Pastor Marc A. Tibbs
It’s hard to believe it’s been 32 years since Clarence Thomas then of the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission sat before a U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee as a nominee for the U.S. Supreme Court.
It’s even harder to believe that since those days of him answering allegations about pubic hairs on coke cans that all these years later Thomas has finally been able to double-down on his notions that affirmative action – a process from which he benefited as a law student at Yale – violates the Constitution’s 14th Amendment guaranteeing equal protection under the law.
Thomas recently was part of the 6-3 conservative majority opinion which struck down affirmative action in college admissions – a ruling that could have adverse reverberations against Black people and others in all areas of society.
“Our Constitution is colorblind,” he wrote, quoting an 1896 judicial dissent in the landmark Plessy v. Ferguson decision which once held that separate but equal was an acceptable legal standard. It wasn’t until 58 years later that the high court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas that the doctrine of affirmative action – “with all deliberate speed” — began to take hold across the nation.
Thomas’ conservative views came as no surprise to court watchers who’ve scrutinized his rulings in the three decades the associate justice has served on the court. At the time of his appontment, Thomas was a rare breed of Black conservative having been nominated to the court by the George H.W. Bush administration as a replacement for the legendary Thurgood Marshall – America’s first Black supreme court justice.
But all those years ago, when Thomas served at the EEOC, and before that as an assistant secretary for civil rights at the U.S. Department of Education no one would have guessed that he’d wind up biting the affirmative action hand that fed him.
Thomas has often written that affirmative action victimizes Black people as inferior to whites, and therefore posits Blacks in perennial need of government’s steady hand. But Clarence Thomas hasn’t always felt this way.
Born in the segregated community of Pin Point, Georgia, which was founded by Freedman after the Civil War, Thomas became a promising student who attended a Catholic high school, and flirted with the idea of becoming a priest until he concluded that the church had not done enough to work against racism.
As a student at the College of the Holy Cross, Thomas was a founding member of its Black Student Union and was known to have a poster of Malcolm X in his dormitory room. He’d even participated in marches against the Vietnam War.
In one interview not so long before he became a supreme court justice, Thomas remarked: “There is nothing you can do to get past black skin. I don’t care how educated you are, how good you are at what you do—you’ll never have the same contacts or opportunities, you’ll never be seen as equal to whites.”
Now, Thomas seems to maintain that the playing field is equal. Colleges and universities can no longer consider race as part of their admissions standards according to the court’s recent decision with which he concurred.
So, what happened? How did this socially aware, nearly Black nationalist activist become the poster boy for white conservatives across the land?
We might not want to admit it, but we, as Black people created him.
While most of us only think of Thomas as the justice accused of sexual harassment by law professor Anita Hill, Thomas has a much more sordid history among Black people in his days growing up in Georgia.
According to a 2019 essay in The Atlantic, Thomas was ridiculed by his own people because of his extremely dark skin. “ABC” was his nickname — America’s Blackest Child. Some children taunted him as being so black, he was nearly blue.
Those of us a certain age who are honest with ourselves know of what Thomas speaks. We remember the paper bag test – holding a grocery bag next to a Black person’s face to determine if their complexion was darker than the color of the bag. If you were “too Black, get back.” If you were “light,” you were alright.
What emotional scarring that must have left on a young Black boy trying to find his way in the segregated south. Thomas was both oppressed by a segregated society from without, and he rejected by his own people from within.
Calling a person “Black,” was a polite way of using the N-word in the 1950s and 1960s. Thomas was himself the victim of a racist society that so permeated the culture that even Black people began to think of themselves as inferior.
When young Clarence Thomas looked in the mirror, he saw an insult looking back at him. Back then we were “Negroes” or colored, long before being African American entered the lexicon.
For as misguided as he’s been for the last 32 years, and as wrong as he is now about affirmative action, Thomas is still a boy in great pain. His only refuge is to shrug off that which tormented him all those years ago in Georgia and embrace a society he’s come to hold up as idyllic.While some might seek to call him Judas as one who betrays his race, perhaps he’s more of a Joseph whose brothers threw him into the pit.
