I thought this post over at Pandagon was really interesting:
One of the most fascinating things about watching the identity politics meltdown on the right after Sonia Sotomayor’s nomination is the blithe assumption that men don’t have a gender and white people don’t have a race.
There's this hue and cry across the TV and the internets that Sonia Sotomayor got this nod due in large part to her race and gender. Question begged: did the 84 white male Senators become senators due in large part to their gender or race? If the numbers tell us anything, being white, being a dude and being straight have been real good for a political leg up for a lot of years now.
Second thought: leaving aside the rigorous intellectual dishonesty behind it, I get so cheesed off when white dudes start complaining about "reverse racism or sexism." Acknowledging race and gender is not the same thing as racism or sexism. God.
Sotomayor's experiences as a woman and as a person of color do give her an insight that John Roberts, for example, lacks. Which is precisely WHY it's so important to have a Supreme Court that's not made up solely of white guys.
And, not for nothing, you don't think their experiences as men had something to do with this incredibly stupid and offensive supreme performance?
