President Joe Biden has vowed to nominate a Black woman, and only a Black woman, to fill the soon-to-be-vacant seat currently occupied by outgoing Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer.
According to The Federalist, however, that promise to base a top judicial nomination on immutable characteristics like gender and skin color is both racist and sexist — and antithetical to the American ideal of equality.
In fact, albeit coming from the opposite angle, Biden’s stance is really no different than the sort of unacceptable thinking that formed the basis of Jim Crow laws that institutionalized racial discrimination and segregation at the governmental level, The Federalist argues.
Black women only
It was during a White House event Thursday to mark Justice Breyer’s retirement announcement that President Biden reaffirmed his racist and sexist plan with regard to filling a Supreme Court vacancy.
Biden said:
While I’ve been studying candidates’ backgrounds and writings, I’ve made no decisions except one: The person I will nominate will be someone with extraordinary qualifications, character, experience, and integrity, and that person will be the first Black woman ever nominated to the United States Supreme Court.
“It’s long overdue, in my view. I made that commitment during the campaign for President, and I will keep that commitment,” he added.
Joe Biden commits again to nominating a Black woman to the Supreme Court: “It’s long overdue in my view.” pic.twitter.com/tRbieuuNkJ
— BuzzFeed News (@BuzzFeedNews) January 27, 2022
Biden’s promise
That commitment Biden referenced this week was initially made in March 2020 during a Democratic primary debate, during which a question was posed about picking future Supreme Court nominees.
Then-candidate Biden revealed during that debate that he would limit himself to only considering a Black woman for an open seat on the high court.
He also made a commitment to ensure that his Cabinet would “look like the rest of the country,” presumably implying that racial and sexual characteristics would at least be equal to, if not greater than, the actual ability and experience of the individuals he would pick to work for him in the administration, and that his vice presidential pick would be a woman.
The return of Jim Crow
“I call this disgustingly racist and sexist,” wrote The Federalist’s Joy Pullman. “It is not progress, it is retrogression. Americans should not tolerate social Jim Crow dynamics like these any more than we tolerated Jim Crow laws in the second half of the 20th century.”
“I don’t want to go through another round of mass civil unrest to re-establish that American ideal, either. Neither should anyone else, but that’s what this kind of sex- and race-baiting will lead to if left unchecked,” she added with regard to Biden’s openly expressed and now institutionalized bigotry.