The thing with humble beginnings in American life is that one is supposed to leave them decorously as just that-the harrowing, Dickensian prologue to an adult life of implacable success and celebrity splendor. That's why the personal story of Sonia Sotomayor is being tirelessly rehearsed as a classic instance of the American Dream coming true-something that claims its significance on the basis of what the Bronx-bred jurist left behind, as opposed to her much-bruited views on how her ethnic heritage continues to shape her approach to her job.

The template is indeed so elastically obliging that the paper of record has used it as a superficial occasion to liken the careers of the aspiring Supreme Court associate justice with that of sitting justice Clarence Thomas. Never mind, of course, that the two hard-pressed minority kids became vastly different legal thinkers and policy advocates: They both grew up in hard-pressed circumstances, without benefit of fathers, eventually both arriving in Ivy League law schools among the first representatives of their ethnic-cum-racial minorities. In the search for academic acceptance, both even struggled to overcome speaking accents that reflected their roots.

But as their respective careers took off, correspondents Jodi Kantor and David Gonzalez report with palpable relief, the two split on matters of race-which is, after all, a social narrative that runs along familiar channels of elite opinion, as opposed to the far less manageable and more inflammable question of social class. They couldn't continue to identify with poor people, after all-that just isn't done in this America, especially among the upward tending minority elites. Here's the pretty, interlocking mosaic of opinion for two prospective colleagues on "a court that is struggling over whether race and ethnicity should be a factor in legal thinking": "Judge Sotomayor celebrates being Latina, calling it a reason for her success; Justice Thomas bristles at attempts to define him by race and says he succeeded despite the obstacles it posed."

And sure enough, there's your policy division, as well: "Off the bench, Judge Sotomayor has helped build affirmative action programs. On the bench, Justice Thomas has argued against them with thunderous force."

So in other words, the two judges' shared origins in working-class America has produced profoundly distinct outlooks on how much, or little, their individual success had to do with race. To be sure, those differences are significant, and of considerable public moment, but they are also far from revelatory, 18 years into Thomas's tenure and some 30 since the Bakke decision. And for them to serve as the landing point for the strong socioeconomic parallels in each judge's biography (the, you know, ostensible occasion for the piece) is more than a tad disorienting. It's a bit like starting to read a dispatch in the international section of the paper, only to have it jump to the inside sports pages.

Still, the Times' usual class discomfiture is nothing compared to what its tabloid competitor the New York Post gets up to. The Murdoch-owned employer of puckish commentators such as Sean Delonas prides itself on gleefully deriding ethnic sensitivities of all kinds, in the name of some free-floating sense of white-ethnic put-upon-ness.

But in a June 8 op-ed on the Sotomayor spectacle, the Post suspends that fake populist shtick and shows its true class colors. Manhattan Institute scholar Howard Husock seizes on the Sotomayor success narrative to spin out an ugly denunciation of the idea of public housing; since this daughter of the slums has been thrust into the spotlight, he complains, "the projects, mostly associated with crime and other social ills, suddenly are being portrayed in the press as a sort of urban log cabin: a starting point for up-from-poverty success stories."

Never mind that the data on crime in public housing shows precious little causal relationship-and that, in fact, evidence is now mounting that urban crime rates are rising due to the demolition of concentrated public housing projects. Mr. Husock is here to retail the chilling tail of how the New Deal boom in urban public housing created "a latter-day poorhouse where residents, rather than moving up, remain for prolonged periods-and in which residency rules encourage a lack of social and economic mobility."

Consider the horrible, horrible numbers: "Housing authorities like New York's are constantly starved for maintenance funds-and low-income tenants don't move out; they stay put." Yes, that's right: Poor people remain irksomely poor, and their poverty severely constrains their ability to move-meaning they malevolently hang on to rental units they can afford, shamelessly flaunting their anti-success culture.

And is there family dysfunction? Why, you bet your, um, dad! "Neither in New York nor nationally is public housing a system of intact nuclear families-like the immigrant Sotomayors-raising children and bent on upward mobility. The most recent HUD data show that only 13 percent of public units house two adults-and 40 percent are home to single-parent, largely female-headed families, often of very low income. Most of the rest are elderly or disabled."

Yeah, and have you seen fertility figures on the old and disabled? Screw them, man! The way forward, clearly, is to "set a time limit for new residents. A five-year-limit similar to that for public assistance would encourage residents to increase their income-perhaps even to marry-knowing that they could not remain in the projects indefinitely." Because, I don't know about you, but anytime I've been evicted, my first thought was always, "I gotta get married."

Just pray that they get the boot before they have the chance to breed, though-"unlike the Ivy-League educated prospective justice, [public-housing] children aren't likely to be high academic achievers," Husock notes, going on to cite an NYU study showing that these kids perform worse in school, are more likely to drop out of high school, and are less likely to get a high school diploma in four years.

Why, it's almost as if, I don't know, the vast majority of U.S. school districts received funding from property taxes or something-and that public-housing kids live overwhelmingly in urban neighborhoods with anemic tax bases. Crazy, huh?

Husock indeed seeks to seal his case against the baleful notion of subsidized public housing for the poor by citing the example of "the suburban housing boom of the 1950s-famously symbolized by Long Island's Levittown" which "disproved the premise that only the government could provide housing for the nonrich." Of course, Levittown and other suburban settlements of that era left certain other premises magisterially intact-such as the restrictive racial covenant.

And on purely fiscal grounds, it's a curious choice indeed for the model private-sector suburb; long after overtly racist measures like the covenants were deemed unconstitutional, Nassau County assessed taxes on minority homeowners at a rate 27% higher on average than those paid by white homeowners in cozy enclaves such as Levittown, eventually prompting a federal lawsuit to reverse the practice.

Oh, and by starving out the County's own revenue streams, the uneven tax assessments also wound up helping to drive Nassau into near-bankruptcy, prompting the inglorious end of its 60-year GOP political machine.

So it would seem, in other words, that government has done more than its share to shape the suburban housing market, and its many higher-performing lily-white school districts. It's just that, on the New York Post end of the journalism market, no op-ed contributor is about to point out that his or her aggrieved white suburban readers are actually de facto dole beneficiaries; and the midtown savants at the gleaming new Times tower want to turn any available story about social class into a parable on the variable meanings of diversity, and how they make for comparative attitudes of stick-to-it-iveness in your individually sampled Supreme Court justice-in-the-making.

Either way, we can avoid the pertinent material facts of the case: that we casually refer to newsworthy people heroically "rising above" their humble origins because all sorts of social and economic forces routinely conspire to make those origins an obstacle-and to judge by the gaping holes in our public discussion, an occasion of abiding shame.

And that means, in turn, that the media can return to its regularly scheduled programming. Hey, did you know that Sonia Sotomayor referred to a "wise Latina" in a speech once?

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