A Separate Path
Clarence Thomas is the most radioactive of America's cadre of black conservatives. Opposed to affirmative action and government assistance, Thomas is reviled as a "chicken-and-biscuit eating Uncle Tom" (courtesy of Spike Lee) and likened to Judas Iscariot. Journalist Ken Foskett, in his new book "Judging Thomas: The Life and Times of Clarence Thomas," charts the rise and near-fall of Thomas, free of the vitriol of his detractors and the self-serving apologetics of his supporters.
Most Americans think of Thomas in terms of Anita Hill, a former co-worker who nearly torpedoed Thomas's nomination to the Supreme Court when she accused him of sexual harassment. Hill charged that Thomas boasted of his penis size (calling it "Long John Silver") and sexual prowess. Before the senate voted on his nomination, Thomas denied the allegation, uttering what Foskett rightly describes as "the most memorable lines in American judicial history:" "Today is a travesty … And from my standpoint, as a black American, as far as I am concerned, it is a high-tech lynching for uppity blacks 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." The two most highly combustible issues in America -- race and sex -- had been doused with gasoline and set afire.
This incendiary episode in American politics has become the definitive prism through which we have come to know Thomas. But many of us know little about him. The product of a broken home, Thomas was raised by his fiercely self-reliant grandfather Myers Anderson in segregated Savannah, Georgia. "You got to do for yourself," Anderson, the great-grandson of slaves, told Thomas. Anderson was also a devout Catholic with a Manichean worldview. Thomas adopted both his grandfather's "fanatical self-reliance" and Catholic absolutism. "This way of evaluating the world one day added up to a judicial philosophy that was equally categorical and absolute," Foskett writes.
Thomas attended Catholic schools for nine years, an experience that made him both race- and class-conscious. "Clarence's classmates were mostly the sons and daughters of Savannah's black upper and middle classes, the children of doctors, dentists, teachers and ministers," writes Foskett. "The class distinctions were also often tied to skin color, with fair-skinned blacks at the top of the heap. The differences determined who your friends were, where you lived, and whom you could date." In the schoolyard Thomas, the grandson of an illiterate fuel-oil deliveryman, was dubbed "ABC: America's Blackest Child." Thomas resented the way wealthier blacks condescended to him and his grandfather. This resentment would crop up again when blacks in the civil rights establishment attacked his conservative views.
Thomas's differences with blacks in the civil rights establishment can be traced to the seminal debate between Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. DuBois. Washington advocated self-reliance and urged blacks to develop trades and vocations, instead of agitating for political and social rights. A portrait of Washington hangs prominently in Thomas's court chamber. NAACP founder DuBois argued the fight for civil rights was priority number one, not material advancement. He proposed the "Talented Tenth" -- a vanguard of black intellectuals armed with liberal educations that would elevate the race.
Though this debate split black America, the Jim Crow South constantly reminded blacks, including Thomas, of their common plight against racial bigotry. As one of two black students in an otherwise all-white Catholic high school, Thomas was taunted by whites. "What's that smell coming from the other end of the room," his white roommates would say. "It's so dark, I can't see somebody. Smile, Clarence, so we can see you." Though these insults wounded the sixteen-year-old priesthood student, Thomas was spared the violent racism other southern blacks faced. "When John Lewis and Hosea Williams were being beaten mercilessly by Alabama Guardsmen on the Edmund Pettus Bridge near Selma, Thomas was safely ensconced at Saint Johns's, both physically and emotionally removed from the raw, racist bigotry," notes Foskett. "However traumatic the seminary school was for Thomas, it was nothing compared with the physical and emotional abuse that many of his generation were confronting regularly."
The assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., on April 4, 1968, had a profound impact on Thomas and his generation. As a college freshman at predominantly white Conception Seminary College in Kansas City, Thomas, who idolized King, was shocked by his death. "In a state of stunned confusion, he mounted the stairs behind a white classmate. Someone from below yelled that King had been shot. Without turning around, the student in front of Thomas said, 'I hope the S.O.B. dies.'" Thomas soon quit school and abandoned his faith. He "could have no part of a religion that preached love and acceptance but practiced bigotry," Foskett writes. Thomas's stint as a college dropout was short-lived, however. King's assassination ignited riots in northern cities, which led schools like the College of the Holy Cross in Massachusetts to boost their black enrollment, making it an attractive place to Thomas.
Like many blacks of his generation, Thomas was drawn to the Black Power Movement. He devoured books by black nationalists like Malcolm X, and donned army fatigues, black boots, and a beret. "When he came looking like that, he looked like he was ready for war," Thomas's friend recalls. He protested the Vietnam War, even marching on the Pentagon. Thomas's transformation from fist-clenched black nationalist to right-wing icon has to be one of the most fascinating ideological journeys in American politics.
Thomas's "epiphany" at a Black Panthers support rally set his right-ward migration in motion. Foskett writes:
In the din of angry shouting, Thomas heard a voice inside his head question the utility of group protests. Why was he on the street, instead of getting an education? Why was he on the street, instead of heading God's call to love? Suddenly, he believed racial anger and bitterness were leading him away from everything he'd worked for.
The echoes of Booker T. Washington are unmistakable here.
With his protest days behind him, Thomas entered Yale Law School in 1971, to which he was admitted under the policy of affirmative action. Thomas's passionate opposition to race-based preferences today infuriates his critics precisely because he benefited from the policy. Why would he deny blacks the same opportunities he had? Thomas argues that affirmative action stigmatizes blacks, suggesting their achievements are owed to favorable treatment, not their own hard work and merit. The suggestion of black inferiority forms the core of his opposition to affirmative action.
At Yale, Thomas's conservative views began to crystallize. He thought the federal government's power was too broad, auguring the libertarianism he would later adopt. And he saw liberalism as "dilettantish affectation for people who had the money and could afford that." After Yale, Thomas worked for Missouri's Republican attorney general until well-connected friends in the new Reagan administration lured him to Washington D.C. to head the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. When liberal icon Thurgood Marshall retired from the court, Bush pere tapped Thomas, Marshall's antithesis in every way, to succeed him.
Foskett gives us one of the most balanced accounts of Thomas's controversial confirmation hearings. But it's Foskett's telling of the lesser-known aspects of Thomas's life, particularly his formative years, that humanizes the often-caricatured Thomas by putting him in the context of the cultural and political forces that shaped his life. You may not agree with Thomas after reading this book, but you might learn to understand him.
— 31 August 2004
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