Hey Meteor readers! This week has been a living how it started/how it’s going meme. It began with the historic confirmation hearings to confirm Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson to the Supreme Court—hearings in which the most qualified and brilliant nominee in years was made to rebuke a pasty melange of Republicans who used their time to racistly invoke spurious and dangerous lies about her record.

And the week ended with the revelation that sitting Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’s wife Ginni was (BIG GULP OF AIR) texting deranged QAnon conspiracy theories supporting overturning the 2020 election to Mark Meadows, Trump’s chief of staff, around the same time that Trump was hoping SCOTUS would help him… overturn the election.

We’ve got a lot more on all this in the news, and after that, Rebecca Carroll writes about Judge Jackson’s exceptionality and whether her confirmation hearings may have woken white America up to the double standard Black women endure every day.

—Julianne Escobedo Shepherd

WHAT’S GOING ON

• Soooo, yeah. Ginni Thomas? The far-right activist married to the longest-serving SCOTUS Justice? Who notoriously left Anita Hill a voicemail 10 years ago demanding an apology for testifying in Congress about Clarence Thomas’s sexual harassment? Which she framed as “why you did what you did with my husband”? Yeah, so…she spent the days after the election texting Trump’s chief of staff Meadows a litany of conspiracy theories (like painting a normal democratic election as a left-wing “heist”) and demanding that Sidney Powell, the Q lawyer who briefly represented Trump, be the face of the “Stop the Steal” effort. The texts were reported by the Washington Post.

• This is significant because when SCOTUS went on to rule that Trump could not block the Jan. 6 committee from gathering White House records, Ginni Thomas’s husband did not recuse himself. In fact, he was the lone dissenter—ruling in the minority against a request for information that eventually exposed his wife’s texts to Meadows. Did he know this? We don’t know. Should he be questioned about it and potentially impeached and yeeted off SCOTUS? LOL yes. To paraphrase an old adage: shoulda believed Anita Hill.

• All of this unfortunately dovetailed with the fact that the most spurious of Republican claims during Ketanji Brown Jackson’s hearings—the lie that she was soft on child sex offenders—was also rooted in QAnon conspiracy theories. The line of questioning isn’t just misleading; it’s actively dangerous. As NPR reported this week, these attacks have resulted in an uptick in chatter about Judge Jackson on fringe websites—and some of the posts have been violent.

• And then there’s the way Judge Jackson was treated—and expected to behave—in contrast to 2018 nominee Brett Kavanaugh. Elie Mystal’s piece for the Nation, “Ketanji Brown Jackson’s Long Pause,” teased this out perfectly: “Everybody knew that, in the same situation, Kavanaugh could and did sneer at his questioners, threaten the Senate with political retribution, and declare his undying love for beer, without hurting his chances at unaccountable lifetime power. Power he now holds.”

• Even after all that, though, there was joy—enough to carry us through the week. If Senator Cory Booker’s passionate exhortation on the last day of her hearings was the most moving bit of video, the most emblematic photo of this process was taken by Sarahbeth Maney, a 25-year-old Black woman photojournalist. “I noticed how proud her daughter was of her,” Maney told the Times, “and it gave me chills when I saw this look that her daughter gave her. It was just this look of such pride and admiration.”

  AND:

• A powerful, must-read Eleine Hseih Chou essay about the specific and violent ways Asian women are fetishized among white men

• A beautiful piece by the LA Times’s Jean Guerrero on what is lost when white assimilation demands the Anglicization of non-Anglo last names

• A sprawling investigation into why one Black community in Columbia, South Carolina has an astronomical rate of diabetes-related amputations.

• A nice profile about Lux Magazine, a Leftist feminist publication you should definitely read

• Fuck yeah, Precious Lee!

—JES

KETANJI BROWN JACKSON

On Being Twice as Good to Get Half as Much

Black women could have predicted what KBJ went through. So why are so many people surprised? 

BY REBECCA CARROLL

THE FACE OF A WOMAN WHO HAS HAD ENOUGH (PHOTO BY CHIP SOMODEVILLA VIA GETTY IMAGES) 

Last week, during the Senate confirmation hearings for Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, after hours of watching the relentless, shameless and openly racist baiting by white male senators of the country’s first Black woman Supreme Court nominee, I posted a tweet:

The way that a Black woman in America can be as highly, hyper educated, intelligent, elegant, skilled, experienced and qualified as KBJ and still be treated like this by white men on national television. It’s not even symbolic. It’s a glaring body of evidence. 

I didn’t feel as though I was saying anything special or new. I’m a Black woman in America who has not only experienced this kind of racism and misogyny, but has made it my life’s work to call it out in everything I make and do. In fact, I have said or written some iteration of what’s in that tweet literally dozens of times, to varying levels of response.

I said it when I first started in magazine journalism, and my ideas were passed over for the less-developed ones of my white peers. I said it when Michelle Obama was in the White House, constantly tested and scrutinized by the media despite the fact that she showed up more graceful, poised, and magnanimous than it was perhaps reasonable to expect. I said it on my podcast Billie Was a Black Woman, for this reason exactly—because Billie Holiday, among the most influential jazz singers of all time, was a Black woman, and as such, was relentlessly targeted and pursued by the FBI all the way to her grave. This is the same historical double-burden of racism and sexism that Jackson, among the most qualified Supreme Court nominees in the history of this country, is experiencing today.

I’ve seen this. I know this. Not new.

But this time, for whatever reason, it struck a chord. Over the first 48 hours, the tweet was liked nearly 170,000 times and retweeted by over 30,000 people—including, I might add, white male political figures Robert Reich and Howard Dean.

All of which mystifies me. Why now? How can you say a thing a thousand times and not have it truly be heard until the thousandth time? Is it just an algorithm? Was it the collective witnessing of what Judge Jackson had gone through? Event television? And mostly, I wondered: Will this change anything for Black women?

