Supreme Court Justices Are Made Not Born
February 14, 2022
What do U.S. Supreme Court top picks Judges Kentaji Brown Jackson, Leondra Kruger, and Candace Jackson-Akiwumi have in common? No no, not what the president or the media have emphasized. They were raised in two-parent households. Judge Jackson’s father was an attorney for the Miami-Dade school board and her mother a school principal for a magnet high school. Judge Kruger is the daughter of two physicians. And both of Judge Jackson-Akiwumi’s parents were judges; her father was Senate-confirmed to the prestigious Eastern District of Virginia no less. And together, those parents—not without challenges, I’m sure—raised daughters that thrived through six Ivy League degrees and will forever be powerful voices in American law, Supreme Court or not.
That should give us hope in the American Dream. Together, a family can raise children to be more successful than them. No doubt, those families are unique in their own ways, and as Nancy Pelosi likes to say, the plural of anecdotes is not data. And, in seeing that only 38 percent of Black children live with two married parents, compared to 87 percent of Asians and 76 percent of White children, we know this gap has its causes.
