Madiba Dennie

Opinion contributor

When Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh Thursday parroted Clarence Thomas' famous 1991 lament that his confirmation hearing was a "circus" and a "national disgrace," Kavanaugh stopped short of using the words "high-tech lynching."

But since the start of Kavanaugh's public questioning, plenty of observers have filled in where the nominee didn't dare go. Some — including a writer for "The New York Post" — have stated that Kavanaugh was experiencing the equivalent of a lynching.

An Arkansas state senator was called out on Twitter after an apparent comparison of the judge, who was raised in a Washington D.C. suburb surrounded by privilege, to Emmett Till — the 15-year-old black boy who was lynched for whistling at a white woman nearly 30 years before the alleged Kavanaugh incident.

Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham compared the handling of Ford's allegation against Kavanaugh to a “drive-by shooting.”

The comparisons are highly misplaced. Using the language of racial violence and injustice is inaccurate at best and offensively hyperbolic at worst. The fact that the tactics apparently worked — the Senate Judiciary Committee voted to send Kavanaugh's nomination through only a few hours ago — is even more alarming. Sen. Jeff Flake, a Republican who was on the fence, voted for Kavanaugh's confirmation, but also called for an FBI investigation. That may seem promising, but it's questionable whether an investigation will even occur. These votes speak volumes about how far we have to go when examining racial and gender violence.

Kavanaugh was not a victim.

The conflation of real, culturally-specific injustice with a white man rightly being questioned for allegations of sexual crimes is unnerving. So too are the different standards used to value white and black life in America.

The Republican party urged the world not to judge Kavanaugh for the crimes of his youth. At the same time the party tells us not to judge police officers who kill black youth who have committed no crime.

Some in the GOP have said that Kavanaugh is fighting for his life. But that fight for life looks much more gruesome in the black community. It includes 134 black people fatally shot by police through August 2018. It also includes black women being three to four times more likely to die from pregnancy-related causes than white women.

A 2016 "New York Times" analysis shows that most victims of mass-violence (including shootings) are black, and of those cases, one-third were drive-by shootings (the comparison used by Graham) or similarly gang-related. The harm, again, is incomparable.

Concern is absent for black mothers in the suburbs and beyond who fear their children will be perceived as a threat, slandered and killed. Wealthy, powerful white males such as Kavanaugh, by comparison, seem to rarely be targeted without cause. Our social, political and economic structures are built to guarantee that. And yet, conservative elites invoke the language of black suffering.

Equating the questioning of a white man who potentially assaulted women with deadly injustice against black people serves to uphold patriarchy and white supremacy.

Female safety and sanity requires the destruction of both.

Madiba K. Dennie is an attorney and freelance writer committed to racial and gender justice, and host of the podcast Barred and Boujee.