All Rise
On a day, not the first, when the US Supreme Court furthered its project of turning the tide of progress and returning the country to the 17th century, I sat down and read Carole Boston Weatherford’s beautiful biography of Ketanji Brown Jackson, illustrated by Ashley Evans.
Picture book biographies have limited space to work with. You can't delve too deeply into character. You can merely point to a governing trait or two and let the space between art and image raise an emotional arc to the surface. You can't unpack the shades of meaning a person derives from lived experience. There is only so much room. Your audience is too young for you to do more than introduce this life to them. But in these pages, alive with an artist’s elevation of text, what you can do is render that life familiar, so that when your child readers encounter this very person again, they might recognize her.
That’s what Carole Boston Weatherford does with her customary skill in this book. Look at this page:
All Rise reveals, in small increments like this, how Ketanji Brown Jackson’s journey was made possible by her own skills and determination as well as by the words and deeds of those who led the way before her.
That way, unfortunately, may be harder for many to navigate going forward, on account of the very court that Justice Jackson now sits upon, where her voice rings often in unflinching dissent. In Students for Fair Admissions, Inc., v. University of North Carolina et al, she sets her dissent in the context of two hypothetical applicants:
Imagine two college applicants from North Carolina, John and James. Both trace their family’s North Carolina roots to the year of UNC’s founding in 1789. Both love their State and want great things for its people. Both want to honor their family’s legacy by attending the State’s flagshipeducational institution. John, however, would be the seventh generation to graduate from UNC. He is White. James would be the first; he is Black. Does the race of these applicants properly play a role in UNC’s holistic merits-based admissions process?
Reading the dissent is like being privy to a history lesson, from slavery to emancipation through reconstruction and the Jim Crow era.
With let-them-eat-cake obliviousness, today, the majority pulls the ripcord and announces “colorblindness for all” by legal fiat. But deeming race irrelevant in law does not make it so in life. And having so detached itself from this country’s actual past and present experiences, the Court has now been lured into interfering with the crucial work that UNC and other institutions of higher learning are doing to solve America’s real-world problems.
No one benefits from ignorance. Although formal race-linked legal barriers are gone, race still matters to the lived experiences of all Americans in innumerable ways, and today’s ruling makes things worse, not better. The best that can be said of the majority’s perspective is that it proceeds (ostrich-like) from the hope that preventing consideration of race will end racism. But if that is its motivation, the majority proceeds in vain. If the colleges of this country are required to ignore a thing that matters, it will not just go away. It will take longer for racism to leave us. And, ultimately, ignoring race just makes it matter more.
Carol Boston Weatherford’s picture book was published only months before the writing of that dissent. Now it feels as if something in the “actual past and present,” something necessary in the “gains of the movement,” has been carelessly knocked askew.
