Grand Watchmaker - and New York Times' Holiday Party "Roundest Glasses on Staff" award winner, 8 years running - David Brooks uncorks this magical statement to open his latest column:
Were this a blog in which I posted topical photographs, I'm sure I could come up with a number of photos capturing "young ethnic kids" in the late 1950s "surrounded by an ethos". The Little Rock 9, for example. I'm sure Ms. Sotomayor worries herself to sleep each night, wondering just how different her life would have been we're she brought up in this encouraging era.
Unfortunately, Brooks gives up the game of Choose Your Own Adventure as the column goes on. We don't get to find out what would have become of Sotomayor were she transplanted, say, Twain-like, into 6th century Britain. Would she have adopted such empathetic notions about the sub-human plight of dragons? He doesn't hazard a guess.
He does make another point, though. Multiculturalism = yucky. If only America could have skipped from the 50s, when Latina women thrived at Harvard and Yale, apparently, to the 80s, when all race-, gender- and class-based oppression ceased entirely to exist, slayed ceremoniously by a dragon. Problem solved, and none of that enforced reading of African authors that goes on in public schools to this day.
And surely there's no need for multiculturalism in our society still today. Those who decry Sotomayor's icky "patina" have clearly got the differences between Buddhists, Asians and Hispanics allllll figured out.
Sonia Sotomayor had bad timing. If she’d entered college in the late-1950s or early-1960s, she would have been surrounded by an ethos that encouraged smart young ethnic kids to assimilate. If she’d entered Princeton and Yale in the 1980s, her ethnicity and gender would have been mildly interesting traits among the many she might possibly possess.
Were this a blog in which I posted topical photographs, I'm sure I could come up with a number of photos capturing "young ethnic kids" in the late 1950s "surrounded by an ethos". The Little Rock 9, for example. I'm sure Ms. Sotomayor worries herself to sleep each night, wondering just how different her life would have been we're she brought up in this encouraging era.
Unfortunately, Brooks gives up the game of Choose Your Own Adventure as the column goes on. We don't get to find out what would have become of Sotomayor were she transplanted, say, Twain-like, into 6th century Britain. Would she have adopted such empathetic notions about the sub-human plight of dragons? He doesn't hazard a guess.
He does make another point, though. Multiculturalism = yucky. If only America could have skipped from the 50s, when Latina women thrived at Harvard and Yale, apparently, to the 80s, when all race-, gender- and class-based oppression ceased entirely to exist, slayed ceremoniously by a dragon. Problem solved, and none of that enforced reading of African authors that goes on in public schools to this day.
And surely there's no need for multiculturalism in our society still today. Those who decry Sotomayor's icky "patina" have clearly got the differences between Buddhists, Asians and Hispanics allllll figured out.
