(Reuters) - A federal appellate judge made a rare move earlier this month when she called out – within the pages of a formal ruling – a fellow judge's "lecture on when, where, and how to identify racial injustice."
The pointed language appeared in a little-noticed footnote to a Nov. 18 decision from the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which rejected a challenge by the state of California and environmental groups to the federal government's approval of an Amazon cargo facility at San Bernardino International Airport.
Judge Johnnie Rawlinson, a Black woman on the 9th Circuit, disagreed with her colleagues Judge Eugene Siler – a 6th Circuit judge sitting on the case by designation – and Judge Patrick Bumatay, saying in her dissent that the Federal Aviation Administration's review and approval process for the facility “reeked of environmental racism."
In response to Rawlinson's dissent, Bumatay wrote a concurring opinion pointing out that none of the parties raised the issue of discrimination. Doing so was “unfair to the employees of the FAA,” who had no opportunity to defend themselves, he said.
That apparently irked Rawlinson, and prompted the terse footnote.
"My concurring colleague chastises me for 'mark[ing] ...
government employees' ... 'with advancing environmental racism,'" Rawlinson wrote in reference to Bumatay. “For the record, I grew up in the segregated South and looked racism in the face, up close and personal, long before my concurring colleague was born.”
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