Clarence Thomas: I 'swallowed hard' and worked for 'a dreaded Republican'
CBS's 60 Minutes featured an extensive interview on Sunday with Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. "He is often dismissed as a man of little accomplishment," began CBS's Steve Kroft, "an opportunistic black conservative who sold out his race, joined the Republican Party, and was ultimately rewarded with an affirmative action appointment to the nation's highest court, a sullen intellectual lightweight so insecure that he rarely opens his mouth in oral arguments."
When asked about these "misperceptions," Thomas told CBS that his job is "not to respond to idiocy." He insists that although he is just one member of an emerging anti-affirmative action majority on the Supreme Court, the "civil rights establishment" has singled him out for criticism, calling him a hypocrite or a traitor to his people. "It's none of their business," said Thomas about such charges. "Do I love helping black people? Absolutely."
Thomas, who has recently written a memoir that does much to explain his beliefs and positions, reminisced to CBS about his childhood. When his father deserted the family and his mother couldn't made ends meet as a maid, he and his brother were sent to live with their grandfather, a stern taskmaster who kept the boys working all day on his delivery truck and warned them, "Don't you ever look a white woman in the eye."
Thomas attended a Catholic school and intended to become a priest, entering a seminary at 16. But when Martin Luther King was shot and someone at the seminary said in front of him, "I hope the SOB dies," Thomas was immediately radicalized. "That was the end of the seminary, that was the end of the vocation, that was the end of, for all practical purposes, my Catholic faith. ... I was angry at everybody," he told CBS.
The Washington Post adds that when Thomas announced he was dropping out of the seminary, "his grandfather kicked him out of the house, telling him: 'I'm finished helping you. You'll have to figure it out yourself. You'll probably end up like your no-good daddy or those other no-good Pinpoint Negroes.'"
Thomas joined the black student union in college and considered himself a radical. While attending Yale Law School, however, he had the uncomfortable feeling that he was being given special treatment because of his race, made worse by his inability to find work after graduation. "It's tainted," he said of his law degree. He finally "had to swallow hard, go out to Missouri, and work for a dreaded Republican."
Thomas would become a Republican himself in 1980 and vote for Ronald Reagan, seeing in Reagan's policies a reflection of the work ethic instilled in him by his grandfather. He eventually concluded that government programs designed to help blacks were demeaning and that the civil rights movement had created a cult of victimization.
When Anita Hill's charges of sexual harrassment in the workplace were leaked during Thomas's Supreme Court confirmation hearings in 1991, he lashed out at his attackers, calling the accusations "a message that unless you kowtow to an old order you will be lynched." Even today, he expresses resentment of the civil rights movement, telling CBS, "I am to be destroyed because I won't drink that Koolaid."
However, Thomas acknowledges that his appointment to the Supreme Court at the edge of 43 and with barely a year of judicial experience makes it hard to believe that race was not a factor in his selection.
The CBS interview did not address Thomas's close affiliaton with the ultra-conservative Federalist Society or the support of his 1991 nomination by the most extreme wing of the Republican Party. According to the Washington Post, Thomas's memoir "has been eagerly awaited, especially in the conservative community, which is playing an active role in promoting it. The Heritage Foundation, the Federalist Society and the National Center for Policy Analysis are sponsoring a six-city book tour, in which patrons will pay $30 to attend events in Thomas's honor."
Ed Morrissey at the "Captains Quarters" blog suggests that, "With his new book My Grandfather’s Son: A Memoir hitting bookstores today, Thomas’ belated last word on the accusations of sexual harrassment and hypocrisy on racial preferences will undoubtedly transform his image from that of an isolated footnote to an active and powerful voice, both on the Supreme Court and in public life."
However, writer Trey Ellis has criticized Thomas for self-pity, writing, "My mom went to Yale law school a few years after Thomas, after having graduated Magna Cum Laude from Howard. She was a thirty-five-year-old black mother of two teenaged kids. She knew she was brilliant, the best of the best, and thrilled at debating the other students. She never once said, 'Oh, I'm only here because they needed a brown body. I really belong at the DeVry College of Law.' ... How pathetic is it that Clarence Thomas writes that he graduated from Yale Law School with his head hanging low, convinced that the world knew that his diploma came with an asterisk of inferiority? When my mom's friends graduated they burst out of law school ready to kick ass and take names."
A transcript of the CBS story is available at this link.
The following video is from CBS's 60 Minutes, broadcast on September 30.
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