The review of the new book out on Clarence Thomas in the Washington Post yields these two interesting paragraphs:
If liberals often cast Thomas as a quisling, conservatives tend to cast him as someone who has achieved the American Dream by pulling himself up by his bootstraps. Thomas, a member of the Horatio Alger Association of Distinguished Americans, seems to find this narrative more congenial, but it has its own bite. This storyline assumes a meritocratic America free of racial prejudice -- an assumption the justice certainly does not hold.
Lost between these two competing stories is the tale of an individual, and that is the one brought to life by Merida and Fletcher, journalists at The Washington Post. Their biography deftly puts paid to both conventional narratives; after all, we do not expect Uncle Toms to have engaged in radical black student activism, nor do we expect Horatio Alger heroes to believe America is irredeemably racist. But that is too faint praise for Supreme Discomfort. By the end of the book, we see the injustice that stock narratives have done to a person who can charm those predisposed against him and win the lifetime loyalty of those whose minds are less made up. We're introduced to the many Thomases we have never seen: the RV-driving Thomas, the Ayn Rand-loving Thomas, the Catholic Thomas and others.
I understand that perfectly. While I'm not particularly fond of RVs I've loved Ayn Rand as much as any rational person and I very much dig Catholicism. And while it's true that much of what we know and think about Thomas revolves around a lot of old bitterness, he still is a mystery. Something about these revelations make me want to claim him. Oh that's dangerous.
In order to deal with Clarence Thomas properly, you have to undo a lot of particular notions about what a 'black man' is supposed to be. It just so happens that I have begun reading 'The Satanic Verses' and I am struck by the simple lack of resonance that one character in the book has in her self-pity as she says, "I'm a blackie". In my life I've never heard that sentence from anyone, but I can imagine that it has worlds of weight somewhere in India. So perhaps if I called him a 'blackie' instead of a black man it would provide just enough disonance for America take his life at face value. Except we don't know much about his life without reading a book that focuses so much on how America refuses to do that.
Whose soul is it anyway?
Over here at Cobb, I am quite aware of the risks one takes in claiming oneself as representative of some aspect of blackness. Blackness is a moving target. It is only having discovered the alternate hierarchy of conservative thought that I have been able to successfully disambiguate racial expectations from political expectations. I know at anytime, any arbitrary opinion might be taken seriously as 'black' even mine as a 'black Republican' or a 'black conservative'. Nonetheless I would be bold enough to suggest that an understanding of conservative thought is the key to black disambiguation, perhaps only way given the unanimity of contempt heaped on Thomas by his would-be soul mates. Just as Khalid Muhammad decries the loss of religion, language, culture as something which has left black people stranded and hopeless, Thomas has been excommunicated from the race for employing what seems like alien religion, language and culture - as if these were the elements of race or blackness.
But it does come down to racism and the battle against it, if any such matters are to be taken seriously. It is on that profoundly moral question that formed the tree upon which Thomas was given his high-tech lynching, specifically the branchs of respect for black women and support for Affirmative Action. But there lies the irony of much of black partisanship, and it is where I think I may find some common ground with Thomas.
You see if Thomas is to be maligned for his lack of support of Affirmative Action, the whipping is brought down on his head because as a black man, he's supposed to be leading the fight. Higgenbotham said:
"I have often pondered how it is that Justice Thomas, an African American, could be so insensitive to the plight of the powerless. Why is he no different, or probably worse, than many of the most conservative Supreme Court justices of this century? I can only think of one Supreme Court justice during this century who was worse than Justice Clarence Thomas: James McReynolds, a white supremacist who referred to blacks as 'niggers.' "
Thomas could simply claim to be a blackie and evade the question, but that wouldn't really suffice. The point that needs to be made, which is only implied by Thomas' default, is that if racism is an affront to humanity, why should the burden be born by blacks alone? To presume that only blacks are morally capable, or that only non-whites have any self-interest in fighting racism is to, ultimately enjoin a racialist agenda. That is to say the presumption that whitefolks will always be whitefolks and therefore always default to white supremacist convention as a political axiom of black partisans is self-defeating.
So you always have to go to religion, or politics, or culture, or law or some external, voluntary ethos to generate an anti-racist agenda. Thomas has obviously gone conservative. Where does that leave him? I don't know, but I know where conservatism leads me, and if I were to be so bold as to assume that mine and Clarence Thomas' black conservatism was similar I can explain the apparent paradox.
Pulling oneself up by the bootstraps is not a testament to the fairness of society or the absence of racism. It is a testament to the strength and determination of the individual who takes advantage of what he finds in this nation. If there wasn't enough room for black achievement of any sort, Denmark Vesey and Nat Turner would have had a lot more company.
As I've said before, for black Republicans at least, we are not cajoled by any racial agenda, and so because we are more self-sufficient, we don't expect one and we don't call for one. Only a fool would think that there is any ethnic patronage of that sort in the GOP. But we do expect fairness and we do expect moral rectitude. So we never expect to see any policy rewarding racism, and we expect that the values of individuals of all sorts will be anti-racist in this nation. That's enough. We don't need 'positive images' and we don't need class protection. And while I've been weekly supportive of Affirmative Action of particular sorts here, I have long been on the edge of conceding that Americans are too emotionally unstable to walk the fine ethical line of fair and balanced racial preferences. The clock is ticking on the suitability of Affirmative Action as a remedy. Its marginal utility gets slimmer as African Americans grow clout.
Isn't it funny that nobody has asked Barack Obama any hard questions about Affirmative Action? Maybe it's because he's a blackie, and because that's the kind of pass a poor boy from Georgia just doesn't get.
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