Posted October 11, 2007 to Politics | Section Home | Print

The Lessons of Clarence Thomas

By Ron Walters

(NNPA) -- The media circus surrounding the publication of Justice Clarence Thomas' biography, My Grandfather's Son, brought back to me the circumstances of his nomination to the Supreme Court and the fact there is little more to learn about Thomas, but there is much to learn from how he arrived there. I will propose just three factors in this space.

First, there is the issue of ideology. Thomas feigns to be hurt from the attempt to destroy him simply for the sake of ideology. He is either woefully ignorant or patently deceptive if he does not understand that as a carrier of the ideology of the radical right he has voluntarily become the handmaiden of an attempt to destroy the long history of the civil rights movement that has been the foundation of the push for the freedom of Blacks in America. But when Thomas was nominated, many Blacks exhibited confusion over the fact that he was Black and conservative. In fact, they privileged his Blackness over the fact that as Chair of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, for ten years he had been attempting to use right wing ideology to destroy the mission of the organization to effectively monitor and enforce fair employment standards. Rather than to merely take race at face value, we should have learned to vet the thinking of a highly nominated official and tailor our support according to the prospect of whether that person - Black or White - will conduct his or her office in a manner that affects the wellbeing of the Black community.

Second, I was pained at the fact that President Bush (no. 1) was able to neutralize the civil rights organizations. It was widely reported at the time that his operatives contacted corporate heads and grantors who contacted their Republican counterparts and corporate representatives who sat on the boards of the NAACP and the Urban League and their reluctance to oppose Thomas created a level of confusion that effectively neutralize the action of these organizations. The result was Black leadership did not fight hard enough to force members of the Senate Judiciary Committee to oppose Thomas. I am open to be contradicted, but then there must be a rational explanation for why the civil rights organizations were so timid in their opposition Thomas, with the sole exception of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights and Women's organizations, convinced that he would vote to role back Roe v. Wade. In any case, I feel that these organizations must take part of the blame for the fact that Thomas is on the high Court, especially because the general public was not apprised of his record and they had his record, but did not disseminate it to the black community.

Third, the twin effect of the timidity of civil rights organizations and the dramatic pronouncement of Thomas that he was being made the subject of a "high tech lynching" appeared to give the Democratic leadership on the Senate Judiciary Committee some space to do as they wished. The strongest ammunition Joe Biden, Chair of the Committee, had was not only the fact that the assertions made by Anita Hill about Thomas's sexual improprieties had been reported to the FBI ten years earlier and that she was a reluctant witness, but that some of what she said could be corroborated by one of her office colleagues. But Biden and his staff did not call her to testify because she reportedly was cited for having called a colleague in her office a "faggot."

Why this weakened her credibility to confirm what she understood about the relationship between Thomas and Anita Hill is still not clear to me. In this circumstance, if this is the only card you can play, not to play it is to give the accused a walk - and that is just what happened. So, Joe Biden could never get my vote for president.

Like many analysts, I have bemoaned the record of Clarence Thomas as a Justice of the Supreme Court and I feel that every bit of harassment he received in the nomination process and since has been justified. But I also feel that this is an historic object lesson for the Black community, one that I hope we have learned, given the disastrous consequences.

Dr. Ron Walters is the Distinguished Leadership Scholar, Director of the African American Leadership Institute and Professor of Government and Politics at the University of Maryland College Park. His latest books are: White Nationalism, Black Interests (Wayne State U. Press); and Freedom Is not Enough (Rowman and Littlefield Publishers).