Jonathan Capehart, the fill-in host for Thursday evening’s The Last Word With Lawrence O’Donnell on MSNBC, reacted to the morning’s news of the Supreme Court’s affirmative action case by launching personal attacks on the justices who had voted against it. He especially condemned their race and political ideologies as reasons that they had voted the way that they did.
The discussion began with Capehart calling the Supreme Court a “radical conservative” one, whining about the “decades of advancements in women’s rights and civil rights” that had been undone. He called the Court’s recent actions “in line with an extreme far-right agenda that’s wildly out of step with public opinion.”
He then slapped racially charged labels on the conservative justices and singled out Justice Clarence Thomas, not evening giving him the dignity of being identified as black:
The Court’s conservative supermajority, four white men, one white woman, and Justice Clarence Thomas, ruled that affirmative action programs “unavoidably employee race in a negative manner” and “involve racial stereotyping,” violating the Equal Protection Clause of the Constitution.
Interesting to note that when he said “Justice Clarence Thomas,” one could just hear the disdain and disgust in Capehart’s tone. Perhaps this was somewhat of a rebuke to Thomas on his political leaning, or perhaps an indicator that, to Capehart, Thomas’s own diverse race (and thus his ability to have an opinion that anyone could take seriously) was invalidated by his vote on the decision.
Capehart then proceeded to wonder why the conservatives thought that “programs designed to counteract racism by increasing racial diversity are, in fact, racist,” since apparently, promoting racial diversity at a school meant being explicitly racist in the selection process for students.
Because that totally makes sense.
Here, Capehart showed his true adherence to this concept by pointing out and lengthily quoting the two dissenting statements from Justice Jackson and Justice Sotomayor, simply because one was “the first black woman to serve on the Court” and the other was “the first Hispanic on the Court.”
He said that Justice Jackson “rejected this absurd notion” of counteracting racism with removing race as a factor in college selection procedures “in her blistering dissent.” Justice Sotomayor’s dissent, similarly, “rebuked the majority for completely ignoring the reality that structural racism exists and adversely impacts students of color.”
Capehart continued the conversation later on in the show, blaming the recent Supreme Court decisions on the “old white male Republican billionaires” that apparently ran the Court:
Class and race are often placed into separate buckets, but we can see in recent Supreme Court opinions and recent Supreme Court scandals involving old white male Republican billionaires, are broader contrasts about power, who has it now and who should have it in the future.
Of course, no mention was made of the old, white, male, Democrat millionaire who’s running the White House, but the difference between Republican and Democrat in this case seems to be very significant.
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Transcript of the segments below (click Expand):
MSNBC’s The Last Word With Lawrence O’Donnell
06/29/23
10:02:08 PM ET
JONATHAN CAPEHART: It's not just that the radical conservative Supreme Court is undoing decades of advancements in women's rights and civil rights, it’s that they’re once again ruling in line with an extreme far-right agenda that’s wildly out of step with public opinion. Just like a majority of Americans supports women's access to abortion services, a majority of Americans supports affirmatively affirmative action college admissions.
The Court’s conservative supermajority, four white men, one white woman, and Justice Clarence Thomas, ruled that affirmative action programs “unavoidably employee race in a negative manner” and “involve racial stereotyping,” violating the Equal Protection Clause of the Constitution.
Now, try to wrap your head around that.
What they’re claiming is that programs designed to counteract racism by increasing racial diversity are, in fact, racist.
The first black woman to serve on the Court, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, rejected this absurd notion in her blistering dissent, quote, “it is no small irony that the judgment the majority hands down today will forestall the end of race-based disparities in this country, making the colorblind world the majority wistfully touts much more difficult to accomplish.”
Justice Sonia Sotomayor, the first Hispanic on the Court, also rebuked the majority for completely ignoring the reality that structural racism exists and adversely impacts students of color: “Ignoring race will not equalize a society that is racially unequal. What was true in the 1860s and again in 1954, is true today: equality requires acknowledgment of inequality… At its core, today's decision exacerbates segregation and diminishes the inclusivity of our nation’s institutions in service of superficial neutrality that promotes indifference to inequality and ignores the reality of race.”
And it will have real world implications.
…
10:37:33 PM
CAPEHART: Class and race are often placed into separate buckets, but we can see in recent Supreme Court opinions and recent Supreme Court scandals involving old white male Republican billionaires, are broader contrasts about power, who has it now and who should have it in the future.
…
