Sotomayor’s tribal allegiance     It’s awfully hard not to be cynical about the outrage over Judge Sotomayor’s tribal allegiance, as revealed by her comments about “wise Latinas,“ not to mention her 20-year membership of La Raza — which, for those readers who’ve been in deep coma the past few days, means “the Race.”

Why cynical? Well, what did you expect? The common, approved protocol on race this past few years has been that if you belong to one of the approved minority races or ethnicities, you are allowed to celebrate the fact, and to agitate for the advancement of your group. Allowed? You are supposed to. If you don’t, you come in for much scorn from your co-ethnics: Uncle Tom, lawn jockey, Oreo, coconut (brown outside, white inside), banana (yellow ditto), and so on. If you do not belong to one of the approved minorities, however, then celebrating your group identity is regarded as unspeakably wicked, a sure sign that you are an evil person with a diseased mind.

This protocol never made much sense on the face of it, and those of us who reached adult life before it became established, have never really been able to swallow it without gagging. Still, everyone has pretty much gotten used to it, and Judge Sotomayor was just doing the what-comes-naturally, probably without thinking about it much. She must be wondering what all the fuss is about.

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Can the protocols survive?     The interesting question, though nobody will thank you for raising it, is: Just how natural is ethnic pride and solidarity? Fifty years ago the U.S.A. embarked on a grand idealistic project to recreate itself into a society in which race doesn’t matter — in which each of us is judged by the content of his character, not the content of his family tree. The project achieved some significant successes. The flagrant insulting of black Americans that was commonplace before the Civil Rights Revolution was shamed out of existence — a great moral and humanitarian victory. Irrational obstacles to success were demolished, and a capable person of any background can now rise to the elite levels of U.S. society, as the career of our current president illustrates.

In its stated ultimate goal, though — the creation of a race-blind society — the project has to be counted a failure. Race and ethnicity still matter tremendously. Haven’t we all been talking nonstop about them this past couple of weeks?

The interesting question, I repeat, is whether things might conceivably have turned out differently. Might they? Or is human nature so constrained that a race-blind society is not possible?

I don’t know the answer to that question, though I have my suspicions. The best evidence for the optimistic view has been the willed de-tribalization of white Americans these past few decades. There are of course white-American equivalents of La Raza and the National Association of Black ———s (you can fill in the blank there with pretty much anything: a Google on “National Association of Black” got 535,000 hits). Such white-pride outfits are regarded by most white Americans with disgust and loathing, though. In a tremendous act of collective forbearance, white Americans have de-tribalized themselves.

A cynic might say: Well, they could afford to. With 90 percent of the population (in the 1950 census figures), the cost to them was marginal. And there has surely been much hypocrisy involved. Beneath the scrupulously de-tribalized public discourse, actual white-American behavior continued to be considerably, though quietly, tribal. Just look at patterns of voluntary segregation in housing and education.

What we shall soon find out is, how well these established protocols, and in particular white-American forbearance, will survive in a majority-minority U.S.A. Perhaps we shall cope somehow. Four of our states are already majority-minority, after all, and they seem to be coping well enough so far. My guess is, though, that the current code of ethnic etiquette is increasingly unstable. That, I think, is the social truth behind the ructions of the past few days over Judge Sotomayor. Probably a majority-minority U.S.A. will need some different, revised system of protocols.

Appeasers vs. Confronters     Within the Republican party (is it still there? yes, I think so . . . ) the battle lines for the Sotomayor confirmation are pretty clearly drawn between Appeasers and Confronters. To continue the argument of my previous section, the Appeasers are those who are happy with the current ethnic protocols, have internalized them, and assume they will continue into the indefinite future.