OPINION: As a Black woman who has never been in the majority in any workplace or classroom, watching what Judge Jackson went through was like witnessing an Olympic-level stress test of a Black woman’s soul.
Supreme Court nominee Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson testifies before the Senate Judiciary Committee on the third day of her confirmation hearings in Washington, March 23, 2022.
The story of her family’s ascent, through hard work and education, to the middle class and positions of public service and influence in Miami is a Great American Story. Like Judge Jackson, I am a child of parents who were raised and educated under segregation. It might be useful to think of us as the first generation children of immigrants from Jim Crow.
Do you have to be a first-generation post-Jim Crow Black woman to understand how offensive it was every time South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham bared his teeth and brayed at the judge about the “asses” she represented as a public defender for prisoners in Guantanamo Bay? I understand political performance, but I can also see when that performance is calculated to be insulting to someone because of their race and gender.
While a number of Democrats on the committee praised how well the judge was handling the process, the three senators of color seemed the most sensitive to how she might be experiencing the hearing. Senator Mazie Hirono, the first Asian American woman to be elected to the Senate, lifted the proceedings from the “sunken place” to a cozy space when she got the judge talking about how she turns to the “fiber arts” in times of stress and as a creative outlet.
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