Academic

FROMA HARROP: Sotomayor and Condescending Identity Politics. ?The important part of Sotomayor?s ti?

By Glenn Reynolds

FROMA HARROP: Sotomayor and Condescending Identity Politics. “The important part of Sotomayor’s time at Princeton wasn’t her struggle as a Bronx-raised, working-class Puerto Rican among the Ivy League flowers. After all, Sotomayor did attend a good private Catholic high school. (And had she been born of poor Chinese immigrants, little fuss would have been made of her academic success.) The essence of Sotomayor’s Princeton experience was that she graduated summa cum laude and went on to Yale Law School, where she was an editor on the law journal.”

Related item here:

This is a story of privilege, dammit, not adversity.

Show me a Montana girl of un-useful ethnicity who put herself through law school waiting tables, after being left with two young children when her Army husband was killed overseas, and I’ll start oohing and aahing over her compelling story.

Of course, such a person would never ever end up on any President’s short-list, no matter if she graduated first in her class at her non-Ivy institution, no matter how extreme the intelligence and dedication and hard work she displayed over the subsequent course of her career. That’s simply how the world ? and especially the legal world ? is constructed today.

Largely true, alas.

Full post as published by Instapundit.com on May 29, 2009 (boomark / email).