Sotomayor and identity politics

"I would hope 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."

So said Judge Sotomayor at UC Berkeley in 2001. Stuart Taylor Jr., in a National Journal column that posted over the weekend, writes:

So accustomed have we become to identity politics that it barely causes a ripple when a highly touted Supreme Court candidate, who sits on the federal Appeals Court in New York, has seriously suggested that Latina women like her make better judges than white males.

Indeed, unless Sotomayor believes that Latina women also make better judges than Latino men, and also better than African-American men and women, her basic proposition seems to be that white males (with some exceptions, she noted) are inferior to all other groups in the qualities that make for a good jurist.

Any prominent white male would be instantly and properly banished from polite society as a racist and a sexist for making an analogous claim of ethnic and gender superiority or inferiority.

Imagine the reaction if someone had unearthed in 2005 a speech in which then-Judge Samuel Alito had asserted, for example: "I would hope that a white male with the richness of his traditional American values would reach a better conclusion than a Latina woman who hasn't lived that life" -- and had proceeded to speak of "inherent physiological or cultural differences."

I have been hoping that despite our deep divisions, President Obama would coax his party, and the country, to think of Americans more as united by allegiance to democratic ideals and the rule of law and less as competing ethnic and racial groups driven by grievances that are rooted more in our troubled history than in today's reality.

I also hope that Obama will use this Supreme Court appointment to re-inforce the message of his 2004 Democratic convention speech: "There's not a black America, and white America, and Latino America, and Asian America; there's the United States of America."

Sorry, man, you lost today.

I want someone to explain to me how Sotomayor's statement does not mean that white males, by the facts of their gender and ethnicity, make inferior judges. It seems pretty obvious to me that she believes that. We accept it in her, but we would (rightly) see it as disqualifying if the same racist, sexist viewpoint were endorsed by a white male, on behalf of white males. If Sotomayor is making the point that judges are human beings, and their life experiences affect their judgment, that's legitimate. It's plain reality. But aren't we supposed to work to overcome our particular circumstances if we sit on the bench, and to be as impartial and as blind as we can?