Here we go again. In July of 2020, when Joe Biden was picking his running mate, there were people running around screaming in apoplectic rage because he limited his choices only to women of color. People were irate that he was exercising such an egregious example of affirmative action. I wrote here about why I, a cis white male, wasn’t particularly perturbed by his actions.
Now that there’s a Supreme Court vacancy, President Biden has announced that he will fulfill his campaign promise of nominating a Black woman to the court. Once again, there are voices of outrage. How dare he overlook all of the wonderful white male candidates and only focus on qualified Black woman!
Just like I did before, let’s look at the facts.
According to that indisputable source, Wikipedia, from 1789 to the present, there have been 115 Supreme Court Justices. According to my count, there have been two Black justices, Thurgood Marshall and Clarence Thomas. There has been a grand total of one Hispanic justice, Sonia Sotomayor. There have been five female justices, Sandra Day O’Connor, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Sonia Sotomayor (two check boxes!), Elena Kagan, and Amy Coney Barrett. That leaves the remaining 108 as white males.
Let’s run the percentages. 1.7% of all Justices have been Black. 0.8% of all Justices have been Hispanic. 4.3% of all Justices have been women. 93.9% of all Justices have been white males.
It’s not exactly a huge mystery why. Black people weren’t even considered citizens until the Fourteenth Amendment passed in 1868. Even after that point, it would be close to another hundred years, after school desegregation and the passage of the Civil Rights Act, that Black people even had the ghost of an opportunity to advance to something as august as the Supreme Court. It wasn’t until 1920 that women were even granted the right to vote and they were denied anything approaching equality for decades after that.
Even if we grant all of that, start history with Sandra Day O’Connor, and pretend that the sexism and racism of those first two hundred years or so somehow don’t count for some reason, where does that leave us?
O’Connor was nominated in 1981. Since then, thirteen more Justices have been appointed. Of those, one has been Black, one has been Hispanic, and four have been women (again, Sotomayor checks two boxes). That leaves eight that have been white males.
That’s a bit better. What are the percentages? 7.7% have been Black or Hispanic. 30.8% have been women. 61.5% have been white males.
What percentage of our country is composed of white men? A quick search yields about 31%.
So, if President Biden decides to nominate a Black woman, white men aren’t exactly going to be underrepresented in our highest court.
Regarding the argument, by doing so, that Biden is overlooking an entire swarm of highly qualified white men that could better serve in that open court seat? Well, does anyone seriously think that Brett “I like beer” Kavanaugh is the greatest legal mind of our age? I have absolutely no fears that Biden will have trouble finding a Black woman serving on a court somewhere that can at least match Kavanaugh’s level of legal acumen.
So, let me close with the same thought that I stated in my previous post. From the year 1789 to the year 1980, the only possible demographic to be a Supreme Court Justice was the white male.
What do you call a job where race and/or sex is a prerequisite? Affirmative Action. For the first 191 years of our country’s history, the Supreme Court was an affirmative action program for white males.
Knowing all of this, I have no problem with a President, in the year 2022, saying that maybe it’s time to give someone else a chance.
dorkenstein 