Because history happened
Julian Sanchez on the Republican response to the Sotomayor nomination:
I find the “what if a white man said that?” move incredibly grating about 99 percent of the time it’s used, because it’s almost always a way of blotting out all the reasons that it would, in fact, be different. In the instance, it would be weird for a white man to say it because it’s probably not true that the experience of growing up as a white male in the United States specifically enhances one’s understanding of what it means to be a disfavored minority. … So yes, sometimes formally gramatically equivalent statements will have different connotations depending on whether it’s a white person speaking about whites or a Latino speaking about Latinos, because history happened. …
And as you watch these gross distortions pile up, you start coming away with the clear impression that they’re not just the result of simple sloppiness, but a deep background conviction that the achievements of Hispanics are always presumptively attributable to special preferences—and that there’s no need to double-check and see whether that’s supported by the facts in this case. They just know she can’t have really earned it.
Look, it’s not racist to oppose a Latina judicial nominee, or to oppose affirmative action, or to point out genuine evidence of ethnic bias on the part of minorities. What we’re seeing here, though, is people clinging to the belief that Sotomayor has to be some mediocrity who struck the ethnic jackpot, that whatever benefit she got from affirmative action must be vastly more significant than her own qualities, that she’s got to be a harpy boiling with hatred for whitey, however overwhelming the evidence against all these propositions is.
Man, some days I’m so glad I wasn’t raised by wolves.
June 2nd, 2009 at 1:05 am
I heard Leonard Pitts Jr. talking about Sotomayor on Talk of the Nation today. He had some good stuff to say about identity politics wrt the Supreme Court, mostly variations on things he wrote in his column yesterday.
I especially liked this paragraph from that column:
Assuming she ascends to the court, Sotomayor will be the 113th person to do so. Of her 112 predecessors, 108 have been white men. Folks who profess concern about identity politics would do well to keep those numbers in mind, illustrating as they do that race and gender have never previously been absent from decisions about who sits on the court.
June 4th, 2009 at 2:48 am
Good post. I also read that Sotomayor is the most qualified applicant to the position in the last 70 years.