By now Americans have long learned the game liberals play with race.

This time around the game revolves around President Joe Biden appointing, as he insisted he would, a “black woman” to the Supreme Court. Republicans start putting her record to scrutiny and the Left goes berserk, shrieking, “Racism, racism!”

All one has to do to understand the very old game at play here — and just who the real racists are — is to imagine this.

Imagine the president were yet again Donald Trump. The Breyer resignation occurs. And Trump nominates a federal judge named — Candace Owens. Now, Ms. Owens is neither a lawyer or a judge in real life. But let’s imagine that she were — and, as she is in real life, were a serious conservative.

What exactly do you think the response to the nomination of a Judge Owens would be from all these leftists busily accusing GOP critics of Judge Jackson’s judicial philosophy as, but of course, racists?

They would, of course, freak out. The assault on a Judge Owens would be a blizzard of racist attacks. Why? Because Judge Owens would be — oh, the horror — a conservative.

In real life, Candace Owens has said this about the reality behind Democrats and liberals, according to the U.S. Sun:

During her appearance on “Life, Liberty & Levin,” Owens raged: “I feel that the Democrat Party represents Black America like plantation owners represented slaves.

“The irony here being is that the Democrats were the slave owners [in the 1800s].”

Her comments come after Biden lambasted a new Georgia state election law as “Jim Crow in the 21st Century” and publicly condemned the state’s controversial changes to local election policies.

It radically changed polling laws, including tougher identification requirements to vote, restricting polling station access and it’s now illegal to serve food and drinks to people queuing up to cast their votes at venues.

“They’re using language, referring to things like Jim Crow. Who was the party that implemented Jim Crow in this country? It was the Democrats,” Owens continued.

“That’s the deep, sinister evil of the Democrat Party, that they’re really just rewriting what they authored in the beginning.

“These were the slave-masters, and they understand the system better than anybody else because they wrote it. It is the fabric of the Democrat Party.

“They understand that an educated mind can not be enslaved,” she said. “They need to make sure there are no educated minds.”

“What better way to ensure that than to pretend that you’re educating Black Americans, but instead you’re filling our minds with absolute filth, making us see the world in Black and White?

“And it makes me so angry that they are still doing this and that they’re now broadening their reach and saying, you know what, not just Black America.

“[This is because] the growth rate population-wise, is not significant enough. So now they’re bringing in a new class of voters.”

Precisely because she has walked off the liberal plantation with thoughts like that a supposed Judge Owens nomination would enrage the Left, instantly bringing out what Owens correctly identifies as the racism that built the Democratic Party from the get-go.

In fact, as has been noted the last few days, Americans don’t have to imagine how Democrats would treat a fictional Judge Owens. This situation has already happened, and the very real judge in question was, yes, Joe Biden’s self-proclaimed ideal — a black woman.

But what happened when President George W. Bush nominated the African-American Judge Janice Rogers Brown for the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals?

Over there in the Washington Post in February, former Bush speechwriter-turned-columnist Marc A. Thiessen headlined this reminder:

Biden blocked the first Black woman from the Supreme Court

Thiessen wrote:

President Biden wants credit for nominating the first Black woman to the Supreme Court. But here is the shameful irony: As a senator, Biden warned President George W. Bush that if he nominated the first Black woman to serve on the Supreme Court, he would filibuster and kill her nomination.

The story begins in 2003, when Bush nominated Judge Janice Rogers Brown to serve on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. The D.C. Circuit is considered the country’s second-most important court, and has produced more Supreme Court justices than any other federal court. Brown was immediately hailed as a potential Supreme Court nominee.

She was highly qualified, having served for seven years as an associate justice of the California Supreme Court — the first Black woman to do so. She was the daughter and granddaughter of sharecroppers, and grew up in rural Alabama during the dark days of segregation, when her family refused to enter restaurants or theaters with separate entrances for Black customers. She rose from poverty and put herself through college and UCLA law school as a working single mother. She was a self-made African American legal star. But she was an outspoken conservative — so Biden set out to destroy her.

In other words, Judge Rogers Brown had, like Candace Owens, walked off the liberal plantation. And Biden, in his role as one of the slave masters of the plantation, went out of his way to destroy her.

Sound familiar? Of course. This is the routine treatment dished by liberals who demand that black Americans think like white liberals — or else.

