Ketanji Brown Jackson offers readers a glimpse into his meteoric rise

Rosa Brooks
| Special to The Washington Post

It didn’t take long for Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson to establish herself as a particularly powerful judicial voice: Her written opinions display a rare blend of intelligence and moral clarity, combined with common sense and compassion. As a district court judge in 2019, for example, she sharply refuted the Trump administration’s claims that White House officials could not be compelled to respond to congressional subpoenas. “Presidents are not kings,” she wrote. “[They]have no subjects, bound by loyalty or blood, whose destiny they have a right to control. To the contrary, in this land of the free, it is unquestionable that … White House employees work for the people of the United States.”

When the Supreme Court ended race-based affirmative action in college admissions, Jackson issued an equally scathing opinion. By rejecting the validity of a holistic, race-based admissions process, she wrote, the Supreme Court had “run, in effect, a woefully misinformed sociological experiment,” requiring universities to willfully ignore the ways in which race may have limited an individual applicant’s opportunities. This “perverse, ahistorical, and counterproductive result … is truly a tragedy for us all.”

At times, her judicial writings feature flashes of wry humor. In another 2023 dissent, Jackson mocked the majority’s logic: The Court majority, she noted, seemed to assume that “because the pro-arbitration party” in the case “gets an interlocutory appeal, it should also get an automatic stay. See L. Numeroff, If You Give a Mouse a Cookie (1985).” This sly reference is not to a classic of jurisprudence but to a children’s picture book (in which a boy’s decision to offer a cookie to a passing mouse sets off a cascade of increasingly absurd consequences).

All of this might lead readers to think that Jackson’s new memoir, “Lovely One,” will be characterized by similar, uncompromising acuity. If so, they may be disappointed. Although it offers a wealth of biographical detail, “Lovely One” exhibits little of the fire that characterizes Jackson’s courtroom statements.

Instead, “Lovely One” introduces us to a wide-eyed and more serious Ketanji Brown Jackson, who has grown from a serious little girl, eager to win her parents’ approval, to a hard-working young woman determined to overcome any challenge. A self-proclaimed “rule-follower and risk-averse,” she describes herself as someone whose “nature was to seek harmony and cooperation wherever she found herself.”

In many ways, Jackson’s upbringing was marked by the greatest privilege: Her parents were educated, stable, and loving, and they were dedicated to ensuring that their firstborn—whose West African-inspired name, Ketanji, means “lovely”—had the character and tools to blaze a dazzling trail in life. “My mother and father,” she writes, “were united in their determination to put me in a program that they believed would nourish me culturally, stimulate my curiosity, and set me on the right path academically.”

Of course, Jackson faced other challenges that cannot be understood without acknowledging the persistence of racism. Jackson, a sheltered 8-year-old, struggled to understand her mother’s reaction when she lost track of time one day. Coming home after dark, she found her mother “pacing frantically… her abject terror turned to inchoate fury as I approached… How could I have been so irresponsible, she asked…? Did I not understand what could happen to a girl alone in the night?” She didn’t add, especially to a little black girl in the South.

It was only later, Jackson writes, that she began to understand that for black children of her parents’ generation, “these rules about where they were allowed to go and when they could do so could literally keep them alive.” Similarly, it took a conversation with a white friend as an adult for Jackson to belatedly recognize the more subtle forms of racism that marked her childhood: an elementary school teacher, for example, who cracked down on black children for the same minor infractions that he ignored when the children involved were white.

But Jackson makes it clear that, whether she acknowledged it as a child or not, her life has been shaped by the ever-present need to defy stereotypes by excelling at every turn—and the equally ever-present fear that the white world would still view her as incompetent. As a Harvard student, she initially struggled to fully trust her future husband, who was white. Patrick’s declarations of love initially thrilled and terrified Jackson (“What was he up to?” she wonders.) They triggered a long-repressed memory: As a child, she had befriended a white boy named Tommy, but that friendship ended abruptly when Tommy’s mother discovered they were playing together. “She would talk to me sweetly and smile all the time,” Jackson recalls, but the next day, a distraught Tommy informed her that he was no longer allowed to play with her; Her mother told her she was “just too different.”

Anecdotes as revealing as they are painful, however, are relatively rare in “Lovely One.” For the most part, Jackson’s memoir is a resolutely optimistic chronicle of her achievements. Jackson was accepted into a program for gifted children; she performed in school theater productions; she won awards on the school’s public speaking and debate teams; she was admitted to Harvard College and then Harvard Law. She served on the Law Review, and the growing diversity of its ranks reminds her that “our society is continually striving to become a more perfect union.” After that, she clerked for a federal court, then another, then the coveted Supreme Court, and finally her own place on the court.

Unlike her acerbic judicial opinions, Jackson’s conclusions in “Lovely One” stick closely to the conventions of other luminaries’ memoirs. Yes, there are challenges: the impossible task of balancing a career and motherhood, for example, and the pain of watching her beloved eldest daughter struggle in school before being diagnosed with autism. But, she assures readers, “if you are diligent and well-prepared, resolutely optimistic and determined in your goal, you will be able to create a bright future for yourself. … (No matter) where we begin our journey, or the missteps we surely make along the way, we must move forward, girded with our blessings and strengthened by our difficulties.”

These sentiments are conventional, expressed by an unconventional woman, but perhaps this is the fundamental tension that has shaped Jackson’s life. More than anyone, she understands the ways in which racism continues to constrain American society. But more than anyone, she also understands that the story doesn’t end there: “It is true that not everyone was represented at the table when our country was born. … Yet the principles of liberty and equality espoused by the framers of the Constitution … mean that every citizen can now enter these halls.”

Jackson is realistic, but not cynical. She understands that when you’re the first black woman on the Supreme Court, every fiery judicial opinion must be balanced by some harmless meritocratic or patriotic cliché. But in “Lovely One,” she also insists that if we try hard enough and work hard enough, we might—maybe—succeed in turning those clichés into truths.

Rosa Brooks is a Georgetown law professor and a former senior Defense Department official under President Barack Obama. Her most recent book is “Tangled Up in Blue: Policing the American City.”

Beautiful

Memoirs

By Ketanji Brown Jackson

Random House. 432 pages. $35.00