I’m very concerned with President Biden’s court picks, especially for the U.S. Supreme Court. Biden’s constitutional views are contrary and reactionary, as are the views of the Democratic Party more generally.
But whatever the Constitutional views of Biden's Supreme Court choice to replace Steven Bryer, Ketanji Brown Jackson’s limb to Supreme Court nominee is worth admiring. In PRESIDENT BIDEN’S SUPREME COURT PICK: “HOW KETANJI BROWN FOUND A PATH BETWEEN CONFRONTATION AND COMPROMISE”, Jack Limpert documents her amazing character and courage.And an inspiring path it was. Her personal philosophy and career journey are quintessentially American Individualist. To sum up her message as I understand it: "Legalized discrimination died in the 1960s. Racism, robbed of its legal backing, has since been rendered culturally impotent. Now, get on with your life. To all dark-complexioned people, understand: Residual racism is 'random ridiculousness!' It can't stop you from succeeding, unless you let it." To give you a sense of what I mean, here are some lenghthy excerpts from Lambert's column:
“My parents set out to teach me that, unlike the many impenetrable barriers that they had had to face, my path was clear,” recalled Jackson, now 51 and a federal appellate court judge in Washington. “If I worked hard and believed in myself, I could do anything or be anything I wanted to be.”
“She was always the person trying to find the middle ground,” Simmons said. As other Black students at Harvard took to the streets to confront college officials about issues of race and equality, Jackson counseled moderation. “ ‘They’re not going to listen to us if we’re screaming at them,’ she’d say,” Simmons recalled. “She was always asking, ‘What are the facts we can use to persuade?’ ”
In 1988, in her first year at Harvard, Jackson had to choose a path. The college’s freshmen lived together in dorms surrounding Harvard Yard, and one of Jackson’s classmates hung a Confederate flag from his dorm room window.
As a new student who’d signed up with the Black Students Association, Jackson joined in reactions to this “huge affront,” she said in a 2020 speech at the University of Chicago. “We organized rallies; we passed out fliers; we circulated petitions; we planned sit-ins.”
But Jackson wasn’t all in on leaping into protest mode. “While we were busy doing all of those very noble things, we were not in the library studying,” she noted. “I remember thinking how unfair it was to us.” Black students saw the flying of the flag as an attack, and they were angry about what they saw as a lax response from university officials, but now, as a result of their protests, “we were also missing classes and could not just be regular students … like the rest of our peers,” she said.
And that, Jackson decided, was “exactly what the student who had hung the flag really wanted: For us to be so distracted that we failed our classes and thereby reinforced the stereotype that we couldn’t cut it at a place like Harvard.”
In that instance and numerous others, Jackson felt pulled in two directions — stand up for what’s right, or buckle down and work. Time after time, in almost every chapter of her life, according to interviews with more than 15 of her friends and colleagues and a review of more than 2,000 pages of her speeches and writings, Jackson refused to be distracted. She would press for her ideals, but she would pick her battles — and choose tactics designed more to persuade others than to announce her opposition.
“I just want to be clear about how I envision thick skin,” Jackson told a Black student group at the University of Chicago in 2020. “I am not asking you to put on blinders. … As a professional of color, there will inevitably be times when you will feel singled out, challenged, questioned, undervalued, and misinterpreted, and you will very much want to call out or cancel people who say and do discriminatory things. … But doing so takes time and effort, and if we are going to get to where we belong … we can’t keep stopping and fretting over random ridiculousness!”
Jackson understood the power of activism. She’d heard about it from her parents back in Miami. “For Black Americans in particular, 1970 was a time of hope,” she said in 2020. “The hard work of the previous decade — the marches, the boycotts, the sit-ins, the arrests — had finally borne fruit. … Young Black professionals like my parents were finally on the verge of getting to enjoy the full freedom and equality that is promised to citizens of the United States. Change does happen, and that even the most dire circumstances can be overcome.”
When she ran for class president in high school (she won three times), when she traveled the high school debate circuit and won a rack of prizes, or when she applied to Harvard despite her high school guidance counselor’s suggestion that she set her sights a bit lower, she felt “slings and arrows” of bias, yet decided not to care about “slights and misperceptions and underestimations that came my way. What I do remember is often thinking, ‘Hmm, well, I’ll show them.’ ”
“There were always more-radical people who wanted to push her off the middle,” arguing for more-in-your-face confrontation, Simmons said. But Jackson argued against protests that might alienate the very people she wanted to persuade. And she would not let anyone steer her away from her studies, the roommate said.
“As a dark-skinned black girl who was often the only person of color in my class, club, or social environment, my parents knew that it was essential that I develop a sense of my own self worth that was in no way dependent on what others thought about my abilities,” Jackson said.
Another profound truth: ". . . my own self worth that was in no way dependent on what others thought about my abilities.” Her parents were wise people, indeed.
I probably will have deep disagreements with many of Jackson's judicial decisions, given she was chosen by Biden. But if her SCOTUS impact is anywhere close to consistent with her personal philosophy--and that of her parents--she would be a surprisingly powerful voice against Woke Nihilism. As a radical for American Ideals, I'm not expecting miracles. But the Left may be gravely disappointed. The last thing they need is a voice for self-responsibility. Based on her personal philosophy and trust that, in America, positive change can happen through rational argument and persuasion rather than activist disruption or "canceling", she has the makings of a great Supreme Court justice.
We’ll see -- and I’ll keep my fingers crossed. But one thing is for sure. Jackson is a great role model, not just for dark-complexioned young people, but for anyone who imagines "the system" is rigged against them.
Related Reading:
Joe Biden—the Real Protégé of Jefferson Davis
Identity Politics: America’s ‘Pre-Existing Condition’, and the Cure
AMERICA: A RACIST NATION? BY ANDREW BERNSTEIN
Leftist Supremacy, Not White Supremacy, is the Gravest Threat to Black Lives by Andrew Berstein
We Have Overcome: An Immigrant’s Letter to the American People by Jason D. Hill
The Founding Fathers, Not ‘Diversity,’ is the Solution to ‘Our Racialized Society’
Related Viewing:
John McWhorter: America Has Never Been Less Racist -- Reason interview
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