Clarence Page: First Black woman Supreme Court nominee faces same old ‘ridiculousness’

Clarence Page, Tribune Content Agency on Mar 2, 2022

Yet, Biden’s similar promise to name a Black woman was called “offensive” and “an insult to Black women,” said Texas Republican Sen. Ted Cruz in a podcast.

Why? “Black women are what, 6% of the U.S. population?” said Cruz. “He’s saying to 94% of Americans ‘I don’t give a damn about you, you are ineligible.’ ”

Gee, I had no idea that the number of eligible Americans for the Supreme Court was so high. Cruz appears to subscribe to the zero-sum game that paints even a modest advance for racial or gender diversity as a loss for white people, particularly white men. Americans, at our best, are supposed to be more optimistic than that.

Sen. Susan Collins of Maine told The New York Times: “The idea that race and gender should be the No. 1 and No. 2 criteria is not as it should be.”

But she also acknowledged that “there are many qualified Black women for this post and given that Democrats, regrettably, have had some success in trying to paint Republicans as anti-Black, it may make it more difficult to reject a Black jurist.”

Not much more difficult, judging by the right-wing rhetoric that already has been raised.

Can’t we all get along? Supreme Court confirmations have been battles waged by both parties at least since President Reagan’s 1987 nomination of the formidable conservative Robert Bork. His confirmation fight was so ferocious it led to a new word in dictionaries, “borking,” for obstruction by systematic defaming or vilification.

But I think Judge Jackson will do well in her hearings if she keeps the “thick skin” she described to a Black student group at the University of Chicago in 2020.

“As a professional of color,” she said, “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,” she continued, “and if we are going to get to where we belong … we can’t keep stopping and fretting over random ridiculousness!”

Right on. Even when the ridiculousness comes from our nation’s highest officeholders.

(E-mail Clarence Page at cpage@chicagotribune.com.)