frontlines I BY CHRISTIAN F. NUNES


Ketanji Brown Jackson’s Supreme Court


President Joe Biden honored his commitment to appoint a Black woman to the nation’s highest court


I


T’S IMPOSSIBLE TO DESCRIBE the importance of the confirmation


of Ketanji Brown Jackson to the


U.S. Supreme Court. And, it’s almost impossible to describe the feelings so many of us are experiencing as we wait for her swearing-in—there just aren’t adequate words for the pride, excite- ment and seriousness of this moment. But we cannot forget that some


people in power will see her identity as a Black woman as a threat and will fight to discredit her by any means necessary. Because she’s a Black woman, they will overlook her decades of experience and expertise and will minimize her credibility based on respectability politics, racism and misogynoir. Black women, I say, are always the first to fight for change but never included in the sys- temic changes that will affect us most. Of the 115 Supreme Court justices


in U.S. history, all but seven have been white men and less than 3 per- cent have been people of color. Pres- ident Joe Biden made a commitment during his campaign to appoint a Black woman to the Supreme Court, a promise from the heart that he hon- ored with distinction. As I watched Judge Brown Jackson in her confir- mation hearings, I was deeply moved by her passionate commitment to be- ing an advocate for justice and for the intersectional issues that matter to women today. Weeks before Brown Jackson was


scheduled to appear before the Sen- ate Judiciary Committee, Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.) reportedly said at a Senate Republican luncheon, “I want a nominee who knows a law book


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from a J.Crew catalog,” adding that he wanted someone “who’s not going to try to rewrite the Constitution every other Thursday to try to ad- vance a ‘woke’ agenda.” What Brown Jackson’s opponents


call “woke,” we call equity. It is her lived experience and understanding of equal justice that make her so exceptionally qualified to be on the Supreme Court. It’s appalling— though hardly surprising—to hear her experience as a public defender attacked so viciously by politicians and the right-wing media. The Supreme Court helps define


the constitutional rights of defendants, from their interactions with police to the conduct of their trials and fairness of their sentencing. The words equal justice under law are literally carved in stone on the Supreme Court—but the Court, thus far, has been far from eq- uitable in its point of view. While the Supreme Court has always had its share of prosecutors (in the current Court, that includes Justices Samuel Alito, Sonia Sotomayor, Neil Gorsuch and outgoing Justice Stephen Breyer), there has never been a justice with ex- perience as a public defender. During her confirmation hearing


to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, Brown Jackson talked about the “direct line” between her public defender experience and how she approached the law, including the “extra care” she took to ensure defendants ap- pearing before her understood what was happening. According to a biographical data- base kept by the Federal Judicial


Center, only 70 of the 3,843 people who have ever served as federal judges in the U.S. have been Black women—not even 2 percent of the total. In little more than a year, Biden has appointed more Black women to federal judgeships than all but two of his predecessors—Barack Obama and Bill Clinton—did during their two terms as president. And as of Jan. 26, 2022, of the 42 judicial nominees ap- pointed to federal courts by Biden, 69 percent were people of color and 79 percent were women—a new record. What’s more, Brown Jackson is far


from the only judicial appointment with a background as a public defend- er. At least 20 other lawyers with this experience have been nominated by the Biden administration, accounting for roughly 30 percent of those consid- ered by the Senate Judiciary Commit- tee in this term so far. Biden himself served briefly as a public defender early in his career, and he clearly under- stands the need to broaden racial diver- sity and representation on the federal bench by naming more people of color. Brown Jackson knows what it’s like


to grow up in an environment where the values and value of her communi- ty are considered subordinate to “mainstream” culture, and where Black women continually have to prove their worth. When Ketanji Brown Jackson was in high school, her guidance counselor cautioned her not to set her sights too high. I’m glad she didn’t listen.


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CHRISTIAN F. NUNES, MBA, MS, LCSW, is the president of the National Organization for Women.


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