Not a whites-only club any more…
Decades ago when Clarence Thomas was first appointed to preside on the Supreme Court, he was asked if he’d ever been invited to join a whites-only club.
“The Supreme Court,” he replied, and what he stated was largely accurate because, with the exception of Thurgood Marshall, the Supreme Court had been an all-white and almost all-male society.
But that doesn’t describe the current Supreme Court. There are now 4 female judges and it includes two blacks and one Hispanic. In other words, it’s diverse at a time when Clarence Thomas appears befuddled by the meaning of the word “diversity”.
In fact, I believe, he’s being completely disingenuous to say, “I’ve heard the word diversity quite a few times and I don’t have a clue what it means.”
The question of diversity arose because the Supreme Court is being asked to rule on Affirmative Action. This has always been a sticky subject for Clarence Thomas because it’s very likely that he received the opportunity to attend College of the Holy Cross in Boston, in part due to affirmative action efforts on the part of of its Director who recruited a number of talented black young men to the previously white college. Then, of course, there was his admittance to Yale Law School.
Thomas can’t deny the boost that affirmative action gave to him but he is pained by the suggestion that he wouldn’t have been qualified for these institution or several other jobs without it. He despises the concept of any sort of “hand-out,” or “hand-up”.
Affirmative action, he believes, implies that blacks are inferior and whites are superior just because of their race. There’s nothing wrong with segregated schools, in his view, if they really are “separate but equal” which is to say that the students in them have access to up-to-date textbooks, well-equipped buildings, good science labs and good teachers. In other words, that black students receive all the resources that white students expect to receive. The idea that black students can only achieve if they’re in the same room as white students, he says, implies their inferiority. And he strongly repudiates that idea.
During his decades-long tenure at the Supreme Court, Thomas was often described as being a dumbbell — as in deaf and dumb — because he almost never spoke up during questioning or articulated his rulings. (However when he doesn’t speak, he writes. He’s written more rulings than almost any other judge serving on the court.)
Yet, in the present discussion on affirmative action, Thomas has engaged in the verbal questioning of “diversity” and its benefits. He recently asked the lawyer representing the plaintive, “I’d like you to tell me expressly when a parent sends a kid to college, they don’t necessarily send them there to have fun or feel good or anything like that. They send them there to learn physics of chemistry or whatever they’re studying.”
I wish I’d been in the room and had a chance to respond. First of all, parents send their colleges for a lot of different (diverse) reasons. One major reason, however, is to be exposed to different ideas and ways of thinking. That was true even when colleges were largely white. You still had students from all parts of the country, different classes and backgrounds and religions and even different countries. It was enlightening to chat with them in the cafeteria or the dorm and to hear their various points of view in the classroom.
But also, not all students attending college are studying physics or chemistry or mathematics — fields that are largely factually-based. Students also attend universities to study anthropology, foreign languages, literature, history, social sciences and philosophy — and all these subjects can be viewed through many different lenses. Thus students at diverse campuses profit from learning the widely different ways of seeing the material that’s being presented. They gain from having diverse professors as well. That’s what a university education is all about. It’s not about memorizing facts, it’s about broadening or opening up your mind.
Does Clarence Thomas really not understand that? I think he does — because when he attended Holy Cross he met many intelligent, aware, socially active black students from the north who introduced him to the thinking of Stokely Carmichael and Malcolm X and others — heady stuff that he embraced. And which he might never have been exposed to at a less diverse school in his home state of Georgia.
But in the days since college, Thomas has found it expedient to narrow, not broaden, his thinking. He’s increasingly adopted the tenets of the conservative Republican Party and the point of view of his wife, to the extent, that that it’s his sole way of seeing the world. Sad for anyone, but especially one who could have played such a large role in the positive growth and development of his own community. Instead he’s gone very far in the other direction.
