Clarence Thomas: An Angry Black Man

I have always liked Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. Even though he rarely writes opinions or says anything from the bench, probably because he's less educated than the other justices, I am grateful that we have someone on the Court who votes in lock-step with Justice Scalia instead of an independent thinker who can't be relied on. But watching Thomas being interviewed on 60 Minutes and glancing at excerpts from his new book My Grandfather's Son and Jeffrey Toobin's book The Nine, both of which I have not actually read, I was struck by how angry he seems to be. It's almost as if he were auditioning for the role of the token black roommate on The Real World who ends up getting kicked out of the house. He seems so full of rage, and even potentially violent, that if I were walking down a dark street at night and he were walking toward me, I think I would be tempted to cross the street to avoid him just to be on the safe side.

Why is Clarence Thomas such an angry black man? Hasn't he actually been quite fortunate, rising from a difficult childhood to a spot on the highest court in the land? Frankly, his book sounds like a long pity party, a tedious list of grievances about how the world has treated him badly just because he is an African-American. Thomas is still angry about his Senate confirmation hearings, which at the time he called "a high-tech lynching for uppity blacks." He lashes out at Anita Hill, "an average employee whose behavior could sometimes be irritating, rude, and unprofessional," he says, who "succumbed to a combination of ego, ambition, and immaturity." And he still hasn't forgiven the mainstream media and refused to give interviews to Supreme Court reporters, whom he called "clowns" at a dinner he recently held for a number of prominent conservative bloggers, to which I was not invited (but I'm not bitter about it). Thomas's confirmation hearings took place 16 years ago and that seems to be an awfully long time to hold a grudge. Get over it already!

It's possible that I am wrong about Justice Thomas (and if I had not been slighted by being left off the guest list of the dinner he held for bloggers and gotten a chance to meet the man in person, I might feel differently). Wendy Long, who writes the National Review's Bench Memos, disagrees with my characterization of Thomas, though she puts it in dry, sophisticated legal language: "Justice Thomas is summed up by the 'A' word -- not 'angry,' but 'awesome.'"

But his confirmation hearings aren't the only thing he seems bitter about. He thinks that people treated him unfairly just because he got into Yale through affirmative action, which he now opposes, over more qualified white candidates. "That degree meant one thing for whites and another thing for blacks," he told 60 Minutes. Does he consider the possibility that there was some other reason besides being black that accounts for his difficulty in finding a job after graduation, such as his demeanor in interviews or the way he dressed or the fact that by his own admission at that time he was one of those radical blacks? Eventually, Thomas came to believe that affirmative action and other government programs designed to help blacks create a "cult of victimization" and if you want to see an example of this phenomenon, look no further than Justice Thomas himself, who seems to constantly see himself as a victim.

Like a lot of black people Thomas invokes ancient history as a way of guilt-tripping white people. He complains about growing up under segregation, which was outlawed more than 40 years ago and which I had nothing to do with. Am I supposed to feel guilty about a system that existed before I was born? In Jeffrey Toobin's book Thomas is quoted as asserting "my right to think for myself, to refuse to have my ideas assigned to me as though I was an intellectual slave because I'm black." Why is it that black people are always bringing up slavery when it was abolished almost 150 years ago? Maybe he should read Michael Medved's article, which shows that slavery really wasn't as bad as people say it was and may actually have been a net plus for blacks. You don't see Medved, who is Jewish, complaining about the bondage of Hebrews in Egypt and blaming it for the fact that most people don't respect him as a film critic. And I'm not complaining about the fact that my invitation to the blogger's dinner with Justice Thomas was apparently lost in the mail even though it happened just this week and the sting of that personal insult still lingers.

There was a time when racism was a big problem in this country, but that was years ago. As far as I know there hasn't been a single high-tech lynching in this country since Thomas's 1991 confirmation hearings and very few low-tech ones since then. To tell you the truth, some of the things Clarence Thomas says don't sound all that different from the rhetoric of race hustlers like the Revs. Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson. If Thomas has suffered so much for being black, then how was he able to pull himself up by his own bootstraps and get on the Supreme Court in the first place? Being black did not keep the first President Bush from appointing him. The first President Bush, who like most conservatives is completely colorblind, just picked the most qualified person in the country and probably didn't even know Thomas happens to be black.

But for Thomas, it seems, everything comes down to race. "It's fascinating that people, there's so many people now who will make judgments based on what you look like," he told 60 Minutes. "I'm black. So I'm supposed to think a certain way. I'm supposed to have certain opinions. I don't do that. You don't create a box and put people in and then make a lot of generalizations about them."

If I had received an invitation to the blogger's dinner with Justice Thomas (and not been basically slapped in the face) I would have given him some advice. I would have told him that he should stop playing the race card and using race an excuse for his own personal failings. It's time he took responsibility for his own actions and not interpret every slight as a racist attack. Sometimes a noose or a burning cross is just a noose or a burning cross. Maybe he should try acting more like Jackie Robinson and less like Isiah Thomas and see how people treat him. Perhaps when he is in a restaurant, he would get better service if he was polite instead of asking for the motherf---ing tea, and left a bigger tip. He would probably have an easier time hailing a cab if he tried not to look so aggressive and menacing so that the drivers didn't feel threatened and think he was going to rob them. If he didn't go shopping wearing baggy clothing that made him look like someone from the ghetto who was there to shoplift, salespeople probably wouldn't follow him around the store. And above all, maybe he should stop acting like the world owes him something just because he's black.

Correction: The picture that originally accompanied this post was of Thurgood Marshall and not Clarence Thomas. I'm not sure how I got them mixed up (though they do look a lot alike). I regret the error.

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