I don’t remember James Inhofe or Rush Limbaugh being so concerned that Roberts or Alito would let their whiteness or maleness unduly influence their judicial opinions. I think that assuming the “white” point of view is the default or “normal” position is much more prevalent in our society than we care to admit. Many pundits (and passive observers such as myself) were guilty of giving undue weight to the preferences of white voters in the Democratic primary, assuming that they were closer to the country’s “real” preferences, which would cause the Democrats serious problems in the general election.
Those who seek to derail Sotomayor’s nomination by portraying her as incapable of separating her decisions from her heritage are actually making me more sympathetic to the idea of striving towards gender and ethnic balance on the court. If a Yale law graduate with decades of experience on the federal bench is influenced in this way, it’s hard to see who isn’t, including the current members of the Supreme Court. This doesn’t make them bad justices, it makes them human. Maybe we should admit that personal identity and judicial identity are actually intertwined, and seek to balance cultural biases out rather than pretend that any judge makes decisions in a vacuum.