, true credibility in public life flows from rigorous argument, demonstrated excellence, and respect for universal standards, not from the rhetorical elevation of identity into a trump card.