It remains to be seen who President Joe Biden will nominate for the U.S. Supreme Court seat presently held by the retiring Justice Stephen Breyer, but he has said that the nominee will be an African-American woman — and the top contender, according to many reports, is believed to be 51-year-old D.C. Court of Appeals Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson. Whoever the nominee is, journalist Kali Holloway warns in a scathing op-ed published by the Daily Beast on January 28, she can expect to be bombarded with both racism and misogyny by Republicans.
"For nearly 180 years," Holloway writes, "every American president made an unspoken pledge to only nominate White men to the U.S. Supreme Court. Race and gender went unmentioned, because they were foregone conclusions…. Now, a lot of those White men are hopping mad, firing off racist responses the minute President Joe Biden reaffirmed his campaign promise to nominate the first Black woman to the Supreme Court, without even waiting to find out what Black woman they're attacking."
One of the Republicans who has been sounding off about Biden and a nominee to replace Breyer is far-right Florida State Rep. Anthony Sabatini.
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Holloway observes, "Florida state Rep. Anthony Sabatini — most famous for wearing blackface, dressing up as a racist 'Mexican' caricature, and requesting that every removed Confederate statue from around the country be sent to his home district — went the 'reverse racism,' White grievance route, demanding that President Biden 'be impeached for his anti-White racist exclusion of any White nominee to the Supreme Court.'"
Fox News' Tucker Carlson, Holloway notes, was "mockingly suggesting that Bridget Floyd — sister of George Floyd, who was murdered by police —should be nominated, adding that 'she is not a judge or a lawyer or whatever, but in this case, who cares?'"
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"This is all fueled by misogynoir, pure and simple," Holloway emphasizes. "We're actually likely to see Biden choose a candidate whose talents, expertise, and skill are unassailable, because she will have already been scrutinized in ways her White and male peers never had to face. To have arrived at the point of being picked for a SCOTUS seat is to have already navigated a racist and sexist career minefield for any Black woman. The problem isn't that we're going to have a Black woman nominated to the Supreme Court, it's that it took this long for us to get here, and people are still effectively claiming it shouldn't happen."
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