He also wrote that she was drawing on “race-based stereotypes,” when, in reality, “all racial groups are heterogeneous, and Blacks are no exception — encompassing Northerners and Southerners, rich and poor, and recent immigrants and descendants of slaves.”
By “articulating her black-and-white world (literally),” he added, Justice Jackson ignored the experiences of other groups, including Chinese immigrants, descendants of Holocaust survivors and those who came to the United States from Ireland, fleeing famine.
Justice Jackson pushed back sharply against Justice Thomas, accusing him of imagining her viewpoint and misunderstanding the underpinnings of her support for the policy.
“Gulf-sized race-based gaps exist with respect to the health, wealth and well-being of American citizens,” she wrote. Although those disparities emerged years ago, she added, ignoring that history would be foolish because those inequities have “indisputably been passed down to the present day through the generations.”
Offering a brief history of Jim Crow and the Great Migration, Justice Jackson laid out how Black families struggled against a legal system aimed at preventing them from building wealth — and focused on the strength and fortitude they showed.
“Despite these barriers, Black people persisted,” she wrote.
She invoked the concept of the pink elephant paradox, the idea that once you try not to think about something, it becomes impossible to stop thinking about it. “The takeaway is that those who demand that no one think about race (a classic pink-elephant paradox) refuse to see, much less solve for, the elephant in the room — the race-linked disparities that continue to impede achievement of our great nation’s full potential.”
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