Who's Tucker Carlson to demand anyone ‘Show Her Papers’?

Charles M. Blow
Wed, March 9, 2022, 

Charles M. Blow

Fox News host Tucker Carlson briefly went to a Swiss boarding school before reportedly being kicked out. He went on to graduate from Trinity College. In a 1991 yearbook entry, he described himself as being part of the “Dan White Society,” an apparent allusion to the homophobe who killed San Francisco’s mayor, George Moscone, and Supervisor Harvey Milk, California’s first openly gay elected official, in 1978.

After graduation, The Columbia Journalism Review reported, “Carlson applied to the CIA, but his application was denied, so he turned to journalism. ‘You should consider journalism,’ his father told him. ‘They’ll take anybody.’ ”

That same Tucker Carlson last week demanded that Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, a Black woman who is President Joe Biden’s nominee for the Supreme Court, prove that she is qualified. He demanded that she show her papers. “It might be time for Joe Biden to let us know what Ketanji Brown Jackson’s LSAT score was," he said on Fox News. "How did she do? … It would seem like Americans in a democracy have a right to know.”


It is outrageous, to be sure. What was Jackson doing in 1991 when Carlson was identifying with the homicidal homophobe? She was studying government at Harvard University while being a student organizer for civil rights causes, and she would graduate magna cum laude the next year. One thing to which successful Black people can attest is that you are sometimes, even often, asked to prove your credentials, to demonstrate that you have earned your way, often by far less credentialed questioners.

Donald Trump — whose time at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania is shrouded in mystery — made a name for himself in politics by questioning the legitimacy, qualifications and pedigree of Barack Obama. Speaking at CPAC in February 2011, Trump said of Obama: “Our current president came out of nowhere, came out of nowhere. In fact, I’ll go a step further: The people that went to school with them, they don’t even know — they never saw him. They don’t know who he is. Crazy.”

Trump also claimed that Obama didn’t write his first book. He insisted that Bill Ayers, who happens to be white, had to be the author of the first book. And it didn’t stop there. In 2012, Trump offered to donate $5 million to the charity of Obama’s choosing if Obama would release his college and passport records.

These episodes struck such a nerve because it isn’t only presidents or Supreme Court picks who have to present proof of their credentials. Too many people, Black and of other races, have had to do the same at some point in their lives. It is humiliating and degrading. It has happened to me several times, and I will share one.

Before I was a columnist, I was an information graphics journalist, a profession that deals with data, sometimes reams of it, to produce maps, charts, diagrams and the like. The New York Times was then, and remains, a leader in the field. And as its graphics director, I was in charge of its efforts. But that field was an overwhelmingly white world. So, for some, my presence was incongruous.

One year I was in Pamplona, Spain, judging the international information graphics awards. The student helpers invited some of the judges out to a bar after dinner. The bar was a cavernous space with an overwhelming amount of flashing and spinning lights.

The students introduced me to some of the locals with my title and the kind of work that I did. No one believed them. I could speak almost no Spanish, but the locals’ "noes" were as clear as their shaking heads. The students confirmed that the locals didn’t believe I could possibly be who they said I was. Before the exchange was finished, I found myself pulling out my Times ID, to the astonishment of the locals.

This is not an isolated incident. People the world over carry so much anti-Blackness that Black excellence to them is an assault on their worldview. They think, “This person, this Black person, can’t possibly be as good as he says, good enough to have earned her station.” They must find a way to attribute it to something else: an unfair advantage, a giving of preference, a bending of the curve.

In the end, all these demands boil down to one thing, ancient and metastatic: racism.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.