Courts

Ketanji Brown Jackson And The Fragile Art Of Black Excellence

Expect the expected and you will save yourself a state of SHOCK!

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angry-man

How dare she get a man off Death Row!

Well.

It has been all of three weeks since President Biden announced his pick of the eminently decorated Ketanji Brown Jackson, and right wing talking heads have been consumed with myriad barriers to her competency ranging from but not limited to: the search parameters prior to her selection, her (presumably high enough for Harvard Law) LSAT scores and…hard to pronounce name? I personally think if I made it through learning how to say Dostoyevsky, Nietzsche and Cabernet Sauvignon, it’s fair to expect people to learn to pronounce Ketanji, but I digress.

This, of course, should surprise no one. There is a long documented history of the liberty people getting uppity when Blacks folks have their turn at our nation’s highest stations — so much so that even the highest honors become bitter in their mouths. Like believing she should recuse her judgement because she sat on a Harvard board. Or the controversy that arose after the discovery that she did what many people would consider one of the highest callings a lawyer could aspire to, namely have on her CV that she got a person off of death row as a public defender. Which, I might add, one very perceptive tipster came very close to guessing would be the next stain on her record in a “What If” I posted in my last article on Judge Jackson.

The newest cut down levied against her (instead of just saying the quiet part out loud) is based on a note she authored in law school about the effects of registering people as sex offenders and her deviations from sentencing guidelines in child pornography cases. For the first, I’d like a little more context considering that a lot of things like peeing in public and hugging can get you on the sex offender registry. Concerning sentencing deviations, Judge Jackson isn’t the only one deviating — they aren’t always binding. She is also on record asking clarifying questions about the motives of those who possess child pornography, namely those who do so for non-sexual reasons. I’ll be honest; I didn’t know that was a thing either. I too would definitely have some follow up questions if someone casually dropped that they had a clearly-naked-child-but-not-child-porn stash. That said, if a friend in art school’s hand drawn cherub collection got seized as evidence in a CP case and they had to go register as a sex offender, I’d likely be parroting some of the language in KBJ’s law review note too. Some people really do read Playboy for the articles; maybe not all pictures of naked children should be considered pornography. Now that, my friends, is not a sentence I woke up expecting to write today. Although it does move. She’s not out here yelling from the rooftops “Go do a child porn!” or anything. Should we really be giving a Supreme Court nominee flack for questioning their own biases and trying to understand a bit about how the law may have unintended consequences on those subject to it?

Despite all their blowing at a brick house, I patiently wait the day they find their Control Denied. If I get dragged for backing someone who asks questions about sensitive topics, so be it. I’d rather that than rallying behind the dude yelling about having too many beers at a sexual misconduct hearing.

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Chris Williams became a social media manager and assistant editor for Above the Law in June 2021. Prior to joining the staff, he moonlighted as a minor Memelord™ in the Facebook group Law School Memes for Edgy T14s.  He endured Missouri long enough to graduate from Washington University in St. Louis School of Law. He is a former boatbuilder who cannot swim, a published author on critical race theory, philosophy, and humor, and has a love for cycling that occasionally annoys his peers. You can reach him by email at cwilliams@abovethelaw.com and by tweet at @WritesForRent.

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