The wise Latina woman

Tomorrow this story will be put to bed, perhaps, though not likely, forever.

Curiously, nobody has really parsed the words of the now-famous phrase: "I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life."

If we change two words in that statement, it reads "I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would as often as not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life."

That statement could not be construed as racist, and in fact objection to it would, on
its face, be racist.

So really, the furor revolves around the distinction between "more often than not" as
opposed to "as often as not". But "as often as not" is, mathematically, highly unlikely. If you toss a coin two million times, it is not going to come up heads exactly one million times. So the "as often as not" phrase would be unobjectionable,
but also false on its face, while the actual statement, which may or may not be true,
but at least could conceivably be true, raises holy hell.

Here's why it probably is true, at least in Sotomayor's case: the typical white male that goes to Princeton and Yale has only lived life in one station. The same cannot be said for Sotomayor. And that's the real reason for the furor. Rich, powerful people only want the outlook of rich, powerful people represented in government, for obvious reasons. They don't need to worry. You can't get justice if you can't pay through the nose for elite lawyers, no matter who is on the bench.