Clarence Thomas Is Not Uncle Ruckus. He's More Complicated Than That
He’s not the first Supreme Court Justice to accept lavish gifts from rich donors. So why all the fuss?
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When news broke of the expensive gifts Clarence Thomas has received over the past 20 years from billionaire Harlan Crow, I set out to skewer the justice in a withering satire. I chose the word ruckus for the headline on purpose. I wanted to link Thomas linguistically to the self-hating Uncle Ruckus character in Boondocks.
I’ve always thought the appointment of Thomas to the Supreme Court was a cynical act through which the first President Bush sought to thumb his nose at African Americans.
What better way to thwart Black progress than to replace a giant of Civil Rights like Thurgood Marshall with a man like Thomas? “Y’all want a Black man on the Supreme Court? How about one who thinks affirmative action is a bad idea?”
Mesmerized
During his confirmation hearings, I was glued to the TV as Anita Hill accused Thomas of sexual harassment when she worked for him at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.
I was disgusted that the fate of the Supreme Court had come down to he said/she said testimony about pubic hair on Coca-Cola cans. I was also embarrassed that these sordid allegations involved two African Americans whose education and professional achievements had failed to extricate them from bordello nastiness and trashy ghetto stereotypes.
The spectacle seemed to confirm racist ideas found on white supremacist social media to this very day. The belief that Blacks are “rabid beasts” whose lower-chakra sexuality trumps high-minded aspiration every time.
Why put money into educating these people?
Why allow them to attend schools with white children? Why support programs to level the playing field? Why waste taxpayer dollars on efforts to correct the injustices of slavery if this is what they do when we give them the keys to the office?
To this day, I do not believe Anita Hill was lying. But I also believe Clarence Thomas was right about one important aspect of those confirmation hearings — their racism.
My heart went out to him during his “high-tech lynching” response. He called out the Senate Judiciary Committee, composed entirely of middle-aged white men, for taking the allegations against him public when those same charges could have been dealt with discreetly in a closed-door session.
In the process, Thomas wrote the playbook that allowed Brett Kavanaugh to overcome sexual harassment allegations nearly three decades later.
But Kavanaugh did not have to think about race as Thomas did. For Clarence Thomas, as it is for all Black men, race is the inescapable bugaboo of existence within America’s racial hierarchy.
But for Thomas, I believe it is worse.
Because Clarence Thomas is not just Black, he is black Black. Born in 1948 and raised in rural Georgia, he experienced the cruelest racism from other Black kids, who routinely referred to him as ABC — America’s Blackest Child.
Colorism and intra-racial prejudice were rampant during those days when Black progress seemed to depend on light-skinned “bridge Negroes” (like Harry Belafonte) whom whites might accept more readily than phenotypical African Americans like Thomas.
Time after time, Thomas had negative experiences that established his attitudes regarding race. As he stated during a 1987 profile in The Atlantic,
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.
This belief turned him into a Black nationalist at first, who said in that same Atlantic profile that “the whole push to assimilate simply does not make sense to me.”
Race has shaped Clarence Thomas
It has turned him into an embittered and cynical old man who now appears to be on the take — out to make liberals miserable because they made his life miserable. For 32 years, he’s been out to get the NAACP for not supporting his nomination by doing his best to roll back nearly 60 years of civil rights.
Although he benefited from affirmative action, he’s against it. He’s also against voting rights, privacy, gun control, and abortion. But he’s really against all those Blacks who rejected him as a kid. He is the hurt child writ large, carrying an inner wound that will never heal, his every achievement a futile effort to compensate for it.
Without the protection of the Supreme Court and wealthy friends, he knows he could find himself under the knee of a Derek Chauvin or be stopped by a white cop for driving while Black — just like I’ve been.
That is why I changed my mind about satirizing him.
Do I think he should have disclosed the gifts he and his wife have received? Yes. Do I think he should have recused himself from cases that smacked of conflict of interest because his wife was involved? Yes. Do I disagree with virtually every position he has taken since joining the court? Absolutely.
But I question the “ruckus” that surrounds him as the avalanche of negative news begins to look like a second high-tech lynching.
Antonin Scalia, et al
As Senator Sheldon Whitehouse stated during a May 2nd session of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Justice Antonin Scalia took more than seven dozen undisclosed hunting vacations.
The trips were orchestrated and systematized. Some intermediary would ask a resort owner to extend a personal invitation to Scalia even if the owner was someone the justice had never met.
Appointed by Ronald Reagan in 1986, Scalia became an architect of the originalist-textualist movement in American law. He remained on the high court for 30 years. But no one complained about his free trips.
Justices Rehnquist, Stevens, and Kennedy received honorary memberships at the Washington Golf and Country Club. Scalia even received a free ride on Air Force II while a case involving Vice-President Dick Cheney was pending before the Supreme Court.
As conservative defenders of Thomas have pointed out, Justice Sonia Sotomayor did not recuse herself from a 2013 case involving her publisher Random House, which paid her a $3-million-dollar advance for her book.
What sets Thomas apart from these other justices is this:
He has accepted more gifts than anyone else. And he is Black.
After the Dobbs decision overturned Roe v. Wade, Twitter was flooded with racist tweets referring to Thomas as Uncle Clarence, Uncle Tom, and the N-word. It was as if these people wanted to call him a n*gger all along.
All of which supports something Thomas has believed ever since his days as a Black nationalist. That all whites are racist. Southern and Northern, liberal and conservative, rural and urban — all are racist.
As Corey Robin observes in his 2019 book, The Enigma of Clarence Thomas:
On the Court, Thomas continues to believe — and to argue, in opinion after opinion — that race matters; that racism is a constant, ineradicable feature of American life; and that the only hope for black people lies within themselves, not as individuals but as a separate community with separate institutions, apart from white people.
All Thomas wants is for folks to be honest. So let’s do that. The next time you come across someone who claims to be outraged over the gifts Clarence and Ginni Thomas have received, ask them this question: Is it really because he failed to disclose them? Or because he’s Black—and conservative? And tell them before they answer to be honest.
©2023 Andrew Jazprose Hill
Thanks for reading.
NOTE 3: Here's a link to the new Frontline documentary about Thomas, which will begin airing on PBS on Tuesday, May 9th. CLARENCE & GINNI THOMAS: Politics, Power, and the Supreme Court https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/documentary/clarence-and-ginni-thomas/
NOTE 2: Perhaps I should have mentioned this in the essay itself, but after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade last year, nobody took to Twitter to hurl racial epithets at Justice Alito, whose background is Italian. But Thomas, on the other hand, was racially singled out and targeted as the social media platform was flooded with the N-word. I don't like Thomas as a judge, but I really think the racial dimension and double standard to the current "expensive gifts" story needs to be called out.