http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/jun/07/sotomayor-racism-supreme-courtUS conservatives are fighting for the rights of a minority – white men
Obama's nomination of a Latina to sit on the supreme court has prompted an attack from the right against racism
Gary Younge
'You do not choose to be a son or a daughter," argues Kwame Anthony Appiah in The Ethics of Identity. "A Serb or a Bosnian; a Korean or an Mbuti ... In all sorts of ways ... our identities are neither wholly scripted for us nor wholly scripted by us."
We are all a product of our time and place. Born in the midst of a random variety of narratives over which we have no control, most of us spend our lives trying to write the best story we can with the material we have been given. Some struggle with this as a concept. Desperate to think of themselves as inspired, original and above all, self-made, they are at pains to deny that their script has been partially penned by anyone other than themselves. Their reluctance is understandable: who would voluntarily cede editorial control over their own lives?
And yet it is really only possible to imagine for those who have power and refuse to interrogate it. The man in high office is never asked how he balances work and family, and the straight person is never asked when they realised they were straight. But just because the issue of their identity never really materialises doesn't mean they don't have one, let alone many.
Those who insist that their opinions and emotions are independent of their experiences and identities ultimately reveal not originality but conceit: having deluded themselves into believing that they do not involuntarily belong to anything, they start to assume that everything belongs to them.
Herein lies the root of the rightwing attacks on Barack Obama's nominee to the US supreme court, Sonia Sotomayor, that have wavered over the past two weeks between febrile and juvenile.
Of the 110 supreme court justices that have ever been confirmed, more than 98% have been white and more than 98% male. For the first 178 of its 220 years, the court was completely dominated by white men. At present, seven of nine of the justices are white men. Now one of them is leaving and Obama has had the audacity to nominate a Latina. Suddenly, conservatives are concerned about meritocracy, racism and the prospect of minorities getting a fair shake before the law. And that minority would be white men.
"God help you if you're a white male coming before her bench," said the Republican leader Michael Steele.
Fulminating against the shortlist from which Sotomayor was picked, conservative crusader Pat Buchanan said: "You got down to four women, not a single white male – all women … Probably half of the great lawyers and judges are white males in this country. To rule them out, why? Because of sex and because of their race is wrong, I think."
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So, far more stunning than Sotomayor's speech itself has been the conservative response to it. Sotomayor has been branded a "bigot", a "racist", and a "reverse racist" by men like Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck who – without any sense of irony – are attacking identity politics in a bid to defend white masculinity.
"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," claims Stuart Taylor in the National Journal. In a world where seven Latinas were on the supreme court and a white man was being nominated for the first time they might even have a point. That, however is not the world we live in.
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