Juan Williams is one of the best liberal commentators around, yet even he can fall into the errors of identity politics. During the Sotomayor hearings, Megyn Kelly pointed out how Samuel Alito had been grilled to a fine turn over a long-ago membership in Conservatives at Princeton, while Sotomayor was questioned very mildly on her recent membership on the board of the Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund, which makes wild and racially charged statements. Williams said that Alito, as a white male from a university that was founded for white males, had to be grilled more thoroughly than a Hispanic woman on the board of a minority group advancing their agenda.
So even the usually pretty fair Juan Williams has a double standard on race. And even he believes that every institution in our society has to be on the defensive if it arose at a time when “white males” tended to hold public positions. Princeton was founded mainly to train ministers, and is still at fault in some way because it didn’t include women or minorities at the time of its founding. In other words, the whole country is perennially in the dock because at its beginnings there wasn’t “diversity” as promoted today.
To the extent that there was discrimination, it has been addressed. To the extent that women were not trained as ministers at that time, it had a lot to do with the sex roles understood and accepted for the most part by both sexes then. (Of course, now we have to pretend that every woman was a suffragette in embryo, writhing in fury at her lesser role.) In any event, the country has expanded beyond all those earlier arrangements, but evidently it can still be condemned for not being perfect at its founding. And a “white male” can still be held responsible today for association with institutions that had a certain character hundreds of years ago, more than a “Latina” for association with a contemporary institution with a radical character today. This is sheer tribalism and must be resisted.