In defense of Justice Clarence Thomas
If Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas had the ideology of, say, Justice Sonia Sotomayor, you can be sure he’d be a much celebrated and revered figure. He’d have schools named after him — like how a magnet school in Los Angeles is after Sotomayor — all that stuff.
Instead — and this is what prompted this column — he gets smeared and denounced as an “Uncle Tom” who “sold his soul to the slave master,” by a Georgia state senator, as happened this past week during a vote to put up a statue of him.
These kinds of attacks are of course quite familiar.
Gubernatorial candidate Larry Elder was smeared by the left-wing Los Angeles Times as a “black face of white supremacy.” Even yours truly, just a couple of weeks ago, was labeled a “coconut” — the idea being I’m brown on the outside, white on the inside — by one letter writer for daring to criticize a Democrat.
The message of these kinds of attacks is clear. If you are Black or Latino, you must think a certain way or else you are somehow betraying your people and not doing what you are supposed to do. This sort of lunacy is the logical extension of identity politics, which parses people along demographic tidbits and then manipulates people accordingly. This sort of dynamic is also why someone as accomplished as Justice Thomas can be casually smeared in this way.
Justice Thomas, agree with him or not, is the most influential member of the Supreme Court, having served for over 31 years. His life story has long been of interest to me, even when I was a left-wing anarchist teenager.
He was born into poverty in Georgia in 1948, with Jim Crow in full force. His family, descendants of slaves, spoke the Gullah Creole language clustered along the coastal regions of South Carolina and Georgia, which combines English with western and central African languages.
Raised by his grandparents, Thomas would briefly go on to a Roman Catholic seminary, studying to become a priest, but left after overhearing one of his classmates mock the murder of Martin Luther King, Jr. in 1968.
As a young man, he indulged in the radical politics of his era. A Malcolm X devotee, he helped cofound the Black Student Union at College of the Holy Cross and was an enthusiastic supporter of the Black power movement in the 1960s and early 1970s.
But he would eventually lose interest in left-wing politics. He would feel cheated by his admission to Yale Law School, saying later it, “bore the taint of racial preference.”
After graduating from Yale in 1974, he was introduced to the works of the great economist Thomas Sowell, as well as the works of Objectivist philosopher Ayn Rand. It was in these last couple of paragraphs that Thomas went the “wrong way.”
Before that, he had the life ready made for a left-wing icon if he wanted to be one. But he began to think wrong, and embrace concepts like limited government, and how dare he!
From there, we know the rest of the story.
He became a Supreme Court justice after a contentious process that he described as “a high-tech lynching for uppityblacks 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. Senate, rather than hung from a tree.”
On the bench, he’s pursued an intellectually consistent approach to cases. Like anyone else, I agree with some of his rulings, disagree with others.
But it’s obvious why he gets the hate he get, and it’s pathetic. He bothers the lefties because isn’t following their script.