Supreme Court Nominee Sotomayor

[miraja2]

In my opinion, the argument that starts with the question, "what if a white guy said the same thing," is completely flawed from the start....because a "white" guy actually couldn't say the exact same thing. If a "white" male made a similar statement to the one that she did, but switched around the racial and gender identifiers, it would be a statement with a completely different meaning. Why? Because race and gender are socially constructed categories that can't be easily distinguished from the power dynamics that created them in the first place. Hundreds of years of racial and gender discrimination cannot simply be wiped away when examining the motivations or the realities of these statements.

I understand that many people who are interested in "fairness" simply wish that all people would stop making statements such as she did. That is a noble sentiment. But while claiming that there would be an uproar over a white man making a similar sounding statement is true, it is also utterly irrelevant. People spend too much time attempting to determine if certain people or phrases should, or should not, be labeled as racist or sexist, as if they are absolute categories in which a person or statement must 100% belong or not. That isn't how it works. What she said, and how she said it, may be unfortunate, but it remains a fundamentally different statement than if a "white" guy had made a similar sounding statement.