The hacktavists over at the Supreme Court are busy today looking to destroy more of the American way of life by striking down affirmative action, which is ironic as heck because Clarence Thomas himself said of race conscious admission policies, “But for them (affirmative-action laws), God only knows where I would be today. These laws and their proper application are all that stand between the first 17 years of my life and the second 17 years.”
The ACLU explained:
The U.S. Supreme Court is set to hear two cases concerning affirmative action today. If the court strikes down affirmative action — also known as race-conscious admissions policies — it would make it unconstitutional for universities across the country to consider a student’s race as one factor in a holistic admissions review process. The American Civil Liberties Union, ACLU of Massachusetts, and ACLU of North Carolina filed an amicus brief urging the Supreme Court to uphold universities’ ability to consider race in college admissions earlier this year.
Clarence Thomas’ life is a perfect example of what affirmative action was meant to do (until he decided that only he should be allowed to benefit). He grew up dirt poor. In the 1994 “The Higher Education of Clarence Thomas” by Jane Mayer and Jill Abramson*: “He saw himself as stigmatized rather than helped by race-conscious aid, an analysis that no doubt reflected the emotional pain he felt but that again overlooked the advantages he had enjoyed — such as his admission to St. John Vianney, Immaculate Conception, and Holy Cross in the first place. The resentment Thomas felt toward he helping hand he grasped set him apart from a number of other minority students at the time… many of whom didn’t care as much about others’ perception of how they had gotten there.”
They describe Thomas as feeling he had never gotten “enough acceptance, which caused some friends to wonder if the problem wasn’t more internal than external.”
So the gist of this is that Thomas is what he projects onto others. He was so angry about being seen as someone who benefited unfairly from affirmative action that he began to hate the mechanism that saved him, and to seek – out of what seems like emotional pathology – to deny anyone else the same helping hand.
The contradiction and hypocrisy is so blatant, but it is hardly new. Back in 1995, Seattle Times published a piece laying it out, entitled ‘Clarence Thomas: Poster Boy For Affirmative Action’:
THERE is something unseemly about a guy who has just built a house on the beach and is now leading the charge to stop all further beach-front construction.
…
Or a beneficiary of affirmative-action programs who climbs the ladder of success by attacking affirmative action.
That kind of unseemliness was demonstrated this month by Justice Clarence Thomas. But few reporters took note – even though it should be the media’s job to spotlight hypocrisy.
Thomas cast the deciding vote in the Supreme Court’s 5-to-4 decision to narrow federal affirmative-action programs. But Thomas went beyond even fellow conservatives on the bench – he argued for an immediate end to affirmative action.
There’s an obvious contradiction here: Clarence Thomas benefited enormously from the kind of affirmative-action programs he now seeks to kill.
Yes, Thomas has been trying to shut the door on Black people behind him for decades. It took white supremacist-appeasing Donald Trump to stack the court so Clarence Thomas could finally spit on those below who seek to climb the same ladder as he did.
In fact, it seems Thomas is on this very court because he OPPOSED the civil rights movement. His opposition, while being Black, led to two “civil-rights” posts in the Reagan White House and President Bush, who also opposed the Civil Rights Act, then chose Clarence Thomas to fill Thurgood Marshall’s seat on the Supreme Court.
Since the early 1980s, Thomas’ career soared thanks to a perverse form of racial preference. It was his race, as Thomas has admitted, that got him two civil-rights posts in the Reagan White House; the jobs came because he opposed the civil-rights movement. So did his boss, President Ronald Reagan, whose opposition dated back to the years of Martin Luther King Jr.
President Bush – who, like Reagan, had opposed the landmark 1964 Civil Rights Act – later chose Thomas to fill the Supreme Court seat of civil-rights legend Thurgood Marshall, the only other African American to sit on the highest court.
By being so against civil rights and affirmative action, Thomas is also giving the white elite establishment types what we now call “pick me” energy. This is like the “cool girl” who hates other women being chosen as the “token” woman for anti-women’s rights campaign. (Also visible on this same court in handmaid type religion Amy Coney Barrett.)
If Thomas Clarence weren’t so singularly destructive of our democracy and so corruptly grabbing power not his to take – including refusing to recuse himself on cases involving his own wife’s attack on our country – he would be someone compelling of a certain kind of sad empathy. Not pity. No, not pity.
But it’s understandable that anyone who fights so hard to get ahead and feels they never fit in has a bristly vibe. Thomas worked hard for his degrees. He came from nothing. It’s an accomplishment.
However, what he has also taken with him in his rise to the top is a seething resentment against those he feels wronged him wayyyyy back in his college years. He seems to identify those people as “liberals.” He did in the 90s, at any rate, tell his law clerks he wanted to serve for 43 years to make liberals’ lives “miserable.”
Well played, rage monster.
Thomas is free to get his hate on and be emotionally unstable to this degree, but there’s a big problem: “According to the American Bar Association, judicial temperament means that a judge exhibits ‘compassion, decisiveness, open-mindedness, sensitivity, courtesy, patience, freedom from bias and commitment to equal justice.’” BallotPedia explains.
These traits are MIA in Thomas, though reports are he’s civil to his colleagues, but I’d argue they aren’t the people impacted by his decisions and Thomas is not civil to half the country, so this seems like an attempt to make his mission to make other people’s lives much worse more palatable.
The man who refuses to cede any ground, including the most obvious conflicts of interest, as he serves as a “justice” on the highest court in the land is also motivated by petty vindictiveness against half the country and seeks to hold down other minorities lest anyone look down on him for getting help.
Is this man fit to be a judge anywhere in America? His temperament says not, his actions say definitely not, and his irrational, decades-long tour of palpable vindictive spite agree most definitely not.
*Mayer, Jane, and Jill Abramson. “The Higher Education of Clarence Thomas.” The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education, no. 6, 1994, pp. 95–100. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/2962477. Accessed 31 Oct. 2022.
Sarah has been credentialed to cover President Barack Obama, then VP Joe Biden, 2016 Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, and exclusively interviewed Speaker Nancy Pelosi multiple times and exclusively covered her first home appearance after the first impeachment of then President Donald Trump.
Sarah is two-time Telly award winning video producer and a member of the Society of Professional Journalists.
