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During his primetime show, Tucker Carlson Tonight, the Fox News pundit shared a racist line of questioning regarding Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson’s LSAT score.
It shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone who’s heard Carlson speak for longer than five seconds that he is making headlines yet again for uttering some racist nonsense.
Back in 2020, while campaigning for the presidency, President Biden promised to nominate a Black woman to the court if an opportunity opened up. When news broke in January that Supreme Court Justice Steven Breyer was planning to retire, the opportunity for Biden to make good on his promise had presented itself.
A Black woman has never held a seat on the bench in the Supreme Court’s more than 232 year existence.
Seated from left to right: Justices Samuel A. Alito, Jr. and Clarence Thomas, Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Jr., and Justices Stephen G. Breyer and Sonia Sotomayor
Standing from left to right: Justices Brett M. Kavanaugh, Elena Kagan, Neil M. Gorsuch, and Amy Coney Barrett.
Photograph by Fred Schilling, Collection of the Supreme Court of the United States
Tucker Carlson’s racist LSAT questions
When it was announced that Ketanji Brown Jackson would be Biden’s nomination for the vacant Justice position, the racist attacks from Carlson began almost immediately.
“So legally speaking, Ketanji Brown Jackson isn’t much of a jurist,” Carlson said. “She’s not simply ignorant of the law, she is a political activist and the irony is that right now the Supreme Court is considering an important question, a central question, about affirmative action. They are about to decide whether Harvard and other elite institutions can make decisions based on racial quotas. Do you want to live in that country? Most people don’t, of all colors. They think that you should be elevated in America based on what you do, on the choices, not on how you were born, not on your DNA, because that’s Rwanda.”
This past week, Carlson took it a step further in his racist rhetoric, and asked a question of Brown Jackson that he did not ask of recent Supreme Court nominees Amy Coney Barrett and Brett Kavanaugh.
“So is Ketanji Brown Jackson, a name that even Joe Biden has trouble pronouncing, one of the top legal minds in the entire country?” Tucker Carlson added. It might be time for Joe Biden to let us know what Ketanji Brown Jackson’s LSAT score was. How did she do on the LSATs? It would seem like Americans in a democracy have a right to know.”
Ketanji Brown Jackson’s life of public service
Jackson currently serves on the US Court of Appeals for the DC circuit. If confirmed, Jackson will also become the first public defender to serve on the court since Thurgood Marshall.
“I come from a background of public service,” Jackson said in her 2021 confirmation hearing.
“My parents were in public service, my brother was a police officer and (was) in the military. Being in the public defenders’ office felt very much like the opportunity to help with my skills and talents.”
Judge Jackson was born Ketanji Onyika Brown in Washington, D.C. but grew up in Miami, FL. Her parents, both HBCU graduates, exemplified the life of public service that Jackson would later assume.
Her father served as the head attorney to the local school board, and her mother was a school principal.
After graduating high school, Jackson went on to attend Harvard University, where she graduated magna cum laude. After graduating cum laude from Harvard Law School, she worked as a clerk in law offices around the nation.
Eventually, Jackson would find herself serving as a law clerk for Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer. Now, two decades later, she has been nominated to assume his seat once he retires.
Following her clerkships, Jackson’s career would lead her to become a federal defense attorney. According to The Washington Post, Jackson “won uncommon victories against the government that shortened or erased lengthy prison terms”.
It was this commitment to justice that caused President Barack Obama to take notice of Jackson’s work, despite pundits like Tucker Carlson. In 2009, Obama tapped Jackson to become the Vice Chair of the US Sentencing Commission. During her five year tenure, the commission worked to significantly reduce sentencing disparities for drug-related crimes.
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