Rich White Men Just Can’t Catch A Break

What Ezra, Digby, Eisgruber, and Atrios said:

…the explicit conversation and subtext suggesting underlying assumptions about race and gender in our world shows just how stupid and/or racist and misogynistic the Villagers are. The idea that for any job, especially something like Supreme Court judge, there’s one “most qualified” person who can be determined is just idiotic. When the white guy is chosen, all of the people who bemoan the evils affirmative actions, nod and clap at how “qualified” he is, despite the fact that generally white men are the greatest beneficiaries of various forms of affirmative action in this society, from inherited wealth and privilege, to the good old boys’ club, and to, of course, fluffing by our media.

A couple of additional points:

• As has been noted before, many of the same conservatives who lament the possibility that diversity plays any role in hiring, hence foiling our perfect meritocracy, also revere Clarence Thomas, who almost certainly would not have been nominated to the Court had he been a generic white guy. And the thing is, Thomas does, in fact, prove the value of diversity, and that once someone has the ability comparisons of additional formal credentials don’t mean much. Leaving ideological congeniality out of it, does anybody think that Thomas hasn’t been a more intellectually impressive justice than the more formally “qualified” Anthony Kennedy? More controversially, I also agree that in many ways he’s made a more impressive contribution than the much more lauded Antonin Scalia.
• It’s also instructive that to the Stuart Taylors of the world having a mainstream liberal position on the constitutionality of affirmative action is enough to mark you as a dangerous radical. (Apparently, written tests are such a foolproof method of determining which firemen are worthy or promotion that it’s beyond the pale for a city to consider the effects of having a lily-white cadre of top-rank firefighters at all.) And note as well that the concern with legal formalism and “judicial activism” with which Taylor usually conceals his preference for conservative outcomes and conservative judges goes straight out the window. The idea that the Constitution is “color-blind” is supported by literally no Supreme Court precedent and can be supported by “original meaning” only if principles are defined at a sufficiently high level of abstraction that William Brennan can count as an “originalist.” I, myself, don’t think that there’s anything inherently impermissible about using an open-ended constitutional provision to reach a politically mainstream, ideologically congenial result, but 1)Taylor often pretends to, and 2)it’s not clear why Scalia and Thomas can do this but Sotomayor can’t.

…see also Serwer, Hutchinson, and Greenwald.