Supreme cancelling

It seems like perhaps I ought to create a What were they thinking? series.  In that post a month ago, I was pointing out that Biden advanced an argument in which all the bad guys were Democrats and only one of the good guys was.  The question I had was how such an obvious blunder escaped the speech writers, the fact checkers, and even Biden himself.  

Since then there have been a handful of further instances of someone making an argument based on a surprising blindness to some commonly known history.

Here is another startling one in what is so far an unintended series.

.@SenSchumer: "Until 1981, this powerful body, the Supreme Court, was all White men. Imagine. America wasn't all White men in 1981, or ever. Under President Biden and this Senate majority, we're taking historic steps to make the courts look more like the country they serve." pic.twitter.com/PrEjoLrmPH

— The Hill (@thehill) February 3, 2022

Talk about cancelling someone.

Thurgood Marshall was on the Supreme Court from 1967 to 1991.  24 years.  He was no shrinking violet, leading the way on civil rights law as well as in other fields of law.  He was immediately followed on the Supreme Court by another African-American Justice who has also carved out a distinguished reputation, though as an originalist rather than as a judicial activist in the case of Marshall, Clarence Thomas. 

It is clear that Schumer knows that both Marshall and Thomas are African-American.  Its in his speech he refers to "only two have been African-American."  It's not the speech writer then.

Reviewing it carefully, you see that the failure comes from a Schumer ad lib rather than from the contents of the speech.  Early on in the speech he refers to five female Supreme Court justices beginning with the first in 1981.  

At the 27 second mark, he lifts his eyes from reading to make an ad lib comment.  He makes an intersectional error.  What he likely meant to say, since he was just speaking of women, is that it is amazing that until 1981 the Supreme Court was all male.  And while an anachronistic criticism, it is jarring.

But because his speech is about race, he commits an intersectional error and conflates women and black women, ending up with the converse claim that up until 1981 the supreme court was all white men.  In doing so he cancels Marshall's 24 years of service and even, technically, Thomas's first year.  

This seems outrageous at first but it is clear that this an ad lib mistake and that it is primarily a product of Schumer accidentally tangling up a series abstract concepts.  Anyone can get lost in our arguments when we go off script.

I guess it just seems more obnoxious because Schumer is making such a big deal of justifying race consideration in the selection process in the first place that his error becomes blatantly and unavoidably ironic.