One of our beloved
Judges, Clarence Thomas, exposes the lies of the left-wing zealots. We, the
members of Unit 1012: The VFFDP, condemns racism in anyway shape or form. So,
we thank the Black Conservatives for telling the truth of the left-wing zealots.
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Government cannot make
us equal; it can only recognize, respect, and protect us as equal before the
law. That [affirmative action] programs may have been motivated, in part, by
good intentions cannot provide refuge from the principle that under our Constitution,
the government may not make distinctions on the basis of race. - Clarence
Thomas
[PHOTO SOURCE: https://www.azquotes.com/quote/906822]
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Clarence Thomas: A Silent Justice Speaks
Out
JAN CRAWFORD GREENBURG
15 October 2007, 22:50
Sept. 30, 2007— -- Since Clarence Thomas
joined the Supreme Court 16 years ago, he has largely remained silent, and his
silence has become part of his mythology. He rarely speaks from the bench. He hasn't
responded to legions of critics. His judicial opinions reveal a powerful voice,
but his story had been written by others.
Now Thomas has chosen to speak,
forcefully and bluntly, in his new book, "My Grandfather's Son," and
in a series of interviews with ABC News over four days that can only be
described as extraordinary for their scope and intensity. He talks with almost
painful candor — all but unprecedented for a public official — about his life
and personal struggles, his fears and failings, his anger and his regrets.
In the book, Thomas describes his
searing experiences, but often stops without elaboration or reflection. In his
interviews with ABC News, a fuller picture emerges of the man Thomas was and is
today — and why he holds the views he does. This portrait will confound his
critics and surprise his supporters.
"It's just about a human
life," Thomas says in a wide-ranging interview at his Virginia home. He
emphasizes the word "human."
During the course of nearly seven hours
of interviews, he reveals an anger long quelled, but easily tapped, over his
controversial confirmation hearings, which he sees entirely through the prism
of race. And, rejecting efforts by his admirers to portray him as a flawless
model, he painfully recounts periods of alcohol use and acute financial
problems as a young professional and even a fleeting thought of suicide.
In the end, he views his life as one of
triumph and inspiration — not only over ugly racial stereotypes he encountered
throughout his life, but over his own moments of self doubt and pain.
Thomas's most deeply felt opinions are
about race, and he pulls no punches. For Thomas, the menacing racists who
donned white sheets in the segregated South of his childhood are as bad or
worse as the northern liberal zealots in suits and ties.
"These people who claim to be
progressive … have been far more vicious to me than any southerner,"
Thomas says, "and it is purely ideological."
Thomas talks about the virulent racism
he encountered growing up in the segregated South, when blacks were considered
second-class citizens and kept separate from whites by law, and he equates
those attitudes with the stereotypes he believes people hold today.
"People get bent out of shape about
the fact that when I was a kid, you could not drink out of certain water
fountains. Well, the water was the same. My grandfather always said that, 'The
water's exactly the same.' But those same people are extremely comfortable
saying I can't drink from this fountain of knowledge," Thomas says.
"They certainly don't see themselves as being like the bigots in the
South. Well, I've lived both experiences. And I really don't see that they're
any different from them."
He says his critics — the people who
question whether he is smart or qualified to be on the Court or who suggest he
merely does what a white Supreme Court colleague dictates — are as also as
bigoted as the whites of his childhood in the deep South.
"People feel free to say about me
what they think about lots of blacks," Thomas said in an interview in his
chambers at the Supreme Court. "Because of the heterodox views I've taken,
they have license to say it about me with impunity."
Sixteen years after the bitter
confirmation hearings that would forever put the name "Anita Hill" in
any story written about him, Thomas remains one of the most compelling and
divisive figures in public life. That is both ironic and inevitable for a man
who, on the surface, appears to be a study in conflicts. He is black, but a
conservative. He is contrarian and independent, but wants deeply to connect
with people. He holds a job he never wanted, but has strong ideas about how to
do it. He fiercely protects his privacy, but has written a book that is
intensely personal and, at times, anguished.
Other justices and other public
officials have written memoirs, but none revealed the kind of raw pain and
emotion Thomas shares. Thomas says he wrote the book, for which he received a
$1.5 million advance, for several reasons — he saw it as a tribute to the
grandparents who raised him, but also to provide an accurate record for history
because the media sloppily or "maliciously" got it wrong. He also
says he wanted to inspire young people who grow up with in poverty and with
hardships "just like me," wondering if they will ever make it.
But it also seems an attempt to wrestle
his story away from others who have told it — either negatively or glowingly —
on both sides of the ideological aisle. He will not fit into a box, he says, or
become an invisible man defined by stereotypes. He defends his views and
explains them in response to liberal critics. But he reveals for the first time
unflattering personal details at odds with the storyline his conservative
supporters have created that he is, somehow, without flaws.
Thomas's life and experiences — growing
up in the Jim Crow South, integrating all-white public schools as the only
black student, confronting more latent racism after he fled to what he hoped
would be "utopia" in the North — clearly have influenced how he views
the law and social policies like affirmative action. His brutal 1991
confirmation battle only reinforced those deeply held views. He says he
believes every discussion of race in America is fundamentally dishonest.
