With the publication of his new autobiography, Clarence Thomas is back in the news in a big way.
Clarence Thomas has lots of issues to sort out. Here are some random thoughts on him that have swirled around my head over the years but that I’ve never put into words.
Thomas says it’s the liberals, black and white alike, who are hung up on his race, but he’s the one who seems hung up on it.
He still believes that he was attacked during his 1991 confirmation hearings because he was black. But doesn’t he understand that the only reason George H.W. Bush nominated him to the Court was because he was black? If he hadn’t been black, he wouldn’t have gotten the nomination. Thurgood Marshall, the only black justice on the Court, was retiring; Bush would look bad if he nominated a white person to replace him, leaving an all-white Court. So Bush decided to have it both ways; if he was going to nominate a conservative, why not nominate a black one? That would flummox those Democrats, wouldn’t it? They wouldn’t vote against a black person, would they? Thomas had been a judge for a less than a year and a half; there were numerous other people Bush could have nominated to the nation’s highest court. Bush clearly used Thomas in a cynical ploy to get liberal senators to vote for a conservative nominee. Given this, what reaction did Thomas expect from people?
Thomas accuses the liberal black community of attacking him in 1991 because he was a black man who betrayed his race. That’s not quite accurate. The anger at Thomas has less to do with Thomas himself and more to do with the justice whom Thomas replaced.
Thurgood Marshall, appointed by Lyndon Johnson in the late ’60s, was a legendary figure even before he became the first black justice on the Court. He’d served as the NAACP’s chief counsel and had argued numerous black civil rights cases before the Supreme Court, culminating in his arguments in Brown v. Board of Education in 1954. During his 24 years on the Court, from the Johnson years into the conservative Reagan and Bush years, he became a liberal holdout for civil rights alongside his colleague William Brennan, even after their fellow liberal colleagues were replaced with justices like William Rehnquist and Antonin Scalia. For Bush to replace Thurgood Marshall with someone like Clarence Thomas was a slap in the face to everything Marshall had stood for. So of course there was going to be anger.
But liberal black America wasn’t really angry at Thomas. Obviously I can’t read minds, and generalizations are unreliable, but it seems to me that liberal black Americans were actally angry at Bush and the Republicans. Bush tried to treat black Americans as fools whom he could easily manipulate; just nominate a black person and you can win the blacks over. Not only was this patronizing, but it also smacked of racism itself.
So Thomas is mistaken about black America’s anger.
But it’s not just black liberals whom Thomas holds a grudge against; it’s white liberals, too. Thomas accuses white liberals of attacking him because he was an “uppity black.” I can’t speak for all liberals, but as for me, I didn’t oppose Thomas because he was black or “uppity,” and it’s an insult to me to say so. I opposed Thomas because (1) he was a conservative, and (2) he didn’t seem to cut it on the merits. His race had nothing to do with it — except for the cynicism Bush created by simultaneously nominating him because of his race and saying that his race had nothing to do it.
I haven’t even gotten to the Anita Hill accusations yet. That’s a whole other area where Thomas seems to be either hung up on his race or hypocritically using his race as a weapon.
Thomas has claimed that he suffered through a “high-tech” lynching in 1991 when Anita Hill accused him of sexual harrassment. He’s claimed that his opponents decided to use the spectre of the stereotypical black male sexual predator to try to destroy him.
I’ve never put this into words, because it’s always seemed somehow racist or reverse-racist to do so. But here goes.
The thing is, Clarence Thomas hardly fits the stereotype of the black male sexual predator. He’s only 5-foot-8-1/2, and during his confirmation hearings he wore big nerdy glasses. In fact, he came across as rather shy and bookish and the farthest thing from a sexual predator there could be. I can’t step into the mind of Joe Racist, but it doesn’t seem to me like Joe Racist would apply that classic black stereotype to Thomas. Maybe he would, I don’t know. But it seems like a stretch, and it seems contradictory for Thomas to make such a paranoiac accusation while claiming to be so post-racial, enlightened, and independent-minded. The accusations of sexual harrassment didn’t gain traction because Thomas was black; they gained traction because Anita Hill seemed like a highly credible witness. Race had nothing to do with it.
Another facet of the Clarence Thomas puzzle is the issue of affirmative action. Thomas hates affirmative action because he believes that it taints his Yale Law School degree. Thomas does have a point here; without affirmative action, Thomas either would have been rejected from Yale Law School on the merits, in which case we wouldn’t be having this discussion; or he would have been accepted to Yale Law School clearly on the merits, in which case we also wouldn’t be having this discussion.
But the only reason Thomas is on the Supreme Court right now is because of a type of affirmative action; his nomination was race-based. Thomas opposes affirmative action while denying that he’s benefitted from it. Granted, it’s not exactly the same, because Bush was not compelled by any law or written policy to nominate Thomas. And Thomas was nominated not in order to make up for past racial injustice, or to give Thomas a leg up; he was nominated as a cynical political calculation. (I guess it’s possible to give Bush the benefit of the doubt — perhaps he nominated Thomas for noble reasons, to show Americans that there can be diversity of political opinion among blacks and that black people do not all have to march in lockstep. That’s a gesture that has some value, but even if it’s the case, and I’m not saying it is, it still means Thomas’s nomination was race-based.)
So there are a couple of paradoxes here. Thomas has reached the pinnacle of legal achievement — a lifetime appointment to the Supreme Court. He’s set for life. He won the fight. And yet he’s still angry.
He’s also delusional. He wants to believe that his race has nothing to do with his being on the Supreme Court and everything to do with his being attacked. In reality, his race has everything to do his being on the Court but very little to do with his being attacked.
Clarence Thomas is fascinating. If he didn’t exist, someone would have to invent him. He’d make a great literary character in a work of fiction — except that he already seems to have written it in his own mind.
