President Joe Biden’s recent Supreme Court nominee, Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, has on multiple embraced other champions, of Critical Race Theory (CRT) via lectures and speeches while making reference to the progressive idea by making use of terms such as “microaggression.”
After his pledge in late January to nominate a black woman to a Supreme Court seat, Biden carried out his promise by putting forth a nomination for Jackson just a month later. Jackson currently sits for the D.C. Court of Appeals and is slated to replace Justice Stephen Breyer after his retirement so long as the nomination is confirmed by the Senate.
Jackson sports a law degree from Harvard, a stint as the head of the U.S. Sentencing Commission, and legal defense work for the prisoners out in Guantanamo Bay. Jackson received their original Senate confirmation to her current role on the D.C. Court of Appeals via a vote of 53-44 back on June 14th, 2021.
Jackson managed to win their confirmation last year with the support of Democrats and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, Republican Sens. Susan Collins of Maine, and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska. Republicans, also including Graham, put forth their reservations in regards to the judicial philosophy of Jackson at that time, and those strong reservations have only continued to grow. Graham issued criticism at Jackson’s nomination back in February as solely a pick for the “radical Left,” despite not having stated the way in which he plans to vote.
After study of a handful of Jackson’s speeches and lectures as seen over the past seven years, it was shown that the nominee has a strong appreciation for leading proponents of CRT, which is a new progressive idea that states in part that: “racism is endemic to, rather than a deviation from, American norms,” wrote Kimberle Crenshaw, a legal scholar who originally coined the term back in 1989. While Jackson herself has made sure to avoid being the champion of CRT, she has complemented its various advocates and suggested that the left-leaning theory influences her legal analysis.
Back in October of 2021, Jackson was taking with moderating a webinar for the Harvard Alumni Association with the University President Larry Bacow. As the questioner for the first part of the webinar, Jackson took time to focus the talks on the idea of “Diversity, Equity, Inclusion & Belonging,” which is an outgrowth of CRT scholarship.
Jackson made sure to press Bacow on how the university “recruits and retains talented faculty of color[.]” Jackson then asked about the choice in regards to the stopping of a “Latinx Studies” graduate course. The judge also put forth the claim that “the growing inequality in wealth and access to education in the United States, and various systemic obstacles to social advancement and democratic ideals” is “of particular interest” to the audience.