By Lee A. Daniels

There she is …. Ms. America….

I don’t mean to be flippant. But, as I’ve watched Judge Sonia Sotomayor, President Obama’s nominee for the U.S. Supreme Court, testifying this week before the Senate Judiciary Committee, that snippet of the tune sung to salute the newly-crowned winner of the Miss America beauty pageant, kept cycling through my mind.

And then I realized why.

Sonia Sotomayor with President Barack Obama (AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais )

Sonia Sotomayor is one of our new—that is, more fully recognized and appreciated—Ms.  Americas. Just as Michelle Obama is. Just as the President himself represents one of America’s newly-recognized and appreciated “Mr. Americas.” Just as, together, the President and First Lady represent a new addition to the galaxy of couples who now represent both the ideal and the reality of America.

Sonia Sotomayor and the Obamas embody the talent, ambition, intellect and savior faire to be found in a huge cohort of Americans that until a mere forty years ago was imprisoned behind high barriers of racism and sexism. Their achievements, writ large, refute spectacularly the once-dominant, terrible American “tradition” of excluding people of color from the mainstream.

Sonia Sotomayor embodies the extraordinary benefits to American society of the social revolution that dismantled the structure of Jim Crow and, via such policies as affirmative action, significantly expanded opportunity across the nation’s color and gender lines.

Her nomination, by the nation’s first black American president, itself bears eloquent witness to the dominance now in America of the tradition of inclusion and reaffirms the meaning of that justly-celebrated declaration of the Constitution the Civil Rights Movement rescued from hypocrisy—We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal and endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights ….

Lee A. Daniels is Director of Communications for the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund and Editor-in-Chief of TheDefendersOnline.com