October 2022 marks the coincidence of the new Supreme Court session, the start of Filipino American History Month, and the opening of a new satirical history of race in America by the esteemed African American writer Ishmael Reed.
All of them are connected. Read on.
First, the Supreme Court. No matter how much we hail and praise Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson’s arrival, the first African American woman to serve on the court will not be able to mitigate the foulness we are about to experience.
Affirmative action, gay rights, abortion rights, voting rights, we are almost certainly assured that the hits will keep on coming.
But if you think it’s bad now, you should have seen SCOTUS in 1857.
That’s when the high court rendered by a 7-2 vote what some have called the worst SCOTUS decision ever, the Dred Scott decision, with the opinion written by Chief Justice Roger Taney.