And those 'opportunities' would have been more readily realized in a tangible sense, and there would have been far more of them had the degree not been tainted as substandard, thanks to Yale's affirmative action crimes.
Similar accounts as Justice Thomas' have been made by black engineers and people trained in a variety of schools....so very many have said the same thing, that affirmative action had reduced the value of their hard work and achievement.
My Banker Boss in LA told me that when he was promoted to President in Chicago they also gave him a tutor to go with it because he was black. That’s messed up. (he’s 70 now)
I have a Yale law degree and all I got was this lousy t shirt and a seat on the US Supreme Court.
It seems a bit disengenuous for the other affirmative graduates to lay claim to how well “they” have done as if affimative actions stopped at graduation.
It would seem that at the their time of graduation there were few black Yale candidates to from which corporate affirmative action programs to choose.
Thomas did more than Okay, he did beautifully and he is 100% right about race, gender, and affirmative action. I know a half dozen men and women who would never have qualified had they not been part of the affirmative action and DC is full of non-qualified people holding positions they have no right to, basically ripping off the public….if government were cut in half today, no one would be missed.
OM...Clarence Thomas is an outstanding man. Look at how the left did an injustice to him.
You can always judge an article by whom they give the last quote to. Enough said.
I have a Latino attorney friend who has had to fight this battle repeatedly over the years. He HATES affirmative action (and would have easily been accepted at his law school without it — speaks several languages fluently, is brilliant, extremely good public speaker, etc., etc.) His final solution: start his own practice, where he is doing VERY well.
On the other hand, both he and I have worked with sub-standard minority attorneys and engineers who were admitted to their schools and even at least partially got their degree purely because of their race. Those people REALLY tick my buddy off, because THEY are the reason he has had to put up with this invisible (and sometimes not-so-invisible) racism.
In sum, affirmative action has MAJOR negative consequences and helps to keep racism alive. Unitended consequences, or completely intended by the libs (i.e., keep the race issue alive as an issue)? Hard to tell, probably a bit of both...
The major oil companies struggled to find qualified Blacks to promote under affirmative action. It would not have been surprising for a young, bright, highly educated Black man to rise much faster than his white counter part.
I don’t think that Judge Thomas’ critics here have actually read his book in its entirety.
Some classmates say Thomas — who was raised poor in Georgia and stood out on campus in his overalls and heavy black boots — faced a tougher transition than black students who came from middle-class or privileged backgrounds.
________________________
There probably is some truth to this. My father, who was white, came from a Southern family, middle class, but still too poor to send him to college. He went to Berea College in Kentucky which offers full tuition scholarships to all its students. When he got to the University of Chicago for graduate school, he felt decidedly provinicial, and that his education hadn’t been up to his classmates’.
I’m almost finished with his book now. It has been quite an eye-opener. Among many other revelations is the poverty he had to struggle with well into his career.
The Gen Y-ers would be shocked, shocked, to learn that (among other things) he was still paying off his student loans into his early time as Supreme Court justice.
He did a stretch as a corporate counsel for Monsanto in the seventies after his days working for then Attorney-General John Danforth in Missouri. He found it unbearably boring and routine and dared to slip out of the “golden handcuffs” to come to Washington to work for EEOC under Reagan. He had to live like a grad student for years to put his son through private school.
This guy needs to leave the status of victim, that he clings to as a minority, by becoming an American.
Affirmative action has the effect of discounting the efforts of the achievers...while enriching the non-achievers.
It cheats blacks like Thomas...in order to benefit blacks like Bob Herbert.
The same old journalistic "some say".
How about "Some of his classmates that never made to the Supreme Court..."
So they jumped on him like the Duke 88 did on the lacrosse players, assuming he was guilty. In his case, because they opposed a conservative on the Supreme Court. In the Duke 88, it was because the alleged perps were white and the alleged victim was black. Both times it was liberal knee jerk response.
I'm glad he didn't give Yale a portrait. The school doesn't deserve to trade on Justice Thomas's good name for their own purposes.
With that bit of hyperbole, I quit reading. Why not simply "a riot?" How about "3 people protesting on a corner?" Nope. We almost had a "large-scale" riot.