The long arc of the moral universe
Like millions of Americans, I tuned in to watch portions of Judge Jackson’s confirmation hearings. If you know me, read me, or listen to me, you’ve heard me say that if you peel back the layers of almost anything you find racism. And once again, there it was on full display. The make believe anger at things that had nothing to do with the judge’s qualifications to take a seat on the Supreme Court. The demands that she clearly state her love and devotion to the United States and the rule of law, because even white people can’t fathom how after the way America has treated Black people, that Black folks can actually love America.
The many implications that, despite her family’s deep background and her obvious pride in law-enforcement, that she would be soft on crime… stemming from the panel imagining her solidarity with the criminally minded race of people to whom she belongs. And of course the biggest boogieman of them all - Critical Race Theory. “Is it your personal hidden agenda as a Black person (Italics are my added words) to incorporate Critical Race Theory into our legal system?” asked Tennessee Senator Marsha Blackburn - based on nothing other than the color of Judge Jackson’s skin.
In the days leading up to the hearings, some have even demanded that Judge Jackson release her Law School Aptitude Test scores so that they could take it upon themselves to determine if she possesses a top legal mind - much as Obama was accused of likely not having been admitted to Harvard Law school based on his own merits…because Black people just ain’t all that smart.
And through it all Judge Jackson had to maintain a composure that Brett Kavanaugh never had to consider because by golly, the only thing scarier that a drug-addled, super-predator, young buck, thug, angry Black man on welfare undeservedly stealing the hard and honest-earned cash of white folks who had made it entirely on their own is an angry Black woman. So Judge Jackson performed the near impossible and appeared as an emotionless non-human in order to not have yet one more strike against her. Don’t display anger or become upset at stupid white people is kinda the modern day equivalent of the Jim Crow era requirements of not looking a white person directly in the eye – the same advice given when encountering a dangerous wild animal – or stepping off the sidewalk when a white person passes by. Society still has rules that are best obeyed.
It’s all about race. In 1870 the 15th amendment to the United States Constitution was ratified guaranteeing the right to vote to all men, i.e. formerly enslaved humans.
In 1919 the 19th amendment gave woman the right to vote
In 1965 congress passed the Voting Rights Act putting teeth into the 15th amendment to curb the anti-Black voting suppression tactics being used all over the south.
But then - 48 years later on June 25th, 2013, at a request coming from a county in TN, a former slave-holding state - the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act, weakening the 15th amendment, exclaiming “times have changed.” Oh really? Hours later NC and TX passed voter suppression laws. A Federal court later struck down the North Carolina law saying it targeted African Americans “with almost surgical precision.” Between 2013 and 2018 some 1,688 polling places – primarily in minority neighborhoods - have been closed in states previously covered by the Voting Rights Act. From Arizona to the Carolinas and north to the Great Lakes, participating in our most basic act of democracy has been suppressed and made infinitely more difficult for Black Americans.
In 1994, John Ehrlichman, one of Nixon’s chief architects of the War on Drugs admitted that “By associating Blacks with heroine and then criminalizing it, we could arrest their leaders….vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying? Of course we did.”
When President Nixon created that War on Drugs in 1972 the prison population of the United States was some 300,000 people. Today, with over 2,000,000 people in prison – a 700% increase from 1972 - the United States, with 5% of the world’s population, holds 25% of the entire world’s incarcerated population. The vast majority are Black. Oh yeah…and that 13th amendment thing? “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime… shall exist within the United States...”
157 years after the end of the Civil War and the passing of the 13th Amendment ending slavery, 153 years after the passing of the 15th Amendment guaranteeing the right to vote to all citizens, and 59 years after the Voting Rights Act, Black Americans are still fighting for that elusive Promise of America.
If we can put a man on the moon in less than one generation; eradicate smallpox, measles, polio, diphtheria, in just a few generations; and develop a vaccine to a deadly pandemic in less than a year - then we know that ending racism doesn't really need to take hundreds of years. That’s just a pretense…a stalling action that represents a country that isn't serious about it.
Near the end of the Judge Jackson hearings New Jersey Senator Cory Booker celebrated the progress that her seat at the confirmation hearings represented. In reporting this, NPR’s Democracy Now said “The arc, 400 years long, is bending towards justice.”
Is it? I’ll be glad to see a Black American woman of Judge Jackson’s accomplishments, intelligence, humanity, integrity, and character sitting on the Supreme Court. But 403 years after Black people landed on the shores that became America, and in the midst of joyful talks of progress, I once again find myself wondering exactly how long is that “Arc of the moral universe that eventually bends towards justice” that Dr. Martin Luther King spoke of.