"It's even more dishonest than the '60s,"
he says.
He is adamantly opposed to affirmative
action, but for entirely different reasons than white conservatives who drive
the debate by arguing it's unfair to white people. Thomas says affirmative
action instead has hurt blacks. It not only sends them into environments in
which they are doomed to struggle instead of soar, but it also perpetuates
negative stereotypes that whites hold today that all blacks are inferior to
them and don't belong — just as whites in the South assumed 50 years ago.
"These ideologies that claim to be
so warm toward minorities actually turn out to be quite pernicious,"
Thomas says.
Under affirmative action, Thomas says,
whites will forever believe blacks enroll in top schools or hold good jobs only
because the institutions lowered their standards to accept them — regardless of
whatever qualifications an individual may actually have. The assumption is that
blacks, Thomas says, are not and cannot be as good as whites.
"Once you start making these
decisions and judgments about people's capabilities based on race, it is
forever locked in," Thomas says. "And you can see it play out
throughout my confirmation and throughout the subsequent years that I've been
on the Court."
And he says he believes the Senate
Judiciary Committee's hearings into Anita Hill's allegation of sexual
harassment — when 14 white Senators asked excruciatingly private questions
about pornography and penis sizes — would not have occurred had they both been
white.
"I doubt it," he says
forcefully. "Can you think of any other examples?"
In discussing the hearings into Hill's
allegations, Thomas's angriest words are for Democratic senators, the liberal
interest groups and the media. He turns a blowtorch on each, blasting them in
turn for their respective roles in what he calls "the most inhumane
thing" that ever has ever happened to him.
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“I'd grown up fearing
the lynch mobs of the Ku Klux Klan; as an adult I was starting to wonder if I'd
been afraid of the wrong white people all along - where I was being pursued not
by bigots in white robes, but by left-wing zealots draped in flowing
sanctimony.” - Clarence Thomas
[PHOTO SOURCE: https://www.azquotes.com/quote/292911]
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At the time, he saw those hearings in a
racial context. Time has only made him more assured.
"I'd grown up fearing the
lynch mobs of the Ku Klux Klan; as an adult I was starting to wonder if I'd
been afraid of the wrong white people all along — where I was being pursued not
by bigots in white robes, but by left-wing zealots draped in flowing
sanctimony,"
he wrote in his book.
In the interview at his home, with his
wife Virginia at his side during part of it, Thomas talks in detail about the
hearings and how he believes they perpetuated the vilest stereotypes about
black men — stereotypes about sexual aggression that had long condemned them to
death in the South and had been recounted by African-American novelists in
harrowing detail. It all, he says was an effort to destroy his nomination and
keep him off the Court.
He says he had to be
"dehumanized" and "destroyed," because he held views
considered heretical for a black man — because, as he puts it, he was in a
different ideological neighborhood and refused to buy into the views that
whites had "disseminated as the prevailing view for blacks."
"I saw it for what it was, and I
still see it for exactly what it was," Thomas says. "I think it was
an effort to keep me in my place."
That's not to say he has kind words for
Hill, whom he describes as mediocre, unpleasant and a "combative … in your
face person." But Thomas suggests she was swept up in the agenda of his
ideological opponents. He wrote that her charges were "ridiculous"
and "preposterous," and says they were "nothing more than an
extravagant fiction concocted so as to have the maximum possible impact on the
public."
"My guess was that a combination of
ego, ambition, and immaturity had caused her to let herself be drawn into the
effort to destroy me," he wrote in the book.
He doesn't care to hear people tell him
they believed him, as an overwhelming majority of Americans, black and white,
did in immediate aftermath of the hearings. The point, he thinks, is they
should not have been asked to believe at all.
"It was a weapon, and we understood
that," he says. "And I think less of people who actually do not see
what was going on, that you're such a dupe that you can't see that."
No justice in modern American history
has been subjected to such vitriolic personal attacks as Clarence Thomas. Many
liberal blacks view him with anger or disgust and consider him a traitor to his
race, suggesting he is doing the bidding of white conservatives seeking to undo
a generation of progress on civil rights. He been portrayed as a lawn jockey, a
'house slave," and repeatedly called an "Uncle Tom," including
by prominent black officials.
Many white liberals, on the other hand,
view him with disdain, questioning his intellect and qualifications —
questions, incidentally, that aren't typically raised about Thomas by blacks.
Even when presented with hard
documentary evidence — memos and notes taken by Justice Harry Blackmun — that
Thomas has been independent of Justice Antonin Scalia from the beginning and
has influenced the Court in a number of areas, many white liberals refuse to
acknowledge it.
Thomas views it all through a racial
lens. He says he is not wounded by the criticisms of his fellow blacks that he
is uncaring about other members of his race, which he dismisses as akin to a
racial slur hurled from"from a bus driving by or a pickup truck on a rural
road." But at the same time he says he is hurt — saying he wishes someone
would just hear him and what he is trying to say.
"Why else would you take on
virtually everybody, and take on the prevailing notions about race? Why would
you take the criticism if you didn't care? I mean it's easy to go along with
the crowd and sort of play that game — that doesn't require any courage or
backbone," Thomas says. "It took a lot more to say, 'I think
something is wrong.'"
