By Julianne Malveaux - I was among the many who were disappointed that President Barack Obama did not nominate an African American woman to be an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court. After all, there are six white men, two women, one Latina and one white, and a nominal African American man on the Court. Why not an African American woman?
The Black Women's Roundtable, led by Melanie Campbell, was so disappointed that they shared their concerns with the President in a letter that spoke both to the contributions African American women have made and the qualifications of a few good women that President Obama should have considered before nominating Ms. Kagan to the nation's highest court.
I won't even speak on what I perceive as some of the shortcomings of the Kagan nomination. The Solicitor General has earned the support of some colleagues that I fully respect, such as Harvard Professor Charles Ogletree. At the same time, we have to pause at the fact that her definition of diversity is ideological diversity, not racial and ethnic diversity, and that she seemed to make Harvard a more welcome place for conservatives, if not for African American faculty.
The hue and cry about the absence of an African American woman nominee, however, speaks to a greater issue in the African American community and among African American leadership. African Americans are too often in the reactive, not the proactive mode. If we had been thinking long run, we might have projected that there would soon be a Supreme Court opening. Then, conversations about the possibility of an African American woman nominee might have been happening sooner, not later. Read the full column at www.juliannemalveaux.com
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