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'Beware of Elites Bearing Theories': Clarence Thomas on Race And Journal of Education & Social Policy Vol. 2, No. 1; March 2015 ‘Beware of Elites Bearing Theories’: Clarence Thomas on Race and Education William S. New, PhD Department of Education and Youth Studies Beloit College Beloit, WI 53511 Michael S. Merry, PhD Faculty of Social and Behavioral Sciences University of Amsterdam Amsterdam, The Netherlands Abstract No matter one's political loyalties, it seems worthwhile to take seriously Clarence Thomas’s ideas about education because over the past twenty-five years most have acquired the force of law. This article explains Thomas’ views on the legitimacy and efficacy of affirmative action as a remedy to educational segregation. It also addresses his views on integration/segregation and diversity, the developments of which are intimately tied to affirmative action. Each is related to ever-shifting definitions and deployments of the notion of colorblindness. Understanding Clarence Thomas with respect to education requires an examination of his biography, as paradigmatic of many black male experiences in the second half of the 20th century. The article argues that it is unproductive to claim that Thomas’ conservatism in the realm of racial politics is either irrational or exceptional. That does not equate, however, to championing Thomas’ positions on affirmative action, diversity, and integration. Keywords: supreme court, affirmative action, segregation, educational law, colorblindness "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." – Clarence Thomas, quoted by Juan Williams (1987) It would be fair to say that no black public figure in the past thirty years has been the target of more unapologetically racial slurs by liberals than Clarence Thomas. Film director Spike Lee offered that “Malcolm X, if he were alive today, would call Thomas a handkerchief head, a chicken-and-biscuit-eating Uncle Tom,” and writer June Jordan characterized Thomas as "virulent Oreo phenomenon" (Perazzo 2002). From Carl Rowan (1991), the noted Washington journalist, came this opinion: “The thing that bothers me about his appointment [to the Supreme Court] – if they had put David Duke on, I wouldn't scream as much because they would look at David Duke and reject him for what he is. If you gave Clarence Thomas a little flour on his face, you'd think you had David Duke talking.” The contempt these commentators feel for Thomas appears to derive from his response to the affirmative action policies of which he was a supposed beneficiary. This, along with the conservative company he keeps, is understood as a betrayal of blackness and of black people in general. More dispassionate proponents of affirmative action discount Thomas’ narrative of stigma and resistance on different grounds. Patricia Gurin (2004) suggests that the feelings expressed by Clarence Thomas and other like-minded “beneficiaries” of affirmative action policies are not representative. Hers is the dominant narrative in which minority students who are able to enroll in elite schools by virtue of affirmative action policies are grateful for the opportunities extended to them, and normally feel obligated to make sure that those who follow have equal opportunities. But there is no doubt that Clarence Thomas feels himself more the victim than the beneficiary of the affirmative actions that resulted in his admission to Yale Law School and the Supreme Court. He claims to have experienced the “racial preferences” he was shown as a form of social and psychological violence that deprived him of the pride of his own accomplishments and made him the object of racist scorn and ridicule among the very people he would most like to serve, that is, members of the black community. 62 ISSN 2375-0782 (Print) 2375-0790 (Online) © Center for Promoting Ideas, USA www.jespnet.com In language echoing civil rights cases from Plessyto Brown, he opposes racial preference and affirmative action programs because they “stamp minorities with a badge of inferiority and may cause them to develop dependencies or to adopt [the] attitude that they are ‘entitled’ to preferences” (Grutter v. Bollinger 539 U.S. 306, 373, 2003, Thomas concurring). Thomas’ autobiography (2007) recounts feelings of his own victimization and brutalization, about his despair and about his conversions and path toward healing. His rejection of integrationist discourse has been interpreted both as the cause of his conversion to the conservative cause, and as the substance of the oppression he feels he has experienced. Most aggravating to his critics is his position that affirmative action does more harm than good, permanently stigmatizing all blacks who attain conventional success, as undeserving (Kearney 2004; Turner 2005). Yet the perhaps radical notion of taking Clarence Thomas seriously – that is, not to reject his opinions or his personal history out of hand – has resulted in a growing literature (see Smith 1997; Dean 2004; Kearney 2004; K. Thomas, 2004; Onwuachi-Willig 2005a, 2005b; Turner 2005; Schraub 2007, for example) that situates him within a longer tradition of black political thought, and attempts to explain rather than excoriate the source and quality of his views. On practical grounds, it seems worthwhile to take the legal philosophy of Clarence Thomas seriously because most of the views and prescriptions he has expressed with regard to education during his almost twenty- five years on the bench have now acquired the force of law. He has been a most forceful and consistent spokesperson for a radical alternative to the previously dominant narrative of integrated, multicultural education. With that in mind, I aim to disambiguate Thomas’ views on the legitimacy and efficacy of affirmative action as a remedy to educational segregation, from the views of other conservative and liberal skeptics. I will also address his views on legal and everyday notions of integration/segregation and diversity, the development of which are intimately tied historically and conceptually to affirmative action. Each of these concepts, in turn, is tethered to the ever-shifting definitions and polemical deployments of the notion of colorblindness. Understanding the jurisprudence of Clarence Thomas with respect to education requires an examination of his biography, as paradigmatic in many respects of the black male experience in the second half of the 20th century. It will be important to counter the supposition of many of his detractors that the choice of conservatism in the realm of racial politics is either irrational or exceptional; that does not equate, however, to championing Thomas’ positions on affirmative action, diversity, and integration. Rather, our goal is to arrive at a fuller appreciation of how educational policy and law related to race have developed since the Brown decision in 1954. 1. Clarence Thomas and his Experience with Affirmative Action Born in 1948 in a rural black community in the heart of the Jim Crow South, Clarence Thomas’ early childhood was both idyllic and impoverished. The language of the Thomases was Gullah. At age seven, their house burned down and family moved to Savannah, where young Clarence attended a segregated public school, living with his maternal grandparents, who were relatively prosperous. Thomas began attending a nearly all-white Catholic school, worked in his grandfather's fuel oil business, and fell under the sway of his grandfather's strict philosophy of self-help and hard work. His grandfather, Myers Anderson, was the spiritual descendant of Booker T. Washington, and Thomas is the spiritual descendant of his grandfather, as suggested by the title of his autobiography, My Grandfather's Son. Raised in the Catholic Church, and in a parochial school, Thomas grew up apart from both the larger black and white communities of Savannah. He was an outstanding student, albeit one who never felt that he fit in, and was accepted to study at Conception Seminary College in Missouri. He remained there only for a year, though, repulsed by the overt racism he experienced. He then gained admittance to Holy Cross, where he taped a picture of Malcolm X to his wall, grew his hair into an Afro, and joined the civil rights struggles of the mid-1960s. 1.1 Yale Law School Clarence Thomas graduated from Holy Cross in 1971, was admitted to Yale Law School in the fall under the kind of quota-based affirmative action program struck down in Bakke, and graduated in 1974. Thomas’ experience at Yale did not result in a conversion to conservatism, but he did turn away from the black (leftist) radicalism of his undergraduate days. The most meaningful of these relationships were those with classmate and later UN representative, John Bolton, and with John Danforth, then the attorney general of Missouri, and later Republican Senator from Missouri. 63 Journal of Education & Social Policy Vol. 2, No. 1; March 2015 Thomas recounts a “fateful” conversation with Bolton on the subject of government intrusion into the private lives of individuals, which brought to his mind one of his grandfather's dicta: Going on public assistance “takes away your manhood ... You do that and they [the government] can ask you questions about your life that are none of their business” (Thomas 2007, 75). Thomas also became skeptical of the wisdom of bussing to achieve desegregation, and of the racial arguments for the disproportionate failures of black law students to pass the bar exam, a failure he felt was due mostly to poor education. Thomas was by no means alone among blacks of that period in questioning the equation of ending de jure school segregation and pursuing integration at all costs. His earlier hero, Malcolm X, advocated separate schools for black children in the interest of their healthy racial and spiritual development, and advocated a black self-help philosophy in line with that of Booker T.
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