Several days into Amy Coney Barrett’s Supreme Court confirmation hearings, we know one thing for certain: Barrett has an impressive, seemingly relentless, ability to dodge perfectly reasonable questions. She could not bring herself to express support for the peaceful transition of power, say whether a president can unilaterally delay an election, and refused to explicitly state Donald Trump can’t pardon himself for his crimes. She managed to describe sexual orientation as a “sexual preference,” and apologized after much backlash.
What has Barrett offered up an opinion on in the past? Well, as covered by the Associated Press, in 2019 as a judge in the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, she wrote a mind-boggling opinion on a workplace harassment lawsuit that came after an employee was terminated. Barrett wrote on behalf of three judges on the panel who all agreed on the ruling. In this case, Terry Smith, a Black Illinois transportation employee, claimed he was called a racial slur (the N-word) by his white supervisor, Lloyd Colbert. The judges upheld the original ruling, and, somehow, Barrett found a way to both close her eyes to the inherent hostility of racial slurs and effectively blame the worker for being fired. Let’s look at the quotes, and some internet reactions to the whole situation, below.
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She wrote: “The n-word is an egregious racial epithet. That said, Smith can’t win simply by proving that the word was uttered. He must also demonstrate that Colbert’s use of this word altered the conditions of his employment and created a hostile or abusive working environment.”
And she managed to essentially blame Smith for his being fired because of his “poor track record.” Barrett wrote: “To be sure, Smith testified that his time at the Department caused him psychological distress. But that was for reasons that predated his run-in with Colbert and had nothing to do with his race. His tenure at the Department was rocky from the outset because of his poor track record.”
There are few words as singularly demonstrative of a hostile or abusive environment as the N-word. And, as most would agree, those comparably hostile words are also slurs on the basis of race, sex, orientation, or gender identity. In this instance, the notion that a literal racial slur isn’t enough to prove how abusive a workspace might be opens up the bigger picture conversation about the ways people of color are systemically kept out of the workforce. After all, even while in the workforce, employees of color are subject to latent (or, in this case, apparently pretty explicit) racism. Because white people don’t want to call a spade a spade and recognize racism in its many forms, people of color face the brunt of not only racism but endless emotional labor to make their experiences digestible for people who simply do not want to accept it. Racism is a systemic, structural issue, from going to the bank to selling property, and the workplace is far from an exception.
On Twitter, people shared a lot of important dialogues on the complexity of Barrett’s writing alongside her role as the mother of Black children. In short: White family members are not excused from racism—nor immune to racist beliefs or participating in structures that uphold racism—just because they have non-white family members.
And of course, given Barrett’s originalist approach to the Constitution, people have some questions about one very, very key point.
Barrett addressed some of the critiques when asked by Republican Sen. John Kennedy about one of the tweets included above by Boston University professor Ibram Kendi, describing “accusations” like that as “cruel.”
And the broader picture when it comes to talking about parenthood and family values Republicans love to rally behind.