Why don't you look at that quote in context?

More specifically, here is the relevant section:

That same point can be made with respect to people of color. No one person, judge or nominee will speak in a female or people of color voice. I need not remind you that Justice Clarence Thomas represents a part but not the whole of African-American thought on many subjects. Yet, because I accept the proposition that, as Judge Resnik describes it, "to judge is an exercise of power" and because as, another former law school classmate, Professor Martha Minnow of Harvard Law School, states "there is no objective stance but only a series of perspectives - no neutrality, no escape from choice in judging," I further accept that our experiences as women and people of color affect our decisions. The aspiration to impartiality is just that--it's an aspiration because it denies the fact that we are by our experiences making different choices than others. Not all women or people of color, in all or some circumstances or indeed in any particular case or circumstance but enough people of color in enough cases, will make a difference in the process of judging. The Minnesota Supreme Court has given an example of this. As reported by Judge Patricia Wald formerly of the D.C. Circuit Court, three women on the Minnesota Court with two men dissenting agreed to grant a protective order against a father's visitation rights when the father abused his child. The Judicature Journal has at least two excellent studies on how women on the courts of appeal and state supreme courts have tended to vote more often than their male counterpart to uphold women's claims in sex discrimination cases and criminal defendants' claims in search and seizure cases. As recognized by legal scholars, whatever the reason, not one woman or person of color in any one position but as a group we will have an effect on the development of the law and on judging.

In our private conversations, Judge Cedarbaum has pointed out to me that seminal decisions in race and sex discrimination cases have come from Supreme Courts composed exclusively of white males. I agree that this is significant but I also choose to emphasize that the people who argued those cases before the Supreme Court which changed the legal landscape ultimately were largely people of color and women. I recall that Justice Thurgood Marshall, Judge Connie Baker Motley, the first black woman appointed to the federal bench, and others of the NAACP argued Brown v. Board of Education. Similarly, Justice Ginsburg, with other women attorneys, was instrumental in advocating and convincing the Court that equality of work required equality in terms and conditions of employment.

Whether born from experience or inherent physiological or cultural differences, a possibility I abhor less or discount less than my colleague Judge Cedarbaum, our gender and national origins may and will make a difference in our judging. Justice O'Connor has often been cited as saying that a wise old man and wise old woman will reach the same conclusion in deciding cases. I am not so sure Justice O'Connor is the author of that line since Professor Resnik attributes that line to Supreme Court Justice Coyle. I am also not so sure that I agree with the statement. First, as Professor Martha Minnow has noted, there can never be a universal definition of wise. Second, 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.

Specifically, she is talking about female/minority judges bringing an additional context to a decision, informed by their life experiences, that a (rich/white/male/privileged) person's life experience would necessarily preclude them from having. Which I don't think is a racist point; her early life's biography is significantly different than the rest of the Supremes, or in the case of this speech, the average federal circuit court's experience. Now, if you follow the sort of politics that call any instance of drawing attention to differences 'racist,' then I suppose that quote fits the description, but it is really more appropriate and closer to the spirit of the speech to look at it as part of a larger discussion acknowledging the effects of bias, of both white male and minority female. Whether or not you agree with her argument that these backgrounds/traits will produce 'better' decisions is a valid point of contention, but in the specific area she's talking about, of cases and laws principally concerned with minority and gender, it isn't totally unreasonable to suggest that a member of the specific group might have a greater insight into the issues and arguments surrounding the case - or, to use a non-value judgment, a unique perspective that can add shades of grey to what might be otherwise construed into a more black-and-white (no pun intended) discussion.

Uncivilized, perhaps, but prisons can in no way be considered 'the wild.' Of all dysfunctional social constructs, prison systems are probably the most extreme. I'm not sure how 'natural' the banding together is; it could very well be an intentional de facto method of control, a somewhat self-regulating means of keeping an overall increase of violent behavior in check through both an internal policing of segregated groups through gang hierarchy and a means of directing violence along predictable fault lines, rather than a large amount of individual skirmishes. If the prison system didn't want these groups to exist, then they could get rid of them. Or, if it is determined to be too costly to change the status quo, then you must still admit that it is an artificial environment that is creating these conditions and hence these groupings can hardly be considered a 'natural state' akin to wolves in the wild.

In any case, these groupings are more than skin deep; it is cultural similarities that tie them together more than the color of their skin, in many cases the culture being a preexisting condition through generations of gang hierarchy that extends from the streets to the prisons and vice-versa. Racial grouping in prisons is much more complex than simply being visually identified as a member of a race, though I'll grant the moot point that color is the most obvious indicator of the index of cultural, historical, and socio-economic similarities.