Cruz held up The End of Policing, as well as other books such as Critical Race Theory: An Introduction by Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic, and Antiracist Baby by Ibram X. Kendi, to question Jackson about the recommended reading lists at Georgetown Day School, where she serves as a member of the board of trustees.
The Texas senator said the books were an example of how the school’s curriculum was “filled and overflowing” with critical race theory. While holding up a copy of The End of Policing, Cruz described the book as calling for an “end of policing and advocacy for abolishing police.”
In a previous statement, Vitale said he was “honored” to have been included in Cruz’s list of critical race theory texts, before adding it seems to be another example of the senator’s “intentional confusing of a specific school of legal scholarship and the broader effort to shed light on the nature and history of racism in America.”
Vitale added: “I can only hope that the senator’s misguided efforts to suppress this history will backfire and inspire a generation of young people to seek out these ideas that are all too often absent in American schools.”
New York Democratic Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez also criticized Cruz while tweeting an image of him holding the book during Tuesday’s hearing.
“When you’re showing off the next book you want banned with the perfect edges and everything to underscore to everyone you haven’t actually read it,” Ocasio-Cortez tweeted.
During the hearing, Cruz took particular issue with the illustrated book Antiracist Baby, which argues that babies are “taught to be racist or antiracist—there’s no neutrality.”
When Cruz asks whether she agrees with the sentiment that babies are “taught to be racist” Jackson took a pause before replying: “I do not believe that any child should be made to feel as though they are racist or though they are not valued or though they are less than, that they are victims, that they are oppressors, I don’t believe in any of that.”
Jackson later dismissed Cruz’s line of questioning about critical race theory, saying the issue does not “come up in my work as a judge, which I am—respectfully—here to address.”
Vitale has been contacted for comment.