Instead of being a hypocrite for
opposing affirmative action after supposedly benefiting from it, a frequent
charge, Thomas says affirmative action actually harmed him and that he believes
he should be able to criticize it.
"Once we're set on something that's
the accepted wisdom, other people like me, who have questions, suddenly become
heretics — you can't talk about it, you can't say, 'Look, I have good
intentions, too. I just don't agree with you,'" Thomas says. "Why
wouldn't it be just as easy to say, 'Well, here's somebody who went through it,
and he has some problems with it based on his experience, and his intentions
are as good as the people who are the authors of the initial policy?' But that
doesn't happen."
But Thomas is much more critical of the
white liberals who have dismissed him as an intellectual lightweight.
"It's similar to what you had in
the South, you know: 'you're stupid because you're black,' that 'you smell bad
because you're black.' I mean, it's all the same thing," Thomas says.
"And I don't understand why people … buy into it and don't see the
long-term damage."
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I believe that there is a moral and
constitutional equivalence between laws designed to subjugate a race and those
that distribute benefits on the basis of race in order to foster some current
notion of equality…. In my mind, government-sponsored racial discrimination
based on benign prejudice is just as noxious as discrimination inspired by
malicious prejudice. —Clarence Thomas
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He believes whites again have created a
system where blacks have to stay in a certain place — this time ideologically,
not geographically. Slavery evolved into segregation; segregation evolved into
an entrenched system of racial preferences, paternalism and condescension — a
modern-day system, Thomas says, that also keeps blacks inferior and
ideologically segregated.
"Whites can think anything they
want, and we can have opinions about frivolous things, like I could be a
(Washington) Nationals fan, as opposed to being an (Baltimore) Orioles fan, Oh,
that's ok. But if it's important, if you're black, you all have to think the
same thing," Thomas says. "Can you imagine someone saying that about
whites, that, 'well, you're white, you're all supposed to think the same
thing.' That would be considered ludicrous."
And the discussion of affirmative
action, he says, is particularly damaging. It's become an issue that pits
blacks against whites, liberals against conservatives — to the point that it's
almost impossible to honestly debate its impact, Thomas said.
Thomas spoke at length about how his own
experiences as a black conservative and a black justice prove his point.
Because he was admitted to Yale Law School under affirmative action after
graduating with honors from Holy Cross, he said people have questioned his
qualifications and discounted his achievements. Even as a Justice, he says,
people continue to believe he merely has "followed" Justice Scalia
because a black man couldn't possibly hold those views or be smart enough to
come up with them on his own.
"Give me a break. I mean this is
part of the — you know, the black guy is supposed to follow somebody white. We
know that," Thomas says. "Come on, we know the story behind that. I
mean there's no need to sort of tip-toe around that … The story line was that,
well I couldn't be doing this myself, he must be doing it for me because I'm
black. That's obvious.
"Again, I go back to my point. Who
were the real bigots? It's obvious," Thomas says.
Centering the debate on affirmative
action also distracts attention from more pressing problems within the black
community, where the vast majority of poor kids don't get far enough to even
consider college, much less ever see a "benefit" from affirmative
action, he says.
"We'll expend huge amounts of
energy over affirmative action, but very little over what's really happening in
the classroom for the bulk of these (other) kids or what's happening in the
home or the lack of home environment," Thomas says. "So yes, you care
about them in theory, as long as it's this racial theory (you) agree with, but
do you really care about them as individuals? Do you care where they go at
night, what they're doing, how they're learning, what's in the school, etc.?
And you don't see any passion expended on the latter."
Thomas's dissents opposing affirmative
action and minority contracting programs, as well as efforts to draw voting
districts along racial lines, prompt harsh criticism from African American
leaders that he doesn't care about black people and just follows the white
conservatives. But Thomas raises different concerns about those programs than
whites do. And in other race cases, he often writes dissents focusing on
exactly the groups he talks about — poor blacks who are trying and struggling
against high odds.
When Thomas was nominated to replace
liberal icon Justice Thurgood Marshall, civil rights leaders were outraged,
saying the conservative Thomas wasn't worthy to replace Marshall, who as an
attorney with the NAACP, had argued Brown v. Board of Education and had done so
much to advance the cause of blacks in society.
"I mean, who are they? Justice
(Ruth Bader) Ginsburg replaced Justice (Byron) White. Did anybody say she was
unworthy to replace Justice White?" Thomas asked, referring to the liberal
Ginsburg taking the place of the more conservative White. "They were
different. They're quite different.
"So why do you ask that question
about black people?" he says. "That's absurd…and the amazing thing to
me is people don't see the absurdity of it, that a white can replace a white
and there's no question. They're quite different. But you never say, 'Are they
worthy to replace this particular person?'"
INTERNET SOURCE:
https://abcnews.go.com/TheLaw/story?id=3664143&page=1
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“Racism is not dead, but it is on
life support — kept alive by politicians, race hustlers and people who get a
sense of superiority by denouncing others as ‘racist.’” – Thomas Sowell on the prevalence of racism
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