During Ketanji Brown Jackson’s confirmation hearings on Tuesday, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) questioned the Supreme Court nominee over her views on critical race theory — including whether she thinks that babies are taught to be racist.
In his line of questioning, Cruz noted that Jackson had described The 1619 Project — a Pulitzer Prize-winning analysis that examines how slavery impacted U.S. history and policy over the past four centuries — as “provocative.” Jackson also served as a board member of the Georgetown Day School, a private pre-K-12 school in the Washington, D.C. area, which Cruz took issue with due to its recommended reading list, which includes a number of anti-racist titles for children.
The school, which has long sought to address racism, was founded by Black and white families in the 1940s when segregation was still the law in D.C. and throughout the rest of the country.
“If you look at the Georgetown Day School’s curriculum, it is filled and overflowing with critical race theory,” Cruz errantly claimed during the confirmation hearings.
Jackson said that her role as a member of the school’s board didn’t include having any say on the books that are taught to students. The books, she reminded Cruz, “don’t come up in my work as a judge, which I am, respectfully, here to address.”
Cruz specifically asked Jackson to respond to a book entitled Antiracist Baby, a children’s book written by noted historian and anti-racist scholar Ibram X. Kendi.
“There are portions of this book that I find really quite remarkable,” Cruz said. “One portion of the book says babies are taught to be racist or anti-racist. Do you agree with this book that is being taught with kids that babies are racist?”
Jackson responded by saying that she didn’t believe “any child should be made to feel as though they are racist or though they are not valued or though they are less-than.” She also questioned Cruz’s line of attack, stating that she understood critical race theory — an academic discipline that examines how race and gender shape laws and policies in the United States — to be mostly “taught in law schools,” not K-12 classrooms.
Studies have shown that children in preschool can indeed develop racist viewpoints from the ideas and media that they consume. Kendi’s book seeks to expose kids to an anti-racist narrative instead.
Jackson also told Cruz that she didn’t use critical race theory in formulating her rulings.
“It doesn’t come up in my work as a judge. It’s never something that I have studied or relied on,” she said.
Cruz’s attempted “gotchas” during the hearings came less than a day after he promised that Republican senators wouldn’t make Jackson’s confirmation a “political circus.” But Cruz and his colleagues proceeded to ask Jackson inappropriate questions about her religious beliefs, deriding her for defending inmates at Guantánamo Bay and pressing her to explain her views of marriage equality.
Sen. John Cornyn, the other Republican senator from Texas, lashed out at marriage equality during the hearings, lamenting that the right of same-sex couples to marry overruled the will of people who voted to ban gay marriage in the state. “Well, senator, that is the nature of a right,” Jackson said in response.
We’re not backing down in the face of Trump’s threats.
As Donald Trump is inaugurated a second time, independent media organizations are faced with urgent mandates: Tell the truth more loudly than ever before. Do that work even as our standard modes of distribution (such as social media platforms) are being manipulated and curtailed by forces of fascist repression and ruthless capitalism. Do that work even as journalism and journalists face targeted attacks, including from the government itself. And do that work in community, never forgetting that we’re not shouting into a faceless void – we’re reaching out to real people amid a life-threatening political climate.
Our task is formidable, and it requires us to ground ourselves in our principles, remind ourselves of our utility, dig in and commit.
As a dizzying number of corporate news organizations – either through need or greed – rush to implement new ways to further monetize their content, and others acquiesce to Trump’s wishes, now is a time for movement media-makers to double down on community-first models.
At Truthout, we are reaffirming our commitments on this front: We won’t run ads or have a paywall because we believe that everyone should have access to information, and that access should exist without barriers and free of distractions from craven corporate interests. We recognize the implications for democracy when information-seekers click a link only to find the article trapped behind a paywall or buried on a page with dozens of invasive ads. The laws of capitalism dictate an unending increase in monetization, and much of the media simply follows those laws. Truthout and many of our peers are dedicating ourselves to following other paths – a commitment which feels vital in a moment when corporations are evermore overtly embedded in government.
Over 80 percent of Truthout‘s funding comes from small individual donations from our community of readers, and the remaining 20 percent comes from a handful of social justice-oriented foundations. Over a third of our total budget is supported by recurring monthly donors, many of whom give because they want to help us keep Truthout barrier-free for everyone.
You can help by giving today. Whether you can make a small monthly donation or a larger gift, Truthout only works with your support.