I really wish Biden had not announced, during his campaign for the presidency, that he would appoint the first black woman justice to the Supreme Court.
There was no need. He should have said nothing and then gone ahead and appointed Ketanji Brown Jackson out of the blue, as his choice as the most qualified candidate.
Not because he was wrong. But because it fed into the false far-right narrative that deliberately choosing a black woman and excluding all white men or women is a form of racial discrimination.
So if a black person is charged with a crime and appeals his verdict all the way to the Supreme Court and is a confronted with 9 old white men who will arbitrate his fate, there is no problem. They are the best. They are the most qualified. And there could not possibly be the slightest racial bias embedded in their judgements.
That’s what the far-right would have you believe because, to be blunt, they are too stupid to see a problem.
What they ignore, of course, is, first of all, that there very likely is a racist element to the selection of those judges. Every single Senator who voted to confirm those justices could openly, sincerely declare that race did not play a role in their choice to confirm. But that would imply the belief that racism played no role in the establishment that created the network of personal connections, criteria, cultural institutions, inflections, language, and so on that provided them with the nominees from which they chose the members of the Supreme Court. They might even sincerely believe that these old white male justices would have enough amazing insights into all of the issues and conditions that black people experience to render an objective and fair verdict on each case. They might believe that black people experience the same law and the same enforcement strategies as white people and that, therefore, there could not possibly be any discriminations or injustice in the way the police and prosecutors conduct their prosecutions. The police are just as likely to stop or pull over a white citizen for a “random” check as a black citizen. They are just as like to respect his rights and assume innocence as a they would for a white suspect. They are just as likely to use physical force.
That is a fantasy.
I don’t think they really believe it themselves. They know they cannot openly declare that only white people (or black conservatives) should be on the Supreme Court because they are white. They can’t openly declare that black people are trying to steal the material benefits created by hard-working white people.
They can’t admit that Clarence Thomas was chosen because he was a black conservative and they relished the idea of liberals having to consider rejecting a black nominee just because he was a lousy ideologically driven judge.