Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, on Thursday again expressed concern over Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson's past referencing of The 1619 Project.
Author Nikole Hannah-Jones led The New York Times Magazine's "The 1619 Project," which sought to reframe the history of America.
The Senate Judiciary Committee this week held confirmation hearings for Jackson, who was nominated by President Joe Biden to replace retiring Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer.
"The 1619 Project is propaganda, and it is utterly false. Ketanji Brown Jackson referenced that revisionist history during a speech at the University of Michigan Law School," Cruz tweeted Thursday.
The senator's Twitter post also included video of Cruz questioning Jackson at Tuesday's confirmation hearing.
"In particular in that speech, you referenced the work of 'acclaimed investigative journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones,' " Cruz asked Jackson at the hearing. "And her — and again this is a quote from the speech — 'provocative thesis that the America that was born in 1776 was not the perfect union that it reported to be.'
"And indeed, Miss Hannah-Jones, in her 1619 projects ... the central thesis of the 1619 Project which The New York Times laid out as a revisionist look of history … and Miss Hannah-Jones described her central thesis as, 'one of the primary reasons the colonists decided to declare independence was because they wanted to protect the institution of slavery.' "
Cruz then asked Jackson whether she agreed with Hannah-Jones' thesis.
Jackson said she had been asked to speak on Martin Luther King Day and gave a speech on women in the civil rights movement. She added one slide had to do with Hannah-Jones' thesis.
"I called it provocative. It is not something that I've studied," she said. "It does not come up in my work, I was mentioning it because it was, at least at that time, something that was talked about and well known to the students at law school."
Jackson is the first Black woman nominated for the high court. She would become the sixth woman justice in the court's history.
Cruz also tweeted Thursday, "ICYMI: Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson sits on the board of a school that is overflowing with Critical Race Theory."
On Tuesday, Cruz displayed a stack of books on racism from the reading list at Georgetown Day School, a prestigious private campus where Jackson serves on the board.
"I've never studied critical race theory, and I've never used it. It doesn't come up in the work that I do as a judge," Jackson answered.
Cruz produced a poster-size page from "Antiracist Baby" by Ibram X. Kendi and asked, "Do you agree with this book that is being taught with kids that babies are racist?"
"Senator," Jackson said. "I do not believe any child should be made to feel as though they are racist."
Critical race theory is defined by the Encyclopedia Britannica as the concept in which race is a socially constructed category ingrained in American law intended to maintain social, economic, and political inequalities between whites and nonwhites. It holds that the U.S. society is inherently or systemically racist.
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