Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson said during a CNN interview on Sunday that she was “flattered” at being called out by Justice Clarence Thomas over her dissent on the high court’s ruling against affirmative action.

“In the time that you’ve been on the court, because you have written your own dissents in some pretty big cases, there — there’s disagreement, obviously, among your colleagues over the law,” host Abby Phillips noted during the segment.

“In one case, Justice Thomas devoted roughly seven pages of his concurring opinion on affirmative action to critique your opinion and your dissent. He also read that opinion out loud, just feet away from where you’re sitting. What was that experience like?” she asked.

“Well, you know, dissents are common on the court. One of the nice parts about the collective decision-making model is that the justices have the opportunity to express their views,” Brown Jackson began.

“And then, when you’re in the majority, there’s a majority opinion that you can sign on to. You can write separately to express your particular take on an issue, and of course, you can dissent. And Justice Thomas, in his concurring opinion, decided to talk about my dissent,” she said. “In one way, I think I was flattered. I was flattered because it meant that I must have been making points that were worth responding to. But it’s a dialogue. It’s always a dialogue with the justices.”

Advertisement

WATCH:

Thomas, in his concurring opinion regarding the 6-3 decision, cited her “racist worldview” as the basis for his concerns.

The ruling overturned race-based college admission standards, which was authored by Chief Justice John Roberts. Thomas agreed that admissions programs at Harvard University violated Title VI of the Civil Rights Act and the University of North Carolina violated the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment.

“Eliminating racial discrimination means eliminating all of it,” Roberts wrote in the ruling.

But in a dissent, Jackson wrote that the ruling would actually make things “worse” for minorities because “race still matters to the lived experiences of all Americans in innumerable ways.”

“With let-them-eat-cake obliviousness, today, the majority pulls the ripcord and announces ‘colorblindness for all’ by legal fiat,” she continued. “But deeming race irrelevant in law does not make it so in life. And having so detached itself from this country’s actual past and present experiences, the Court has now been lured into interfering with the crucial work that UNC and other institutions of higher learning are doing to solve America’s real-world problems. No one benefits from ignorance.”

“Although formal race-linked legal barriers are gone, race still matters to the lived experiences of all Americans in innumerable ways, and today’s ruling makes things worse, not better,” Jackson, whose husband is white, further claimed. “The best that can be said of the majority’s perspective is that it proceeds (ostrich-like) from the hope that preventing consideration of race will end racism.”

In his concurrence, however, Thomas noted, “Racialism simply cannot be undone by different or more racialism.”

“Instead, the solution announced in the second founding is incorporated in our Constitution: that we are all equal, and should be treated equally before the law without regard to our race,” he continued. “Only that promise can allow us to look past our differing skin colors and identities and see each other for what we truly are: individuals with unique thoughts, perspectives, and goals, but with equal dignity and equal rights under the law.”

The senior justice then focused on his junior colleague’s unsubstantiated claim that the United States is a “fundamentally racist society.”

“Rather than focusing on individuals as individuals, her dissent focuses on the historical subjugation of black Americans, invoking statistical racial gaps to argue in favor of defining and categorizing individuals by their race,” he wrote. “As she sees things, we are all inexorably trapped in a fundamentally racist society, with the original sin of slavery and the historical subjugation of black Americans still determining our lives today.

“The panacea, she counsels, is to unquestioningly accede to the view of elite experts and reallocate society’s riches by racial means as necessary to ‘level the playing field,’ all as judged by racial metrics. I strongly disagree,” Thomas wrote.