If you can't count on anything else, you can count on the sky to be blue, rain to be wet, and Fox News host Tucker Carlson to be racist. (And actually, the former examples are less certain than the last.) Less than a week after President Joe Biden honored a campaign promise and nominated Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, the first Black woman nominated to the Supreme Court, Carlson called for the president to reveal her Law School Admission Test (LSAT) score on Carlson’s show Wednesday night. As soon as he made the request—no, demand—it triggered a level of insult for me akin to asking the late NASA mathematician Katherine Johnson—whose orbital mechanics calculations helped send the first U.S. crew into space—if she can count to 100.
“So it might be time for Joe Biden to let us know what Ketanji Brown Jackson’s LSAT score was,” Carlson said. “Well, how did she do on the LSATs? Why wouldn't you tell us that? That would settle the question conclusively as to whether she’s a once in a generation legal talent, the next one at hand.”
America has the right to know Jackson’s LSAT score, Carlson continued. Okay, I’ll play. Sure, let’s publicize her LSAT scores, but just make sure we publish it in the same article as we do former President Donald Trump’s academic record, which a superintendent of New York Military Academy was "in a panic" about trying to hide in 2011, Evan Jones, then-headmaster of Trump’s high school, told The Washington Post. “He said, ‘You need to go grab that record and deliver it to me because I need to deliver it to them,’” Jones said of the superintendent's request on behalf of Trump's "prominent" and wealthy friends.
Jeffrey Coverdale, the superintendent in question, confirmed Jones’ account to the Post. “I was given directives, part of which I could follow but part of which I could not, and that was handing them over to the trustees,” he said. “I moved them elsewhere on campus where they could not be released. It’s the only time I ever moved an alumnus’ records.”
Michael Cohen, Trump's former personal lawyer, told Congress Trump sent him “to threaten his high school, his colleges, and the College Board to never release his grades or SAT scores.”
Meanwhile, Jackson’s record of academic excellence is already public. A U.S. circuit judge and former district judge, she graduated cum laude from Harvard Law School in 1996 after earlier graduating magna cum laude from Harvard-Radcliffe College in 1992, according to her circuit court profile.
Her Supreme Court confirmation hearings are set to begin March 21, CNN reported. And even before she was announced as Biden’s choice, she was lauded by activists and civil rights leaders as a brilliant choice for the seat.
Journalist Elie Mystal wrote of her the day Biden announced the nomination that she “has been the front-runner for ‘the next’ Democratic Supreme Court nominee for six years for reasons beyond her race, sex, and educational credentials.”
“Her strength lies not in the immutable characteristics of who she is but in what she’s done,” he penned for the weekly progressive magazine The Nation. Mystal celebrated Jackson as a high school debate champ, as a clerk for both a judge appointed by former president Bill Clinton and another appointed by the late President Ronald Reagan, and as a public servant in a federal public defender's office and on the U.S. Sentencing Commission, which aims to underscore disparities in sentencing. "If confirmed, Jackson will come to the court with more public defense experience than any justice since Thurgood Marshall," Mystal wrote.
To even mention her name in the same sentence as Tucker’s is an insult.
“This is textbook racism,” Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones tweeted. “Not even a dog whistle. Show clips of Tucker asking for LSATs of a white candidate. Outside of the ridiculous argument that scores to get INTO law school are the measure of qualification, the presumption that Black pp are dumb is standard white supremacy.”