Sotomayeer, like Obama, would not be where she is without affirmative action. We can assume she doesn’t deserve her lofty perch because Obama needed a Latina woman, and she had been at Harvard, a post she filled because she was a Latina.
Sotomayer is a brick for sure and Obama is an incessant narcissist but short of raping and killing others I wouldn’t begrudge anybody for getting a better education than most.
Fire away.
Sotomayor is affirmative action personified. She rose through her legal career as an attorney, then as a judge, because she was a “wise Latina”, to use that term she has used. If she were white, she would not be on the Supreme Court today. Her career would not have sent her on such a path.
Perhaps her dissent was so strident because for her, it’s personal.
Yet she doesn’t acknowledge the other side, namely, that with benefits given to people such as her, that someone else more deserving was denied those same benefits. After all, there are only so many slots available in college, in law firms, on federal courts, and on the Supreme Court. By definition, a less qualified person such as herself pushed out someone else more deserving.
Affirmative action may have made sense in 1965, as we were then coming out of a time when there was open discrimination.
But it seems clear to me that, even if for sake of argument, it made sense in 1965, that we still have liberals who think that minorities need special help forever. Some liberals talk as if it still is 1965, and Jim Crow laws are holding people back.