It must be a terrible, awful burden to be Clarence Thomas -- condemned to a lifetime appointment on the United States Supreme Court, nowhere to hide from the people who expect you to think the way black men are supposed to think, nowhere to hide from the lies of the media and the politicians.
Thomas rarely gives interviews because the media is full of evil, black-hearted liars out to destroy him, you see. But he made an exception and granted an interview to Diane Brady of Business Week because the magazine was doing a story about his Jesuit mentor, Rev. John Brooks, at the College of the Holy Cross College in Massachussetts.
It is an extraordinary interview, so much so that Business Week just printed it in full. It needs to be read in full. The Los Angeles Times wrote a story about the interview that hits the highlights but gives a completely different impression of Thomas.
The interview starts off on a note of hostility:
Thank you for meeting with me.
Father Brooks asked me to do it. One of the reasons I don't do media interviews is, in the past, the media often has its own script. One reason these stories are never told is that they are contrary to the script that people play by. The media, unfortunately, have been universally untrustworthy because they have their own notions of what I should think or I should do.
Brady says "thank you for meeting with me" and Thomas launches into a diatribe about the media. He makes it known he is only talking because Brooks asked him to.
Thomas makes it clear that Brooks was the difference in his life, that Brooks nurtured him and other black students, that he was a confused and disoriented young black kid from rural Georgia suddenly thrust into a Catholic, overwhelmingly white New England school at the end of the 1960s.
Were you angry?
Sure. I was upset. I was upset with a lot of things. You get there and you sort it out. Look at that neighborhood there [Thomas points to a photo of a desolate strip in Georgia]. How do you go from that to Holy Cross? How do you do it? That's why some of us were really concerned about throwing some of these kids into those environments without thinking because you have a theory. That's the neighborhood I lived in before I went to live with my grandparents. Doesn't look very good, does it?
There were a lot of changes to absorb. Just to think about it was fatiguing. It's still really fatiguing. It's also fatiguing that people assume we all showed up the same. A friend of mine sent me that print there. [A sketch of an African American man, draped over a desk with his hands extended toward the floor.] He has since passed away. He thought it captured my life.
Does it?
Oh yeah. That's why I keep it there. Look at the hand. Look at the exhaustion.
What sort of exhaustion?
Everything. Mental. Physical. Spiritual. Just constant change. You just want to slow down. You see people take a walk and you want to, too.
Fifteen-plus years on the nation's highest court as Antonin Scalia's sockpuppet, 15-plus years in self-imposed isolation from the lies of the media and all the people who are out to get him. It has taken its toll, apparently.
And he still bristles at the notion that he ever benefitted from affirmative action.
Father Brooks made a point of trying to recruit a lot more African Americans to campus in the months before you came. Do you think that recruitment drive helped you?
Oh no. I was going to go home to Savannah when a nun suggested Holy Cross. That's how I wound up there. Your industry has suggested that we were all recruited. That's a lie. Really, it's a lie. I don't mean a mistake. It's a lie.
In the middle of that diatribe, Thomas does make some good points. He is quite passionate in condemning the tendency by many whites to treat blacks as a monolithic bloc that acts and thinks the same instead of as the individuals they are.
I've thought a lot about these things, and I've spent the bulk of my life, beating my head against a wall, trying to get people to see that they can have their grand theories but, in the end, you can't impose them on other people's kids. How many kids do you have? They're different, aren't they? If your kids are different—and they're all yours—what about just some kids who happen to be different shades of black, different degrees of Negro? They're all from different family settings—some two parents, some no parents, some raised by grandparents. Come on. How can you just all of a sudden treat them as all the same?
Were you treated the same?
There was no requirement that we all be the same. There were faddish things, like you wear an Afro. Father Time takes care of the Afro. Holy Cross never once required us to be anything other than ourselves and good people.
Doesn't every college want that?
Oh no. I think there are different points of views that are not acceptable. I go around this country and the poor kids who want to dissent from a prevailing point of view have no room. There's no room for them.
Because of political correctness?
Oh yeah. Come on, that's obvious. You don't even have to ask. That's obvious. Otherwise, there are people who have set notions of what blacks should think. But I rejected that years ago. I rejected that back when I was considered radical.
And that, I think, is what drives Thomas' anger, even more so than Anita Hill -- the idea that people want to put him in a box, that people assume that because he is black his political and legal views should conform to the way society expects blacks to think. He wants to be a right-wing ideologue but society expects blacks to reject that. If he were white, he wouldn't be considered a traitor to his race.
He has a point. In America you have the God-given right to be a member of the right-wing lunatic fringe. You have the right to reject the box that your ethnicity or your religion or your economic class puts you in and strike out on your own -- even if it leads you to the dark side.
But if you do that, you can't expect it to be easy. And you can't expect others to automatically understand. From the interview, Thomas acknowledges that it is hard. What he fails to appreciate is that others are not going to understand you unless you make them understand you.
To a degree, I can empathize. We all struggle during our lives against the ridiculous expectations and absurd generalizations that others have of us. Some of us overcome it. Some of us reach an accommodation with it that allows us to live our lives. And some of us become bitter and exhausted by the struggle.
Clarence Thomas never overcame it. And for a man who is 58 years old and may be on the court for another 20 or 30 years, that's a tragedy the rest of us will have to endure as well.