Someone, somewhere, somehow must tell Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas to stop looking at the world through his own narrow prism.
New York Times columnist Charles Blow’s essay takes the justice to task over some remarks he made about what he described as an undeserved fixation about race in America.
Thomas, of course, is the second African-American picked to serve on the nation’s highest court. President George H.W. Bush appointed him in 1991 after the first black justice, Thurgood Marshall, retired from the bench. President Bush called Thomas “the most qualified man” in the country to take the seat, which has turned out to be more than a bit of an overstatement.
Thomas’s road to the court was strewn with obstacles. He faced charges of sexual harassment that surfaced many years after the alleged incidents occurred — and during his confirmation hearings before the Senate.
Do you remember his reference to the “high-tech lynching” he said was occurring in an effort to scuttle his nomination?
He now has said that growing up in Savannah, Ga., he didn’t feel racism and asserts, astoundingly, that it somehow wasn’t a problem in the South.
Umm, yes it was, sir.
Here is what he told a university audience on Tuesday:
“My sadness is that we are probably today more race- and difference-conscious than I was in the 1960s when I went to school. To my knowledge, I was the first black kid in Savannah, Ga., to go to a white school. Rarely did the issue of race come up.
“Now, name a day it doesn’t come up. Differences in race, differences in sex, somebody doesn’t look at you right, somebody says something. Everybody is sensitive. If I had been as sensitive as that in the 1960s, I’d still be in Savannah. Every person in this room has endured a slight. Every person. Somebody has said something that has hurt their feelings or did something to them — left them out.”
Then he said this: “The worst I have been treated was by northern liberal elites. The absolute worst I have ever been treated.”
That all might have been true in young Clarence’s case. Who am I to dispute someone else’s personal recollection?
That doesn’t translate to others’ experiences. Many millions of African-Americans have endured so much hatred and bigotry on the basis of their race that it defies my imagination to believe that one prominent black American could be so dismissive of the pain brought to so many others.
As Blow asks in his column, Thomas either suffers from serious amnesia or is “contemporaneously oblivious.”
The one justice who never speaks during oral arguments before the Supreme Court has spoken out now. He’s said a mouthful.
Unbelievable.