Recall, again, the tale of the retirement of Justice Thurgood Marshall, the first black justice on the Supreme Court. At the news of his retirement in 1991 the New York Times reported that President George H. W. Bush was “under pressure to appoint a black justice” to replace Marshall.

This was accurate. The call went up immediately from Democrats that this was the “black seat” on the Supreme Court, and any Court nominee from President George H. W. Bush must be black.

And … Bush obliged. He nominated the black and seriously qualified Federal Judge Clarence Thomas. What happened?

All hell broke loose. Why? In the world of liberals, all blacks must think alike — which is to say, they were supposed to be liberals. And Judge Thomas was, in fact, one of the most thoughtful conservatives on the bench. As Justice Thomas remarked in a recent documentary, he was “the wrong black guy.”

So the Democrats’ move — decidedly racist in many respects — was on not just to defeat Judge Thomas but to destroy him. As Thomas himself put it in his dramatic face-off in front of the Biden-chaired Senate Judiciary Committee with his liberal opponents who had smeared him with false allegations of sexual harassment:

I think that this today is a travesty. I think that it is disgusting. I think that this hearing should never occur in America. This is a case in which this sleaze, this dirt, was searched for by staffers of members of this committee, was then leaked to the media, and this committee and this body validated it and displayed it at prime time over our entire nation….

And from my standpoint as a black American, as far as I’m concerned, it is a high-tech lynching for uppity blacks who in any way deign to think for themselves, to do for themselves, to have different ideas, and it is a message that unless you kowtow to an old order, this is what will happen to you. You will be lynched, destroyed, caricatured by a committee of the U.S. — U.S. Senate, rather than hung from a tree.

The committee was stunned — and duly shamed. Judge Thomas was confirmed.

But the entire episode was utterly typical of how the American Left views African-Americans. They must — must! — be political liberals — and if not, and they have any prominent role in American life or law, the Left and its allies will seek to destroy them because, yes indeed, they have had the nerve to walk off the liberal plantation.

Pick a name of a black conservative — Clarence Thomas, Janice Rogers Brown, Dr. Ben Carson, Candace Owens, Deneen Borelli, to name but a handful — and you’ll find that they have repeatedly been targeted with the most racist attacks imaginable.

All of which is to say that Republican critics of Judge Brown Jackson are critics not because of her race but because of her legal opinions and expressed political opinions. She is treated not as a “black woman” but rather as a thinking American with her personal views, legal education, and more making her the federal judge she has become.

The very fact that her leftist supporters view her nomination through the prism of race says everything you need to know — about them.

A Judge Candace Owens is not reality. But a Judge Janice Rogers Brown was indeed reality in the day — and then-Sen. Joe Biden went out of his way to defeat Judge Rogers because she was the wrong kind of black woman — someone who didn’t agree with white liberals like him.

Not to be forgotten either is that this is exactly the way liberals view other American minorities — notably Hispanics. Recall that President George W. Bush also nominated Miguel Estrada, a prominent D.C. attorney who was a Honduran immigrant, for the same D.C. Circuit Court for which he had nominated Rogers.

The Estrada nomination was blocked by Biden and the current chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Illinois Democrat Sen. Richard Durbin. A memo from the Durbin staff was mistakenly in the wrong hands and was quickly leaked to the media — explaining exactly the racism behind the opposition to Estrada. Estrada, said the memo from a liberal staffer to the liberal senator, was “especially dangerous, because he has a minimal paper trail, he is Latino, and the White House seems to be grooming him for a Supreme Court appointment.”

In other words, Miguel Estrada had walked away from the liberal plantation, and the liberal slave masters were not about to let him eventually rise to become what would have been the first Hispanic on the Supreme Court. So they made sure he was filibustered until he finally withdrew.

To sum it all up?

Just as the real Candace Owens has said of the Left and Democrats:

The deep, sinister evil of the Democrat Party, that they’re really just rewriting what they authored in the beginning.

These were the slave-masters, and they understand the system better than anybody else because they wrote it. It is the fabric of the Democrat Party.

Exactly. Which is why Democrats take such offense at the treatment of Judge Brown Jackson by Republicans. She is being treated by Republicans as the smart, capable — and liberal — judge that she is.

She is more than capable of discussing her record.

To suggest she is not, which is in essence what Democrats are suggesting, says everything you need to know about liberal Democrats and their mindset about race.

Shocking.

Not.