Key Point: “A nominee for a Supreme Court vacancy seen and identified by many on the right as being granted undue elevation over theoretically more-qualified White people is now linked to CRT, the code-phrase for concerns about subjugating White power in America. Every part of this is about race, and every part of it is already structured to let the GOP pretend that it isn’t.”

Washington Post: GOP drops any subtlety in centering the Jackson nomination fight on race
By Philip Bump 
March 22, 2022

Republicans have had a tricky time trying to undercut President Biden’s nomination of Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson to the Supreme Court. On Monday, the first day of Senate Judiciary Committee hearings considering her nomination, several Republican senators offered lines of attack on her background and sentencing history. It seemed a bit scattershot.

[…]

But then the Republican Party itself decided to weigh in, elevating a point first introduced by Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) on Monday. Maybe, it suggested in a tweet, the Jackson nomination was a Trojan horse for that most nefarious of concepts … critical race theory.

We can dispatch with the allegation itself fairly quickly, and will. But it’s very important to recognize what the party is doing here. “Critical race theory” (CRT) was elevated — and expanded — as a way of talking about conservative concerns about the perception that Whites held a diminished position in American society without being explicit about that perception. Here, the subterfuge is stripped away: Republicans are being warned that a Black nominee for the Supreme Court is hoping to inculcate this anti-White agenda.

It’s not subtle.

[…] 

Here, though, the Republican National Committee tries to tie its attack to something specific: the actual academic regimen of critical race theory. For instance:
 

• Jackson in one lecture mentioned that her parents had a book written by a proponent of the theory on their coffee table and also mentioned the New York Times’s “1619 Project” in noncritical terms.
  
   
• In another lecture she mentioned critical race theory as one of a half-dozen aspects of law and legal theory that come into play in sentencing.
  
   

And that’s it. The first is guilt by association; the latter a recognition that critical race theory — an academic theory specifically about the intersection of race and the law — might inform legal decisions. In the same portion of that lecture, Jackson also suggests that people might consider contract law, but the RNC for some reason chose not to emphasize their concerns about her being beholden to Big Contract.

[…]

We end up at the GOP’s tweet. A nominee for a Supreme Court vacancy seen and identified by many on the right as being granted undue elevation over theoretically more-qualified White people is now linked to CRT, the code-phrase for concerns about subjugating White power in America.

Every part of this is about race, and every part of it is already structured to let the GOP pretend that it isn’t.

[MORE]

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