Sotomayor and the Politics of Race
Clip from the most recent article from Shelby Steele as published in the WSJ. I reccomend you read the whole thing.
The Sotomayor nomination commits the cardinal sin of identity politics: It seeks to elevate people more for the political currency of their gender and ethnicity than for their individual merit. (Here, too, is the ugly faithlessness in minority merit that always underlies such maneuverings.) Mr. Obama is promising one thing and practicing another, using his interracial background to suggest an America delivered from racial corruption even as he practices a crude form of racial patronage. From America’s first black president, and a man promising the “new,” we get a Supreme Court nomination that is both unoriginal and hackneyed.
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With the Sotomayor nomination, Mr. Obama has made the same mistake his wife made in her “This is the first time I am proud of my country” remark: bad faith toward an America that has shown him only good faith.