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GOP drops any subtlety in centering the Jackson nomination fight on race
Part of the issue, of course, is the historic nature of Jackson’s nomination. If confirmed, she would be the first Black woman to serve on the Supreme Court. Before she was nominated by Biden, Republicans expended a great deal of energy performatively lamenting that the president had pledged to nominate a Black woman, a pledge cast by many on the right not as a recognition of a historic oversight but instead as representing a sort of un-American form of affirmative action. That worked better in the abstract; once named, Jackson’s experience made it hard to cast her as a beneficiary of charity.
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....
We know why, of course. For decades, Republican officials and candidates slowly moved away from explicit racial appeals to quiet or subtle ones, a pattern reflected in the “Southern strategy.” But emboldened by the increased discussion about race that accompanied the emergence of the Black Lives Matter movement, the party has started moving back to more explicit racial appeals such as that focus on “critical race theory.” Ask a Republican voter what CRT means, and they are likely to offer up some pastiche of concerns about children being taught that White people are inherently guilty or bad and that the United States is foundationally racist. CRT has been recodified to annex the entire range of cultural constructions that are unpopular with Americans, as Rufo promised — where “Americans” means “heavily conservative White Americans.”
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....
We know why, of course. For decades, Republican officials and candidates slowly moved away from explicit racial appeals to quiet or subtle ones, a pattern reflected in the “Southern strategy.” But emboldened by the increased discussion about race that accompanied the emergence of the Black Lives Matter movement, the party has started moving back to more explicit racial appeals such as that focus on “critical race theory.” Ask a Republican voter what CRT means, and they are likely to offer up some pastiche of concerns about children being taught that White people are inherently guilty or bad and that the United States is foundationally racist. CRT has been recodified to annex the entire range of cultural constructions that are unpopular with Americans, as Rufo promised — where “Americans” means “heavily conservative White Americans.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/03/22/gop-drops-any-subtlety-centering-jackson-nomination-fight-race/
In other words, Republicans are racist trash.