Conservatives like John Derbyshire are using the Sotomayor nomination to beef up, in their own minds, their working class white cred:
I get mighty annoyed by the unspoken implication in a lot of commentary that anyone not a member of a Protected Minority must have grown up in a twelve-bedroom lakeside mansion and been chauffered off to prep school with a silver spoon in his mouth. …
Was it really not possible to correct past injustices without creating an entire — and apparently permanent — class convinced that accidents of geography or biology have gifted them with special insight, wisdom, and “empathy”?
Mighty annoyed? Really?
Derbyshire was responding to one of his readers who was eager to “rain on the Sotomayor ‘compelling life story’ parade,” as she put it:
The woman grew up in the capital of the world, went to two Ivy League schools, and was blessed by Providence with the precisely correct right race-gender two-fer for the moment.
This is a story of privilege, dammit, not adversity.
They’re mad, and they’re not gonna take it anymore!
