CNN’s piece on possible Supreme Court pick, Michelle Childs, includes this section:
Childs was born in Detroit to a father who was a police officer and a mother who worked for a telephone company. Her father died when she was a teenager and her family moved to South Carolina after his death, according to a 2014 profile of the judge in the Greenville News. A valedictorian and student body president of her public high school in Columbia, she returned to South Carolina after earning her undergraduate degree to study law at University of South Carolina, where she also obtained a master’s degree from the university’s business school.
“She was always a go-getter,” said Kelly Seabrook, who met Childs during their first year of law school at University of South Carolina. “She was involved everything in law school.”
Her educational journey is a contrast to the routes followed by the justices currently on the court; all of but one of them attended Ivy League law schools (Justice Amy Coney Barrett obtained her law degree from Notre Dame) and many of them received their undergraduate educations at Ivy League schools as well.
This is an extremely flat way of categorizing “the justices currently on the Court.” Yes, all but Amy Coney Barrett ended up at an “Ivy League law school.” But are we really to believe that this means they all took the same “route”?
Clarence Thomas went to Yale Law School. So did Brett Kavanaugh. Does this give them the same background or experience? Thomas grew up in poverty in the Jim Crow South; spoke (and was ridiculed for) a Gullah dialect as a child; lived with his grandparents after he moved to segregated Savannah, Georgia; and took steps to become a priest before dropping out and going to Holy Cross, where, for a while, he was a “dedicated black militant.” Brett Kavanaugh, by contrast, grew up around Washington D.C., and was privately educated in Georgetown before going to Yale and then Yale Law School.
The same, right?