We aren’t just forbidden from being “the best,” we are simply not allowed to have or hold the word and its meaning 

Some comments on the tweet, not surprisingly, were from fellow Black women who knew all too well what we were witnessing as we watched Senator Lindsey Graham bitterly interrogate Jackson, and callously speak over her answers, while palpably seething with resentment over her sheer presence. For many of those women, it evoked that famous scene from Scandal, when Papa Pope tells his already exceedingly successful grown Black daughter, Olivia, that she has to be “twice as good as them to get half what they have!”

One Black woman in the comments put it a bit differently, tweeting: “We have to be better than the best.” And in Judge Jackson’s case, “better than the best” isn’t an exaggeration. By definition and anyone’s standard — including the white one — she is the living, breathing embodiment of the best. Judge Jackson went to Harvard University (magna cum laude) and Harvard Law (cum laude), became a judge in the U.S. Court of Appeals, a Supreme Court clerk, and a public defender. There’s no “best” for her to be “better” than.

LINDSEY GRAHAM, A DISGRACE TO LINDSEYS EVERYWHERE (PHOTO BY SCOTT APPLEWHITE VIA GETTY IMAGES)

And that’s it right there.

The hearings weren’t just about the way that white America continues to move the goalposts for success when it comes to Black women (and all people of color); it’s about the way it unrepentantly steals words and lynches language in actual plain sight. We aren’t just forbidden from being “the best,” we are simply not allowed to have or hold the word and its meaning. And if we try, especially in public, white America will snatch it right out of our exhaustively achieved grasp.

This week made that reality visible. Because it wasn’t just Black women and other Black folks and people of color who responded to my tweet — white people, lots of them, tweeted comments like, “Those Senators make me ashamed to be a white man.” Some responses felt genuine, others performative. Either way, clearly some (most?) white people are just starting to understand the kind of racism we endure all the time—because they were seeing the evidence. They, and all of us, were watching it right in front of our eyes. I’m still not sure Why Now, but I’m also not that interested in speculating about why white people do what they do; I’m more interested in us and in finding our harbingers of hope.

And the reactions did give me a glimmer of hope. Two years into our so-called “racial reckoning”—more a phrase than an actual change—it felt to me this week as if people might actually be reckoning. But there’s no real victory in the simple acknowledgment that racism exists.

I will feel victorious when Judge Jackson is.

ONE MORE THING

Nicole Chung on Having “The Talk”

The racism talk, not the sex talk

BY SHANNON MELERO

Few things terrify me more than the thought of parenting. I watch all of the parents in my life, and I am astounded and filled with equal amounts awe and fear. How does anyone stay sane while navigating the boss-level Mario Kart map that is being a parent? Particularly parents of color, who have the added responsibility of explaining complex concepts like structural racism, respectability politics, and police procedure to children under 10, because to delay such a conversation is a life-altering risk?

On this week’s episode of UNDISTRACTED, author Nicole Chung shared her story of being a transracial adoptee and parenting her own daughter, now 14, amid a surge in anti-Asian hate crimes. “I think we were always going to have these conversations” about violence against Asian women, Chung said on the episode. “Not just because she’s old enough to get news alerts on her phone, but because we’ve always had these conversations… I still feel that parental urge to want to protect her or to just like, keep her safe at home where nothing could happen.”

It made me think back to my own teen years and whether or not my mother and I ever had such a talk or how we would have even started it. My family covers a wide racial spectrum, from our Afro-Latino elders to my one cousin on my grandfather’s side, who is full Irish. When you’re a kid seeing this assortment at family functions, it’s as if racism has been magically solved. So my mom had to take a very different approach. Sparing you the details (gotta save something for the memoir), there were many things we never talked about because we had lived through them, and really when life Stone Cold stuns you in the face with a hard lesson, what’s the point in conversation?

But I’ll never forget the conversation we had when she was dropping me off at college for my freshman year—the first time we would ever be so far apart from each other. “These white girls are going to be different than what you’re used to,” she said. I attended a predominantly white institution and had already met my new white roommate via Facebook. “They’re raised different. I don’t want you picking up their habits. And remember, you already have three strikes against you. You’re Latina, you’re a woman, and you believe in God. So you need to be careful.”

And as much as I hate to admit it, my mother was right. The women I met and lived with were different, and I struggled. When assimilation failed me, I leaned into the unspoken segregation on my campus. I joined the Latino Student Union, Black Student Union, Caribbean Student Association, and even the Asian Student Association—just to fill up the week with people who understood to some degree what I was going through. My weekends were devoted to hockey games and parties with my white friends because, despite our differences, I didn’t want to totally cut them out. It also helped that with a few strokes of a flatiron I could blend in with any white crowd (just not during the summer).

And maybe that’s part of why my mother was able to skip some of these conversations: I easily pass, and I was born a people pleaser. But eventually, my turn will come to have a small human, and if I remember seventh-grade genetics correctly, they’ll look like my husband and won’t pass as I do. And even though I’m nowhere near parenthood, I’m already trying to figure out how to have a useful talk with my future kid about race. I reckon that once the big moment comes, I’ll feel much like Chung, who told host Brittany Packnett Cunningham, “The adult you, with the adult perspective… You look back on these moments you experienced, many of them before you had the tools or the vocabulary or the support or the community or whatever it is you needed to kind of deal with it…and it really messes you up a little bit.”

One thing I am certain of is that I will be repeating Chung’s advice to her own child published in the Atlantic: “If there are those who do not consider your life precious, I hope that you can always feel assured of your own immense worth and your absolute right to be safe. You deserve to be safe. We all deserve to be safe.”

For more of Nicole and Brittany’s conversation, listen here.  

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