Posted on 05/12/2003 6:29:38 AM PDT by sjersey
Even now, after nearly a dozen years on the Supreme Court, Clarence Thomas still has a rebellious streak and a will to speak his mind.
In a rare and wide-ranging interview, Thomas likened African Americans' overwhelming support for the Democratic Party to the old era of segregation in the South.
"I remember when I was down in Georgia [as a youth], people were very comfortable with the idea that we should be in certain parts of town, and now we have become very comfortable with the view that we should only be thinking certain things," he said.
But Thomas maintains that political change, if it occurs, will come at a price.
"There would be many, many more [black Republicans] if the price weren't so high," Thomas said, discussing the isolation that some black conservatives feel in the face of overwhelming black support for the Democratic Party. "The price right now is that so many people are quick to criticize.
"One day someone is going to look back and say, 'What were these people doing?' I don't understand why it is so acceptable that there is some lockstep approach to these things."
Ever since his bruising and still-controversial Senate confirmation hearings in 1991, Thomas has been a mostly silent figure on the bench, communicating his thoughts through opinions and occasional speeches.
His interview with The Inquirer was for a profile of his old friend Larry D. Thompson, the U.S. deputy attorney general and himself an African American conservative. But the conversation covered a number of other subjects as well.
He struck a poignant note when he hinted that, despite having reached a professional pinnacle with his appointment to the Supreme Court, he might never be a role model for young people because of the controversy of his confirmation hearings. In those hearings, a former aide, Anita Hill, accused him of sexual harassment, although the charges were never proved.
"They may have pounded me too much," Thomas said.
Black conservatives have long been at odds with African American leaders because of the conservatives' allegiance to the Republican Party, which many black people view with suspicion. Rep. Elijah Cummings (D., Md.), chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus, says that is because many African Americans see the Republican Party and conservative causes as hostile to policies - affecting taxes, health care and other issues - that would benefit them.
"He [Thomas] has to understand why there is this criticism" of black Republicans and conservatives, Cummings said. "What Republicans do over and over again is cut away at the rights of middle-class people, many of them African American people. If the Republican Party truly was about opening its doors to the masses of African American people, not just a few," then the party might have more acceptance among black voters.
Thomas insisted in the interview that criticism had not fazed him. If anything, the political hurly-burly that surrounds his right-of-center ideas seems to have strengthened his conviction that he's on the correct course.
Thomas quickly established himself as one of the court's most conservative members after taking office on Oct. 23, 1991. But far from becoming a mere acolyte of the forceful and persuasive Antonin Scalia, the court's leading conservative, Thomas has found his own style, interpreting legal issues through the lens of historical research and the writings of the drafters of the Constitution.
"Justice Thomas' career on the bench is sort of like the trajectory of President Bush," said David J. Garrow, a professor at Emory University Law School. "You may not agree with them, but you have to acknowledge that they are doing a whole lot better job than was predicted when they took office."
Added Garrow, Thomas "is not someone following Scalia like a pet poodle."
In the interview, Thomas steered clear of legal questions and cases before the court, sticking to political and philosophical themes.
When asked whether the intense criticism of his legal views by liberal activists was disturbing to him, Thomas quickly replied: "Not for me it isn't; I really don't care."
The Republican Party has long sought to make inroads in the black vote, and George Bush's narrow Electoral College victory in 2000 provided ample evidence as to why. But according to David Bositis, an analyst at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, a Washington think tank that focuses on issues affecting African Americans, Republicans are hampered because the party's leadership is from the South, and because many black voters mistrust conservative policies.
"It's not easy being a black conservative," Bositis says. "Most black conservatives would like to be more accepted by the African American establishment and the African American community. It would make them very, very happy. Much happier than being accepted by [House Majority Leader] Tom DeLay."
Thomas spent the early part of his career as a political independent in Missouri, where he worked for a time with John Ashcroft, when both were lawyers in the state Attorney General's Office. It was in Missouri that he became friendly with Thompson, when the two worked together on the legal staff at Monsanto Co., and with Alfonso Jackson, now deputy secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development.
In 1980, Thomas and Thompson attended a conference in San Francisco that was to become a central event in their lives and those of many other black conservatives. Organized by Thomas Sowell, a leading black conservative thinker, dozens of African Americans with backgrounds in the law, government and higher education met to share strategies for promoting black advancement with a conservative spin. Participants in the Fairmont Conference, as it came to be known, roundly criticized school busing, welfare and the minimum wage.
Today, Thomas bristles at the idea, advanced by some, that black conservatives are opportunists, throwing in their lot with Republicans for the prospect of quick career advancement.
Life as a black conservative, he suggested, can be too painful to make such a calculating approach worthwhile.
"What does it mean to sell out?" Thomas asked. "It was difficult for me to go to work for a Republican [in the Missouri Attorney General's Office]. I was born and raised a Democrat, but to go and do it and be in the Attorney General's Office, that meant [to some people] keeping blacks in jail."
Throughout, he contended that the pressure he feels to conform will never change his views.
"If the price to be treated better is to be dishonest, that is a Faustian bargain to me," he said.
It's not just African Americans. It is a whole mix of people who still find that the Democrats give them hope but you can not explain to them that its is just hype that never pans out. I believe it to be a class of people who never get out of that hype.
Thomas' liberal critics are entitled to their opinions. But as a USSC justice, Thomas' opinions are all that really matter.
Besides, if his critics were censored they'd protest by posing nude on some magasine cover. We really, really don't need that. <|:)~
I like the sound of that....: )
Well, we white middle class people must be dumb sh*ts, then, to keep supporting Republicans who are cutting away our rights. BTW, what is a middle class right?
Now I'm hearing that the problem is that the Middle Class in America is getting a raw deal from the Republicans and, since so many blacks are in the Middle Class, this is why there are few black Conservatives.
Welfare reform has pushed the poor into the work society and restored to them the idea each has value through individual work and effort. It also encourages family life as a married couple get ahead faster than single moms. Children benefit as an intact family looks out for kids much better than mama's boyfriends ever did.
This needs to start being OUR reaction to everything the leftist racebaiters say from which they have come to expect a predictable, guilt-driven response.
Now I'm hearing that the problem is that the Middle Class in America is getting a raw deal from the Republicans and, since so many blacks are in the Middle Class, this is why there are few black Conservatives.
This is a tactic of the Congressional Black Caucus that few people catch. When any change, let alone cut, is made to a program involving the poor, they howl bloody murder and accuse white Conservatives of doing it for racist reasons. But let someone characterize blacks as being on welfare or some other program for the poor, and they howl racism for stereotyping blacks as being poor.
I'm sure that's true and I do admire the courage shown by outspoken black conservatives, however, until blacks drop the hyphenation, they will continue to be black first, and Americans second. Until they break free of the herd mentality that keeps them dependent on on the decisions and provisions made by others, they continue to serve on the democRAT plantation, agreeing that they lack the ability or the initiative to do otherwise. And until they start questioning the lies they are fed by the spokesmen of the black KKK NAACP, they will continue to be hapless pawns in a destructive game of power. God bless those who dare to embrace what it is rightfully theirs and who, with the courage of their convictions, challenge others to do the same.
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