There had been six Supreme Court justices who voted to overturn Roe v. Wade final week. The majority opinion was authored by Justice Samuel Alito. However, within the aftermath of the ruling, there was an intense and explicit focus on a distinct justice: Clarence Thomas.
Soon after the court docket handed down its determination, some pro-choice advocates started hurling outrageous and overtly racist remarks in Thomas’ course (together with liberal evocations of the “N-word” on Twitter) — usually to the acclaim of another left-aligned whites.
Thomas’ embrace of the Republican Party is consonant with a deep distrust of white liberals, the establishments they management and the insurance policies they attempt to advance within the identify of “social justice.”
The remarks had been so ubiquitous that “Uncle Clarence” started trending on Twitter, a reference to the eponymous character of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” who has emerged as a symbol of Black males who’re too subservient to whites.
In observe, the time period is primarily deployed in opposition to Black individuals who strike positions that elite liberals discover distasteful. For occasion, “Uncle Tim” previously trended on Twitter after Black Republican Sen. Tim Scott’s rebuttal of President Joe Biden’s inaugural deal with to a joint session of Congress.
Then once more, in different instances, minorities who violate the preferences and sensibilities of liberals are actually declared to be white as an alternative. At least insofar as Thomas and Scott are branded as race-traitors, critics nonetheless acknowledge their race.
However, there’s a deep irony in characterizing Thomas as an “Uncle Tom” (or worse) on condition that, previous to pursuing public service, he identified with Black nationalism. He is at present married to a white lady and has aligned with the GOP. However, as political theorist Corey Robin has proven in his ebook “The Enigma of Clarence Thomas,” his views on race and racial points have remained extremely constant over the course of his life.
Indeed, Thomas’ embrace of the Republican Party is consonant with a deep distrust of white liberals, the establishments they management and the insurance policies they attempt to advance within the identify of “social justice.”
This distrust was broadly shared amongst Black activists of his era — and is in line with Thomas’ Supreme Court selections, together with overturning Roe. If something, the racialized attacks many liberals directed at Thomas within the wake of the Dobbs v. Jackson ruling verify the pessimistic view of race relations that prevailed amongst lots of the Black thinkers who formed Thomas’ worldview and is exhibited by Thomas himself.
For occasion, Thomas was deeply inspired by Malcolm X. He had a poster of Malcolm X that hung in his dorm room. He memorized lots of his speeches by coronary heart, and he continues to evoke him continuously to today.
It was Malcolm X, in fact, who famously declared that, “In this deceitful American game of power politics, the Negros (i.e. the race problem, the integration and civil rights issues) are nothing but tools, used by one group of whites called Liberals against another group of whites called Conservatives, either to get into power or to remain in power.”
He argued that white liberals and white conservatives differ “only in one way: the liberal is more deceitful than the conservative. The liberal is more hypocritical than the conservative. Both want power, but the white liberal is the one who has perfected the art of posing as the Negro’s friend and benefactor.” He continued, “By winning the friendship, allegiance and support of the Negro, the white liberal is able to use the Negro as a pawn or a tool.”
A 2019 New Yorker profile reported that Thomas also supported Black Panther chief Kathleen Cleaver and Communist Party member Angela Davis, each of whom had been needed by police.
“When he was asked at his confirmation hearings what he majored in, Thomas said, ‘English literature.’ When he was asked what he minored in, he said, ‘protest,’” the article notes, declaring that his first go to to Washington was to march in opposition to the Vietnam War and the final rally he went to demanded the discharge of two Black Panthers. “I was never a liberal,” the article quotes him as saying at a chat in 1996. “I was a radical.”
Thomas appears to have been put on this path by the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. King had superior a very optimistic view of white liberals and cross-racial advocacy. However, within the months main as much as his dying, even he was compelled to concede that “Negros have proceeded from a premise that equality means what it says, and they have taken white America at their word when they talked of it as an objective.”
In distinction, he wrote, most whites “proceed from a premise that equality is a loose expression for improvement. White America is not even psychologically organized to close the gap — essentially, it seeks only to make it less painful and less obvious but in most respects to retain it. Most abrasions between Negros and white liberals arise from this fact.”
The political theorist Robin notes that, within the aftermath of King’s assassination, which occurred when he was a scholar at Holy Cross in Worcester, “by his own report, Thomas has a realization that nobody is going to do anything for black people. And by nobody, he means white liberals and white leftists.”
By the time Thomas arrived at Yale Law School, he was militant on racial issues and more-or-less totally disillusioned with mainstream liberalism. Hillary Clinton, who overlapped with him within the early ’70s, lately declared that so long as she has identified Thomas, he’s at all times been crammed with “grievance,” “anger” and “resentment.” Unsaid, however crucial context: These had been emotions Thomas displayed towards white liberals specifically (like Clinton herself), who dominated Yale on the time, and who proceed to dominate elite areas at the moment.
Thomas noted in a latest interview that individuals repeatedly assume he has difficulties round different Black individuals by advantage of his politics. “It’s just the opposite,” he declared. “The only people with whom I’ve had difficulties are white, liberal elites who consider themselves the anointed and us the benighted … I have never had issues with members of my race.”
In truth, there have been many outstanding Black intellectuals and leaders whose Black nationalist-inflected distrust of white liberals in the end led them to conservativism. For Thomas, it was the work of Black economist Thomas Sowell that in the end helped him channel his misgivings towards “white saviors” right into a coherent, right-aligned political philosophy.
There is a deep irony in characterizing Thomas as an “Uncle Tom” (or worse) on condition that, previous to pursuing public service, he recognized with Black nationalism.
However, Black nationalist impulses continue to influence his rulings and judicial philosophy. For occasion, core to Thomas’ thinking, per Robin, is “a belief in Black self-defense.” This dedication undergirds Thomas’ staunch help for the Second Amendment. It additionally performs a task in his opposition to abortion.
Thomas has expressed repeatedly that his aversion to abortion is significantly informed by its deep and longstanding ties to racial eugenics packages. It needs to be famous that these eugenics initiatives had been pushed heavily by white liberals of the time, additionally within the identify of serving to the marginalized and deprived. Thomas has no belief in comparable social justice rhetoric being deployed by abortion rights advocates at the moment.
Instead, the reactions many modern liberals have directed towards Thomas for diverging from their most well-liked insurance policies on abortion — together with an unabashed embrace of racial epithets and slurs, within the identify of social justice advocacy no much less! — appear to be a transparent vindication of Black nationalists’ longstanding suspicion that, at backside, many self-described “allies” are themselves deeply racist and easily use the Black trigger as a handy automobile for shoring up their very own energy and affect.
As cultural critic Yasmin Nair put it in a tweet on Saturday, “Clarence Thomas is not your ‘I can be a racist’ card, people.” This is one thing that ought to by no means even need to be stated to these ostensibly dedicated to social justice. The incontrovertible fact that it apparently should be stated is telling.
