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Clarence Thomas Discredits The Black Race [1]
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Date: 2023-04-30
He is an anathema to the black existence
Firstly, let me just state that I abhor the credit to your race phrase, as it has been a patently odious way for racist people to refer to any black person they purport to admire.
Black people are generally good people, family-oriented, relentlessly god-fearing, and law-abiding. We do have our stragglers, individuals who lose their way for an assorted number of reasons — I was one of those people for years before I got back on track. Nevertheless, billions of black people continue to play by the rules, many of them purposely rigged against us. Still, we endeavor to survive a world that is often inhospitable, hostile, and dangerous.
Supreme Justice Clarence Thomas is one of these black people. Born into abject poverty in Pin Point, Georgia in 1948, there was much for Clarence Thomas to overcome, almost insurmountable barriers to his eventual success. Nevertheless, he was able to overcome these obstacles, earning prestigious degrees from the College of the Holy Cross and Yale Law School, becoming a lawyer, and quickly rising to become the second black man in history nominated for the highest court in the land, the United States Supreme Court.
Thomas’s ascent to the high court was nearly derailed by Anita Hill, a black woman and former employee who accused him of sexual harassment. Miss Hill recounted her experiences with Thomas before the Senate judiciary committee, the body responsible for approving judicial candidates. It was a brutal process for Thomas, who bristled like a porcupine as he responded to Anita Hill’s charges.
Clarence Thomas compared his hearing before a group of all-white men to a modern-day lynching, suggesting that his race and conservative beliefs played a part in the resistance to his eventual confirmation. Interestingly, President Joe Biden headed the Judiciary Committee as Thomas was under consideration for the open seat.
Eventually, Clarence Thomas achieved his goal, receiving fifty-two of one hundred available votes from the Senate. I was in my fifteenth year of existence, a callow and inexperienced young man, the emerging son of an African immigrant who had been denied the type of life that reflected his education — my dad earned a Master’s degree from my alma mater before settling for a job at the airport. Thomas’s triumph was a win for people like my father, individuals overlooked and easily dismissed by a society dominated by white conservative males.
As the nineties progressed and I grew older, Clarence Thomas became an afterthought for me. For I was focused on creating a niche for myself. I was admittedly shortsighted, wrapped in my existence, focusing on surviving high school and college, obsessing over my attractiveness, and chasing women all around town. Meanwhile, Clarence Thomas was authoring legal opinions that directly controverted the existence of millions of marginalized human beings.
Some years after the reelection of former President Barack Obama in 2012, I allowed Clarence Thomas back into my life. Apoplectic conservatives, still reeling and disbelieving of the election of a black democratic president, endeavored to prevent Obama from bringing about the change he promised. These conservatives often referred to Obama as a radical, thug, and criminal, and sought assistance from the Supreme Court to stop him. The court’s ideological split was 5–4, tilting conservative. Clarence Thomas was the most conservative of them all.
Thomas is an antithetical force to Obama, a fact that was reflected in Thomas’s opposition to Obama’s agenda during his tenure as president. Thomas voted to strike down Obamacare in 2012, restrict portions of the Voting Rights Act, eradicate affirmative action, and disallow same-sex marriage. Clarence Thomas, one of the earliest beneficiaries of affirmative action, a former admirer of Malcolm X, and one-half of interracial coupling with a crazy person — Ginni Thomas belonged to a cult once — was at war against policies that made it possible for him to succeed. It did not make any kind of sense to me.
Regrettably, Obama had to leave office, making room for Donald Trump, the raving racist and elusive conman. Trump was allowed to appoint three Federalist Society-endorsed, ultra-conservative judges to the Supreme Court. All three of these Trump judges are originalist thinkers who employ a strict interpretation of the Constitution, meaning they do not consider a rapidly changing society when deliberating on court cases.
Originalists maintain that the framers of the Constitution — white men who owned slaves — constructed the document without race or gender in mind. Therefore, any law passed to strengthen the rights of American women, LGBTQ Americans, and people of color, traditionally marginalized groups who need protection, conflicts with the Constitution’s original intent.
Of the nine judges who serve on the Supreme Court, six — Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, John Roberts, Bret Kavanaugh, Amy Coney Barrett, and Neil Gorsuch — are members of this Federalist society. They often vote in lockstep, gleefully and assiduously tossing aside the rights and privileges of vulnerable members of society.
Recently, these sinister six judges voted to rescind the federal right to abortion, breaking with fifty years of legal precedent. Justice Samuel Alito wrote the majority opinion, sprinkling his vile opinion with beliefs espoused by a 17th-century English jurist who executed women for performing witchcraft.
In his written concurrence with the majority opinion, Clarence Thomas boldly expressed a desire to go even further than the execrable Alito: “Justices should reconsider all of this Court’s substantive due process precedents, including Griswold, Lawrence, and Obergefell.” That is right. Clarence Thomas wants to permanently restrict contraception access, ban consensual sex, and eradicate gay marriage.
But why does he want to do this though? Why is Clarence Thomas so intent on inflicting so much misery on the rest of the country? Perhaps it is because Thomas is miserable himself, a spiteful man who delights in siphoning happiness from the world. He remains the most conservative member of a court dominated by six extremely restrictive jurists, often authoring opinions that tack to the right of his radical compatriots. Projecting a disarming geniality and gentility, Thomas justifies his sadism with a distorted sense of righteousness: “Right is still right,” said Thomas. “Even if you stand by yourself.”
There is no nuance, versatility, or dexterity to Thomas’s thought processes, though he thinks of himself as an independent and thoughtful human being. Instead, he is mindless, rigid, obstinate, and backward, a man who is incapable of accommodating a different point of view. His perspective on a rapidly changing world is ironclad, leaving no room for illumination or enlightenment. “North is still north,” Thomas said, describing his relationship with reality. “Even if someone is yelling at you.”
Compounding Thomas’s deleterious impact on the law is his apparent lack of a moral compass. Thomas is beholden to a person named Harlan Crow, a right-wing billionaire, political activist, and collector of Hitler regalia. Thomas regards Mr. Crow as a long-time friend, but their relationship is a lot more complicated and disturbing. Because Mr. Crow has been greasing the skids with Thomas, supplying him with expensive gifts and trips in exchange for favorable rulings that benefit his ideological and business pursuits.
We should have listened to Anita Hill, currently a law professor at Brandeis University. Thomas was a criminal and creep then and he is a creep now, a man unworthy of his vaunted status. Conservative whites gush about Thomas, extolling his virtue, character, and prodigious intellect. But there is nothing complicated or special about the man, for I see him for who he is. He is a man of low character, the simplest individual serving on the Supreme Court, and a discredit to all of black America.
I do not want the rest of the world to think that all black people are like him.
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