Jasmine Crockett is defending the reputation of Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Jackson Brown after others criticized her for an astonishingly dumb line of questioning concerning birthright citizenship and for her recent dissent in a straightforward free speech case. In that dissent (she was the lone dissenter), Brown sought to affirm the power of states to compel therapists and other healthcare professionals to restrict options for gender-confused patients to so-called “gender-affirming care.” The dumb line of question? Jackson linked birthright citizenship to stealing a wallet in Japan.
Crockett commented that, because Brown is black and a woman (can Crockett tell us what a woman is?), she has to work “ten times harder” than those who are not black women. The reality is that Brown’s status as a black woman has made her life easier, and her nomination and confirmation to the Court prove that. She does not deserve to be on the Court. Her race and gender matter to those who count beans. Joe Biden explicitly selected her because she is a black woman. He did not select her based on accomplishment or talent. He sought a token, which is the progressive way.
Under questioning during her confirmation hearing, Brown couldn’t even answer the simple question, “What is a woman?” All she had to say was that a woman is an adult female human. Instead, she said she could not answer the question because she is not a biologist. If she cannot answer questions outside her field of expertise, then how could she have dissented in the Colorado case? Yet she wrote in her dissent that helping patients come to terms with their gender is an inappropriate treatment for gender dysphoria. Is Brown a medical professional? No. Following her logic, she should have no role in deciding cases that bear on medical questions.
We all know why progressives won’t answer the question Senator Marsha Blackburn put to Brown. If they answer the question truthfully, then men who say they are women are not women, since they are plainly not adult female humans. Answering the question honestly destroys the foundational premise upon which gender-identity doctrine rests. But truth and honesty are not important to progressives. What they value is movement politics and the electoral success that accrues to it. They need the votes of those who identify as transgender and their allies. If denying there is such a thing as a woman advances their power, then denying that truth is in order.
Nor does principle matter to Democrats. At the same time they deny knowing what a woman is, they advance candidates like Brown because she is a woman. They do the same with race. Race is only a social construction, but progressives promote selected blacks based on their race. I say “selected,” because when they are black conservatives, as Biden put it, they aren’t really black. In the hands of Democrats, gender and race are political tools. They are a façade standing in front of progressive policies.
If they actually cared about the interests of black people, progressives would recognize that in pushing DEI, they harm the populations they claim to champion. It’s in the interests of black men and women to rise to the top based on their accomplishments and talents. But progressives select and advance them on the grounds of identitarian politics.
Victor Glover, the NASA astronaut serving as pilot on the Artemis II mission to the moon, had to clarify during the press conference that, while he recognized that he was making history as the first black astronaut to travel to the moon, he looks forward to the day when not his race but his accomplishments and talents matter. Remember when Martin Luther King, Jr., told America of his dream that one day people would be judged based on the content of their character and not the color of their skin? Progressives are determined that King’s dream will never be anything more than that.
You could see that the question irked Glover because it suggested that he was selected to “make history,” not because he was the most qualified man for the job. This is the consequence of choosing people not because they are the most qualified, but because they represent demographic and supposed victim categories. In this sense, Glover does have extra work cut out for him: he has to push back against the perception that he is a token for a brand of politics that essentializes race.
Glover is not a concrete manifestation of an abstract demographic category. He is an individual. Glover’s ascent to his present status debunks the claim that a black man cannot be an astronaut because of systemic racism. Glover is not only an astronaut but also the mission’s pilot—a role no rational agency would assign based on race. The lives of his crew members and the success of the mission were put in his hands because he is accomplished and talented, not because he is a black man.
What happens if the mission fails? Some will suspect that he was a DEI hire. Progressives have set up Glover for such suspicion.
The same cannot be said of Ketanji Jackson Brown, who was appointed not to safeguard the Constitution of the United States but as part of a strategy to recruit collaborators for a political-ideological project. One does not have to suspect that she is a DEI hire. Joe Biden told us that she was.
Democrats appear unable to pull their collective head out of the ass of the racialized world they played a principal role in constructing. The problems of black Americans—ghettoization, welfare dependency, joblessness, crime, and family disintegration—are the consequence of the progressive policies of Democrats. The party’s racial paternalism is as front and center today as it was during the days of the slavocracy and Jim Crow.
One might think their desire for reparations is misplaced guilt over the fact that they are largely responsible for the situation of blacks in America. But that’s not it (even if it were, reparations are not rationally justifiable). The fact is that racial politics are embedded in the party’s DNA. From slavery through DEI, identity politics is a party reflex. It’s why they create dependent categories who vote rather than work for a living—not just blacks, but non-white immigrants. It’s why they pursue open borders and oppose deporting those who are illegally in America.
The Democratic Party engine runs on the fuel of racial politics. They are out of step with history. And that is why they’re obsessed with revising it, substituting propaganda that portrays Democrats as the white savior party. Their particular style of white saviorism goes hand-in-hand with manufactured racial self-loathing. They believe it ingratiates their party with those groups they exploit in pursuit of power.
It’s high time we reject identity politics and embrace the Enlightenment principle of individualism. To do this, we must reject the Democratic Party.
freedom and reason 