Cheap Shot At Clarence Thomas

Tahnkfully, Justice Clarence Thomas has a thick enough skin to ignore these kinds of cheap shots taken at his expense. Ellen Goodman is the latest to refer to the Justice as a traitor to his race. Oh, she doesn't use those terms, but rather insinuates it in a slithery sort of way:

The justice is now talked about even less in terms of race -- less as the profligate successor to Thurgood Marshall than as a certified member of the court's right wing. Color him conservative.(emphasis added)

Now I am sure Clarence Thomas is just fine with the description of conservative, but Goodman says it like it is an insult--a black conservative--my goodness--the world is going to end.

Goodman describes Thomas's now familiar history: racially segregated high schools, attendence at Holy Cross as an undergrad on a "minority scholarship," attendence at Yale law school which had a program of set asides for minorities, a stack of rejection letters from law firms because he was black and the "high-tech lynching" of his confirmation hearing. No one would deny that Thomas has made the most of his opportunities, but no one, including Goodman, wonders if he would have earned these opportunities on his own. It would be the height of arrogance and stupidity to not take advantage of the opportunities.

But what Goodman calls hypocrisy in Thomas, I find truthful. Of all the members of the Court, only Thomas has any idea of the soft bigotry that resulted from affirmative action. Yes, he went to Yale, but even with those stellar credentials, top law firms still thought of him as an affirmative action baby--not a real lawyer. If Thomas wants to avoid that same bigotry for children going forward, he should be applauded as a chamption of civil rights for everyone, not hypocritical traitor to his race.

Finally, Goodman, in her last paragraph seems to give the impression that the Court's recent drift to the right is a result of Thomas' sitting "on the far right edge."

So when the liberal agenda runs aground on the shoals of individual rights it so championed for decades, the only person to blame is Clarence Thomas--traitor to the "black cause."