Here's the thing. When conservatives like Michael Goldfarb or Rush Libmaugh embark on a vision quest to prove the existence of beneficial treatment that a "reverse racist" like Sonia Sotomayor has received, they're arguing a stupid and misguided point that they actually believe in. They are happily deluded in accepting a comforting worldview that basically rewrites history; it's self-inflicted brainwashing that can only be accomplished from years and years of living inside an echo chamber that nurtures all the anger that comes with white resentment:
Not to state the obvious, but an upper-middle class white guy reared in the suburbs is shaped by his experiences, carries certain assumptions, and views the world through a particular prism as much as a working-glass Puerto Rican gal from the Bronx, or, for that matter, the half-black son of a single mom raised in Hawaii. The person belonging to the cultural/ethnic/religious/gender/racial demographic that has traditionally dominated a field (and thus whose perspective has long been the default) may not have given as much thought to his prism as a member of a non-dominant group. But that does not make his prism a neutral one. It aimply allows him to more freely indulge his delusions of pure rationality and objectivity.
It's primarily only white people who are strongly opposed to affirmative action, let alone even the idea that minorities still suffer from racial inequalities in this country. And any point that leads in such a direction is immediately mocked by conservatives as pinko hyperbole not fit for real Americans, who Goldfarb and Limbuagh would be happy to inform you have spent much of their life striving to overcome the unfair advantages and opportunities found disproportionately in every liquor store and pay day lender in South Central, LA and Gary, Indiana. But it's easy to convince yourself of mental superiority when you're insulated from varying viewpoints. How many blacks and Latinos are regularly hanging out at Goldfarb's crib on the weekend to discuss frat pranks and race relations during games of beer pong? I'm guessing not many. And the diversity doesn't get much better when Goldfarb heads to work at the Weekly Standard. Which is exactly what Sotomayor was implying when she said a "wise Latina" should have better insight into issues dealing with race, as opposed to a doughy white dude who only interacts with minorities when watching The Wire:
On a related note, I find the “what if a white man said that?” move incredibly grating about 99 percent of the time it’s used, because it’s almost always a way of blotting out all the reasons that it would, in fact, be different. In the instance, it would be weird for a white man to say it because it’s probably not true that the experience of growing up as a white male in the United States specifically enhances one’s understanding of what it means to be a disfavored minority. In other words, it just wouldn’t be true or reasonable in this case—though it might be for a white male who grew up as a religious or ethnic minority somewhere else in the world. So yes, sometimes formally gramatically equivalent statements will have different connotations depending on whether it’s a white person speaking about whites or a Latino speaking about Latinos, because history happened.
Yeah, history did happen. And it's something conservatives in this country are working as hard as ever to ignore.