The GOP Staged a Racist Clown Show at Ketanji Brown Jackson’s SCOTUS Hearings

In news that manages to be both shocking and unsurprising, the GOP launched an ugly, racist attack against the absurdly qualified Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, whom President Joe Biden has nominated to be the first Black female Supreme Court Justice in this nation’s history.

At 10:52 a.m. on the second day of Jackson’s confirmation hearings, the GOP’s official account tweeted a GIF with her face next to the letters CRT, which were then scratched out and replaced by her initials KBJ.

Subtle.

You can throw away the dog whistles of the old-time Republican propagandist Lee Atwater, the GOP of 2022 just goes right for the overt racism.

A few hours after the GOP’s racist tweet, Republican Sen. Ted Cruz did his part to advance the cause. Like a loyal footsoldier, he insinuated that Judge Jackson is an anti-white radical. He spent a majority of his time asking her about Critical Race Theory (CRT), knowing full well his questions had no bearing or relevance to her career, her qualifications, or her performance as a Supreme Court Justice.

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It’s all ugly theater of the absurd, but that’s exactly the point. This is red meat for the conservative base, which has been increasingly radicalized and fed a steady diet of conspiracy theories and lies that deliberately and inaccurately redefine CRT as a pernicious ideology unleashed by the deep state to teach our children to be anti-white, anti-democratic, Marxist sex criminals.

As Judge Jackson herself said in response to one of Sen. Cruz’s many insulting questions, “[CRT] doesn’t come up in my work as a judge. It’s never something that I studied or relied on and it wouldn’t be something I would rely on if I was on the Supreme Court.”

But her record and statements don’t matter, because Judge Jackson is a Black woman—nominated by a Democratic president. That alone condemns her as a Trojan horse who will allegedly use her considerable talents and powers to attack an increasingly paranoid GOP base that have been told they are being “replaced.”

It’s important to remember that right-wing activist Chris Rufo, who created the cynical anti-CRT playbook, freely admitted, “the goal is to have the public read something crazy in the newspaper and immediately think ‘critical race theory.’” Republicans can do this, he said, by pairing CRT “with breaking news stories that were shocking and explicit and horrifying.” He wanted to manufacture CRT as a “salient political issue with a clear villain.”

He succeeded. That “villain” is Toni Morrison’s Beloved, which was successfully used by Gov. Glenn Youngkin to win over suburban white moms in Virginia. The “villain” also includes books by Black and LGBTQ authors, and now trans kids and their parents.

This week, the villain is Judge Jackson.

Sen. Cruz, imagining himself the heroic slayer of CRT dragons, made an issue out of Judge Jackson’s relationship with the private Georgetown Day School in Washington DC, where she sits on the board. He alleged the school, which has a historic role in embracing integration before the end of segregation, was “filled to overflowing” with “stacks and stacks of [CRT] books.” He specifically cited Antiracist Baby by Dr. Ibram X. Kendi.

After revealing a large printout of one of the book’s pages behind him, Sen. Cruz asked with a straight face, “Do you agree… that babies are racist?”

With the patience and grace of a Black woman who’s had to tolerate racism and the double standards of white mediocrity her entire life, Judge Jackson sighed and replied after a long pause, “Senator, I do not believe that any child should be made to feel as though they are racist or though they are not valued or though they are less than their victims, that they are oppressors. I don’t believe in any of that.” (Incidentally, Dr. Kendi’s books can also be found in the library at the elite private school attended by Sen. Cruz’s children.)

But, again, it doesn’t matter what Judge Jackson believes. She’s a Black woman and, as such, now joins the rogue’s gallery of villains manufactured by the GOP ahead of the 2022 and 2024 elections. Throughout his questioning, Sen. Cruz played the full GOP bingo card, even name dropping The 1619 Project and its founder Nikole Hannah-Jones, who now lives so comfortably and rent-free in Republicans’ heads that she should lean back, stretch her legs, and find time to enjoy the spacious accommodations.

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Not to be deterred, Cruz continued on his quixotic mission to portray Judge Jackson as a stealth CRT jihadist. He cited a 2020 speech Jackson gave on MLK Day at the University of Michigan, in which she referred to The 1619 Project. Judge Jackson responded by saying she mentioned the Pulitzer Prize-winning collection because it was both topical and familiar to her students. Cruz also cited a “curious statement” by Judge Jackson from a 2015 speech she gave at the University of Chicago, where she just mentioned critical race theory. She responded that it was one of the many various types and theories of law she mentioned that inform sentencing policy.

But facts don’t matter to the “facts don’t care about your feelings” Republicans. Sen. Cruz used his bully pulpit at the nationally televised hearings to smear the eminently qualified Supreme Court nominee as a radical, anti-white racist. While he failed to prove his case, he successfully tarnished the judge’s reputation among his intended audience.

The reason the GOP is blatantly resorting to racism is because they have no other case. They can’t attack Jackson on her actual record without lying. And as Tucker Carlson tried a few weeks ago by asking for the judge’s LSAT scores, they can’t honestly flame her academic achievements either. They can’t get her on temperament, as evidenced by her restraint, calmness, and professionalism during Sen. Cruz’s bad faith, racist questions.

The GOP is obviously soft on racism—I mean, two sitting members of Congress spoke at a white nationalist conference and were met with tepid condemnation by party leadership, who quickly changed the subject back to CRT panic.

Denying what is obvious to any Black woman in this country, conservatives insist the only “real racists” are grade-school teachers reading Antiracist Baby.

But the GOP’s coordinated effort today—both on social media and at the first Black woman Supreme Court nominee’s Senate hearing—proves definitively that racism is a vital plank on the Republican Party’s platform.