Op-Ed: Sorry KBJ, The Myth of 'Systemic Racism' Ended Long Ago on the Supreme Court
Three Supreme Court justices have been black. All three of them were appointed by white males.
Clearly, this is evidence of “systemic racism.”
Interestingly, the one black president — Barack Obama — didn’t appoint a single black justice to the court. Instead, he appointed two whites, one of whom identifies as a “wise Latina.”
Obama even had a white heterosexual male ready to replace the late Justice Antonin Scalia, but, alas, he was blocked by Sen. Mitch McConnell and now spends his days raiding Melania Trump’s unmentionables drawer in her closet.
Meanwhile, the latest white male appointment to the Supreme Court — Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson — will hear arguments for the first time this week. She will hear cases having to do with, interestingly enough, affirmative action.
Yet none was needed to get three black Americans on the court. Their race may have influenced their appointment in terms of politics, but there is no legal requirement that, when a vacancy opens up, it must be filled by a black justice.
The nation’s first black justice was, of course, Thurgood Marshall, appointed by President Lyndon Johnson (a white man) in 1967. Marshall served until 1991. He had been previously appointed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit… by another avatar of the white male patriarchy, President John F. Kennedy.
Marshall would probably never have risen further than his practice as a small-town lawyer in the then-backwater Baltimore of the 1950s had it not been for the “racism” practiced by two powerful white men. Kennedy and Johnson say “you’re welcome.”
The nation’s second black justice, Clarence Thomas, narrowly avoided not being confirmed after having been appointed by another white man, President George H.W. Bush, to replace Marshall.
Interestingly, Bush had reportedly given serious consideration to nominating Thomas as the replacement for Justice William Brennan when the latter retired just before Marshall. Brennan, of course, was white and male. Clearly, it is an example of systemic racism that Bush contemplated replacing a white justice with a black one.
Thomas eventually replaced Marshall — but only after a partisan attempt to prevent him from ascending to the court led by a black woman, Anita Hill, who infamously accused Thomas of sexually harassing her when she worked for him at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission back in the ‘80s. Hill’s allegations were taken at face value — a kind of prequel of the #MeToo movement that insists accusations be treated as facts.
Thomas had this to say about Hill’s accusations:
“This is not an opportunity to talk about difficult matters privately or in a closed environment. This is a circus. It’s a national disgrace. And from my standpoint as a black American, as far as I’m concerned it is a high-tech lynching for uppity blacks who in any way deign to think for themselves, to do for themselves, to have different ideas, and it is a message that unless you kowtow to an old order, this is what will happen to you. You will be lynched, destroyed, caricatured by a committee of the U.S. Senate rather than hung from a tree.”
Thomas was eventually confirmed and has served with distinction.
Interestingly, Joe Biden — then a senator — presided over the Anita Hill hearings. And later on said he believed Hill’s allegations. “Oh, I thought she was telling the truth at the beginning,” Biden said, according to The Washington Post. “I really did.”
When Biden decided to run for president, he expressed regret for not having helped more to derail Thomas’ nomination — which he expressed during the reboot inquisition of Brett Kavanaugh, a fellow white male. Biden did all he could to prevent him from becoming a Supreme Court justice, urging (as ex-vice president in 2018) that the hearings be delayed for as long as it took to accommodate the assertions made by Christine Blasey Ford about what Kavanaugh supposedly did to her as a high school student 40 years ago.
He also initially refused to condemn the attempt made upon Kavanaugh’s life after he became a justice. You can imagine the reaction if an attempt had been made to take the life of a sitting black justice. Well, except perhaps Clarence Thomas’ life. Being a conservative makes him an “Uncle Tom” in the eyes of leftists.
To be “black” you must agree, as Biden himself has lectured.
But Biden did at least do what America’s only black president failed to do. Last year, he nominated a black woman, Ketanji Brown Jackson, to succeed white and male Justice Stephen Breyer.
This, clearly, is another example of the “systemic racism” that pervades this country.
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