Black Twitter Goes off on Jeopardy Contestants Who Didn’t know Ketanji Brown Jackson

Everyone knows that Jeopardy! is supposed to be a game show for super smart people. That’s why I make sure to give myself a pat on the back any time I can answer one of the questions. And the show’s Tournament of Champions is for the smartest of the smart. It’s a special two-week tournament that brings back contestants who have won at least five episodes to flex their brain muscles in an epic battle of nerdiness.

So you’ll probably be shocked to learn that not a single one of the contestants in a November 9 episode of the tournament knew the answer to this clue in the category “Three-Named People,” “She’s the first Black woman on the Supreme Court and the first justice to have been a federal public defender.” Huh? Of course, if you are Black or have been walking on the surface of the Earth for the past several months, you know the answer (or the question) is ‘Who is Ketanji Brown Jackson?’ But for some reason, these smarty pants people who I’m sure could tell you anything you wanted to know about physics or philosophy had no clue.

For Black people, this is the ultimate form of disrespect. After the disappointment that is Clarence Thomas, we’ve been waiting for a Black justice we could be proud of. And we got that in Justice Jackson, which is why we say her name any chance we get.

So of course Black Twitter had no problem letting the Jeopardy! contestants know just how disappointed they were in them for not being able to identify the newest addition to the Supreme Court.

There was plenty of outrage, like this tweet from @tiredtinNYC:

Writer and political commentator Elie Mystal tweeted his frustration saying, “It’s like my whole life means nothing.”

But others were not surprised, like @AbeFroman who tweeted, “Of course they didn’t.

I’m not even going to try to explain what happened here. But I definitely gave myself a pat on the back for knowing the question/answer to this one.