Nominating Supreme Court justices has always been about
identity and politics. It’s just that for nearly the first two centuries of the
court’s existence, the only people considered for inclusion were white men.
اضافة اعلان
When it comes to power, white and male are silent, like the
“u” in disguise. In this country (the
US), white men are the presumptive base
of power from which everyone else is a deviation. They are the norm against
which all others are judged to be anomalous.
When white men were the only people being considered for
seats on the Supreme Court, qualifications didn’t always matter. James Francis
Byrnes dropped out of school at the age of 14 and never went to college or law
school. What he knew of the law he learned from working at law firms before he
was admitted to the South Carolina bar and started his own practice.
His lack of any formal higher education didn’t prevent
President Franklin D. Roosevelt from appointing him to the Supreme Court. He
served for a little over a year before he quit. (He later became secretary of
state under Harry Truman.)
Some justices, like John Archibald Campbell, enslaved
Africans. Campbell would side with the majority in the horrendous Dred Scott
case. In 1861, he resigned from the court, and the following year, he joined
the Confederate government as its assistant secretary of war.
Not all of the white men who served on the court were
paragons of morality. Not all of them went to college, let alone law school.
But they each had the golden ticket: low melanin and high testosterone.
So now, it is fascinating to watch as people work themselves
into conniptions about Joe Biden committing to choosing a Supreme Court nominee
from a group that has long been overlooked: black women.
It is identity politics and affirmative action, they scream.
Ben Carson said on “The Vince Coglianese Show” that Biden’s
pledge to choose a Black woman was a sign that “we’re reverting back to
identity politics” and that it would “bring more division into our country.”
Carson hoped, he said, that people would “be incensed about
it.” In the end, he called it “abominable.”
As Carson explained it, “We need a Supreme Court where we
have the best candidates.”
This from one of the most unqualified secretaries of housing
and urban development the country has ever had, a man who didn’t even know the
basics of his job. When Rep.
Katie Porter asked him at a congressional hearing
if he knew what an REO was (the initials stand for “real estate owned,” a term
used to describe property that has failed to sell at a foreclosure auction),
Carson seemed to think she was referring to an Oreo cookie. Even after Porter
clarified the three letters, Carson was still left guessing what the O stood
for, at one point suggesting: “Real Estate e-organization.”
This from a man whom
Donald Trump may have nominated to the
post only because of Trump’s own constant, problematic conflation of “black”
with “urban,” even though most black people in the US live in the suburbs.
The irony here is that Ronald Reagan, the Republicans’
patron saint before the rise of Trump, made a similar promise in 1980 when he
was in trouble with women for not supporting the Equal Rights Amendment. He
promised to nominate a woman — again the word “white” was silent — and that’s
how we got Justice Sandra Day O’Connor.
Carson wasn’t the only conservative making a fuss about
Biden and identity politics. Tucker Carlson also railed against the impending
pick, saying, “
Biden claims that his race counting is essential so that the
court and the rest of his administration, quote, ‘looks like America.’ ” He
continued, “Of all the lies that Joe Biden tells, this could be the easiest to
check. We have the latest census numbers, and we can promise you with dead
certainty that Joe Biden’s nominees look nothing like America, not even close.”
Instead, Carlson said, a Black woman nominee will “represent about 7 percent of
the population.”
I say, look at it another way.
Of the 115 justices who have served on the bench since 1789,
108 — roughly 94 percent — have been white men. Zero percent have been black
women.
Viewed this way, through the long sweep of American history,
the US has some work to do.
There is no legitimate or logical argument against
inclusion. Consciously including racial groups can be one of the most effective
reparative remedies for centuries of racial exclusion.
Only when we disentangle the concepts of whiteness and
maleness from the concept of power can we see the damage the association has
done. Only then can we truly accept and celebrate the power of inclusion,
diversity, and equity. Only then can representative democracy in a pluralistic
society begin to live up to its ideals.
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