Clarence Thomas Speaks Out

In many ways, I'm not so different from US Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas on the subject of affirmative action. I still believe that President Clinton's "mend it, don't end it" approach is, unfortunately, necessary. But I understand Thomas's abhorrence of a policy that begins with the premise that Blacks are, no matter their actual backgrounds, damaged goods in need of handouts to get a leg up.

We do not often hear from Justice Thomas beyond his utterances through the US Supreme Court, where he is the only Black. He is often the butt of jokes, scorned as an Uncle Tom and a conservative lackey, seen as so into his White world that he has forgotten from whence he came (poor Black folks near Savannah, Ga.)

I’ve actually read his opinions and, among the columns for which I was awarded a Pulitzer Prize in 1996, was one defending his position in a school-discrimination case. (www.pulitzer.org, See Commentary.):


July 12, 1995


Clarence Thomas' Input in Race Debate


THREE OF MY fellow Georgians stand at the forefront of our painful national debate on racism and remedies: House Speaker Newt Gingrich, the self-proclaimed leader of the Republican revolution; Rep. Cynthia McKinney, whose racially gerrymandered congressional district the Supreme Court deemed unlawful, and Clarence Thomas, the Supreme Court justice who, if you listen to some folks, was single-handedly responsible for that decision and an earlier one limiting the federal courts' role in the area of school desegregation.

Thomas has been pilloried, "called everything but a child of God," as we say in Georgia. But rather than being "an Uncle Tom," as so many are so quick to say, at times he sounds to me like W.E.B. Du Bois, the scholar, founding member of the NAACP and Pan-Africanist whose bona fides has not been called into question as far as I know.

You probably think I'm nuts, but consider what Du Bois had to say 60 years ago when educators like himself and lawyers such as Charles Hamilton Houston and Thurgood Marshall were debating what to do about segregated schools. Work to raise their quality, while conceding the reality of American apartheid? Or sue to end state-mandated segregation, arguing that integration was the only assurance black children could get a decent education?

In the July 1935 Journal of Negro Education, leading scholars, including E. Franklin Frazier, Ralph Bunche, Horace Mann Bond, Alain Locke and Du Bois, weighed in on the subject. Du Bois chastised blacks for their "utter lack of faith" in their own schools. "[A]s long as American Negroes believe that their race is constitutionally and permanently inferior to white people, they necessarily disbelieve in every possible Negro institution." The quality of the education should be paramount, he said, not whether black kids sat next to white kids in integrated classrooms. "The Negro needs neither segregated schools nor mixed schools," Du Bois declared. "What he needs is Education."

Thomas seemed to echo Du Bois a few weeks ago in finding that a federal judge had gone too far in requiring an elaborate desegregation plan to achieve racial balance in the public schools of Kansas City, Mo., where, in some instances, schools were 90% black. Looking at black students' poor academic performance, the federal judge concluded that there was a link between the high proportion of blacks and the low quality of the schools.

"It never ceases to amaze me that the courts are so willing to assume that anything that is predominantly black must be inferior," Thomas wrote in a passionate critique of the Kansas City plan. Of the Missouri court's insistence on racial balance, he said: "This position appears to rest upon the idea that any school that is black is inferior, and that blacks cannot succeed without the benefit of the company of whites."

Thomas, like Du Bois, would say to local school officials and parents: Fix the schools to make sure that they are indeed educating kids. Demand that every school gets its fair share of education dollars. Let kids go to school in their own neighborhoods if they choose. And forget about what proportion of students are of what race. Thomas agrees with Du Bois that it's wrong to use children as "battering rams" in the elusive goal of creating an integrated society.

Admittedly, Thomas is a strange bird, but he seems to have more faith in the ability of blacks to stand on their own two feet than do some of those who berate him. His is an Old Testament-style tough love. He is yes, I do believe this a proud black man. But a confused one.

"We're a mixed-up generation, those of us who were sent to integrate society," Thomas once said.

I'm part of that generation that was the first to integrate this, that or the other. We've got the bruises psychic, if not physical to show it. So who better than us the expeditionary troops, the cannon fodder to force Americans to confront racism and shape remedies that make sense for the 1990s? Black thought on racism did not begin with the 1954 Brown vs. Board of Education case. The remedies we seek should not end with it.

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Check Thomas out now, with his own take on how he got to where he is today. He still thinks he pretty much made it on his own. But the White benefactors probably did see him as an affirmative action hire. Maybe he can only be comfortable in his own skin by denying that.

Go to this web address:

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-thomas3mar03,0,4638507.story?track=ntothtml