Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson has a message for the country: Do not shy away from uncomfortable facts about the history of violence against Black Americans.
The first Black woman on the nation’s highest court is expected to offer her frank assessment of the tendency to avoid acknowledging racism in a speech Friday morning in Birmingham, Alabama, according to draft excerpts obtained by NBC News. Her remarks will be part of a ceremony marking the 60th anniversary of the 1963 bombing of a church, in which four young Black girls were killed.
“If we are going to continue to move forward as a nation, we cannot allow concerns about discomfort to displace knowledge, truth or history. It is certainly the case that parts of this country’s story can be hard to think about,” Jackson is expected to say. “We cannot forget because the uncomfortable lessons are often the ones that teach us the most about ourselves. … We cannot learn from past mistakes we do not know exist.”
Jackson’s blunt words are notable not only because they come from a sitting member of the highest court, but also because they land on the heels of the Supreme Court’s conservative majority restricting race-conscious admissions practices in colleges and universities in June.
In a scathing 29-page dissent to the court’s affirmative action ruling, Jackson wrote that her conservative colleagues were suffering from “let-them-eat-cake obliviousness.” She warned that deeming “race irrelevant in law does not make it so in life.”
In Friday’s remarks, Jackson will also defend the importance of facts and history in education at a time when some schools districts continue to grapple with efforts to police how racism is discussed in the classroom. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and other Republicans have led the charge in public school curriculum changes that critics say whitewash the country’s past.
The site of Jackson’s speech is the 16th Street Baptist Church where the Ku Klux Klan set off the bomb that killed the four girls, just as schools were being desegregated.
“I know that atrocities like the one we are memorializing today are difficult to remember and relive,” Jackson is expected to say. “But I also know that it is dangerous to forget them.”
Source: | This article originally belongs to Nbcnews.com
