Black History
COMMENTARY: Judiciary Committee Hearings Enough; Ketanji Brown Jackson Should Be on Supreme Court
“I do consider myself having been born in 1970 to be the first generation to benefit from the Civil Rights Movement,” said Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson. “From the legacy of all of the work of so many people that went into changing the laws of this country so that people like me could have an opportunity to be sitting here before you today.”
By Emil Guillermo
Watching four days of the Judiciary Committee Hearings on Ketanji Brown Jackson, I discovered we shared a few things. We were both debaters in high school. And we both did OO (Original Oratory) in the NFL. Football? No, National Forensics League. We both went to Harvard, too, though I was there 15 years earlier.
On the first day of the hearings, I was struck by the introduction given by one of her college roommates, Lisa Fairfax, now a law professor at the University of Pennsylvania. Fairfax talked about meeting Jackson in her freshman year. “Those first moments when you wonder if you belong,” Fairfax said. “She’s the friend that made sure we all did.”
Fairfax went on: “She was the role model who makes you believe in what she said, ‘You can do it and here’s how.’ And she showed us how, by the power of her example of hard work, preparation and excellence that transforms the seemingly impossible into the achievable.”
I wish I had that kind of college friend in my time in Cambridge. When I needed a pep talk, the best I got was, “Come on, Emil, let’s get a pizza.”
On Day 3 of the hearings, Jackson called herself, “a Black woman [and]lucky inheritor of the civil rights dream.”
With humility, she sounded like she understood the journey all people of color are on.
“I do consider myself having been born in 1970 to be the first generation to benefit from the Civil Rights Movement,” Jackson said. “From the legacy of all of the work of so many people that went into changing the laws of this country so that people like me could have an opportunity to be sitting here before you today.”
That was said before more of the onslaught from Senators Lindsey Graham, Ted Cruz, and Josh Hawley, Republicans all.
And if you watched it all like I did, you felt the impact of each attack.
So, when Democratic Sen. Cory Booker took his turn on Day 3, he provided reassuring comfort.
“You have earned this spot,” he said to Jackson, perhaps to help to ward off any self-doubt or a sense of “imposter syndrome” thoughts that may be lurking. “You are worthy. You are a great American.”
Booker was just warming up. As one of the last five senators to question Jackson, he was bringing it home. And it worked. Because I found I could totally relate to Jackson.
If you have experienced even the most minor transgression because of race in America, you know. Did you see yourself as she sat in the committee chamber? I did.
“There is a love in this country that is extraordinary,” Booker said to Jackson. Booker then referenced the racial segregation laws affecting Jackson’s family, as well as the laws that would have prevented her own marriage to a white man. The same anti-miscegenation laws that kept Asians like my Filipino father from marrying whites. “But [people] didn’t stop loving this country, even though this country didn’t love them back.”
That hit me.
It’s the reason Jackson was before the committee, Booker said. It was about all the people who came here and said, “I’m going to show this country that I can be free here, that I can make this country love me as much as I love it.”
And then Booker mentioned Asian Americans, specifically.
“Chinese Americans first forced into near slave labor building our railroads connecting our country saw the ugliest of America, but they were going to build their home here [and say] ‘America, you may not love me yet, but I’m going to make this nation live up to its promise and hope.’”
That statement infused a much-needed sense of diversity and inclusion and love, yes, that word, in a room that had been stripped of it by the preening Republicans.
“And so, you faced insults here that were shocking to me,” Booker said to Jackson. “But you are here because of that kind of love.”
People of color know the struggle of getting to where Jackson sits.
She’s in that seat for us.
As Booker talked, Jackson wiped her eyes.
And that’s all we really needed to know about the judge.
It’s good to know a nominee’s judicial philosophy. But we want to know they are human, too. That they have a heart. And that given individual circumstances, they can break the cookie-cutter and responsibly balance punishment with a sense of public forgiveness, a constructive empathy. If I had a vote, I would cast it in a second for Ketanji Brown Jackson. A vote for history.
Emil Guillermo is a journalist and commentator. His web talk show is on Facebook.com/emilguillermo.media; YouTube; and Twitter@emilamok
