As the nomination of Ketanji Brown Jackson to the Supreme Court has ignited a discussion about the historic lack of diversity on the nation’s highest court, her ascendance has also renewed focus on the absence of Black judges on the federal judiciary’s lower courts.Of the 3,852 people who have been confirmed as federal judges, a CNN analysis of data from the Federal Judicial Center shows that 240 of them — 6% — have been Black. Seventy-one of them have been Black women. More than three-quarters of all the judges have been White men.
And while strides have been made in recent years to improve the demographic makeup of the federal bench, the judiciary still skews dramatically toward White, male judges, especially when compared to the rest of the country. Almost 80% of all Article III judges — the federal judges who are nominated by a US president and confirmed by the US Senate — are White, and 71% are men, with large gaps persisting in Latino, Black and women’s representation in the federal courts, the data shows, despite Black Americans accounting for 12.4% of the US population.
