Black Judges:

Here’s a poorly-reasoned article (via How Appealing) that relies on statements by an NAACP Legal Defense Fund attorney for criticism of the supposed dearth of black Bush appointees to the federal judiciary. According to the article, 7.5% of all Bush judicial appointees have been black (the list doesn’t include Janice Brown, whose nomination has been held up by Senate Democrats).

The vast majority of judicial appointees are over forty and are active members of the president’s party. Approximately 5.7% of all attorneys in the U.S. are African Americans. The percentages have increased dramatically over the last thirty years, so one can assume that the percentage of lawyers over 40 who are black is under 5%. Let’s use five percent for simplicity’s sake. Already, we see that Bush has appointed a higher percentage of black lawyers than their share of the lawyer population. But then we have to add in the fact that politically active African American lawyers, like African Americans in general, are overwhelmingly Democrats. The pool of black Republican lawyers over 40 is undoubtedly a much smaller percentage of the pool of over-40 Republican lawyers than the overall five percent statistic suggests.

I think it should be clear by now that the Bush Administration has gone out of its way to appoint African American judges. Indeed, given the relative percentages of black Republican and Democratic attorneys, Bush (7.5%) has gone further out of his way than did Clinton (approximately 15%), given the strong likelihood that far more than twice as many African American attorneys are Democrats as are Republicans. Oddly, if anyone has cause for complaint regarding race and Bush judicial nominations, it’s likely Bush supporters who support colorblindness [although, of course, the mere fact that blacks are overrepresented in judicial appointments is not proof of lack of colorblindness], not the NAACP.