Just started reading this thread today and I'm not trying to be a History Nazi here but Thurgood Marshall was the first African American on the Supreme Court.
True, Clarence Thomas was the second African American
appointed to the Supreme court but Joe's point was about
liberal racism.
Clarence Thomas in his memoir, 'My Grandfather's Son."
Cliff note version for the attention span challenges.
Merely because I was black, it seemed, I was supposed to
listen to Hugh Masekela instead of Carole King, just as I was
expected to be a radical, not a conservative.
I no longer
cared to play that game. Some of my friends accused me
of being contrary for its own sake, but I knew there was
more to my growing skepticism than mere stubbornness.
The black people I knew came from different places and
backgrounds -- social, economic, even ethnic --
yet
the color of our skin was somehow supposed to make
us identical in spite of our differences. I didn't buy it.
Of course we had all experienced racism in one way or
another, but did that mean we had to think alike? -- P.62
I thought of what Daddy had said when I asked him why
he'd never gone on public assistance.
"Because they
take away your manhood," he said. -- P.73
I was bitter towards the white bigots whom I held responsible
for the unjust treatment of blacks, but
even more bitter
towards the ostensibly unprejudiced whites who pretended
to side with black people while using them to further their
own political and social ends, turning against them
when
it suited their purposes. At least southerners were up front
about their bigotry: you knew exactly where they were coming
from, just like the Georgia rattlesnakes that always let you
know when they were ready to strike.
Not so the paternalistic
big city whites who offered you a helping hand so long as
you were careful to agree with them, but slapped you down
if you started acting as if you didn't know your place.
-- P.75
It was in Boston, not Georgia, that a white man had called
me n*gger for the first time. I'd already found New England
to be far less honest about race than the South, and I bristled
at the self-righteous sanctimony with which so many of the
northerners at Yale glibly discussed the South's racial problems.
-- P.78
It was disconcerting to watch other people using food stamps
to buy whatever they pleased, but I knew our financial problems
would someday come to an end, whereas theirs were likely to
stay with them. -- P.85
I'd been spending so much time thinking obsessively about
race that I'd lost sight of the rest of what the world had to
offer. My new friends knew better.
They understood
what mattered: family, home, church, friends. -- P.99
I'd already noticed that it was liberals, not conservatives,
who were more likely to condescend to blacks, but I
assumed, like the good radical I once was, that liberals
and conservatives were simply two different breeds of
snake, one stealthy, the other openly hostile. Yet, here
was a black man who talked hard common sense about
race -- the same sense I was groping towards -- and
was being praised for it in America's most staunchly
Republican newspaper. All at once the political spectrum
looked more complicated than I had previously suspected.
-- P.108
"Black is a state of mind," one Democratic staffer told
me, by which I assumed he meant being a liberal Democrat.
That kind of all-us-black-folks-think-alike nonsense
wasn't part of my upbringing, and I saw it as nothing
more than a way to herd blacks into a political camp.
-- P.125
I saw no good coming from an ever larger government that
meddled, with incompetence if not mendacity, in the lives
of its citizens, and I was particularly distressed by the
Democratic Party's ceaseless promises to legislate the
problems of blacks out of existence.
Their misguided
efforts had already done great harm to my people, and I
felt sure that anything else they did would compound
the damage. -- P.130
The attrition rate for blacks in predominantly white
colleges and universities throughout America was
disturbingly high. Although half failed to graduate
on time, if at all. Nor was enough attention being
paid to the kinds of courses these students were
taking: very few studied math, science, or engineering.
To ignore these unpalatable facts was to miss the
whole point of a higher education. Merely to enroll
a black in a predominantly white college means
nothing. What matters most is what happens next.
An education is meaningless unless it equips students
to have a better life. -- P.142
One reporter told me that good news about civil rights
wasn't "newsworthy" during the Reagan years. As far
as I was concerned,
that said it all. -- P.162
Back in 1984, I'd told Juan Williams exactly how I felt
about the refusal of civil-rights leaders to treat President
Reagan other than contemptuously. All they did, I said,
was "b*tch, b*tch, b*tch, moan and moan, whine and
whine. That doesn't help anything...You don't call the
judge reviewing your case a jack*ss; you don't call the
banker reviewing your loan application a fool.
But
that's exactly what black leaders have done with
this administration. They've called the President
everything but a child of God." -- P.183
"...
I was struck by how easy it had become for
sanctimonious liberal whites to accuse a black man
of not caring about civil rights. It was as ludicrous
as a well-fed man lecturing a starving person about
his insensitivity to world hunger" -- P.202
He told me that as I considered each case that
came before me, I should ask myself, "What is my
role in this case -- as a judge?" It was the best
piece of advice I received, one that became central
to my approach to judging. In the legislative and
executive branch, it's acceptable (if not necessarily
right) to make decisions based on your personal
opinion or interests. The role of a judge, by contrast,
\is to interpret and apply the choices made in those
branches,
not to make policy choices of his own.
-- P.204
At one point (Howard Metzenbaum) actually tried to
lure me into a discussion of national law, but I knew
he was no philosopher, just another cynical politician
looking for a chink in my armor, so all I did was ask him
if he would consider having a human-being sandwich
for lunch instead of, say, a turkey sandwich. That's
Natural Law 101:
all law is based on some sense
of moral principles inherent in the nature of human
beings, which explains why cannibalism, even
without a written law to proscribe it, strikes every
civilized person as naturally wrong. -- P.222
I also
met with several board members of the
NAACP, but that was a waste of time, since
the organization announced its opposition to my
nomination shortly after the meeting, apparently
at the insistence of the AFL-CIO. Friends of mine
who were close to both organizations gave me a
copy of the union's letter to the NAACP. They
explained to me that
the AFL-CIO's leaders
wanted the NAACP to give them cover to oppose
me at the union's upcoming convention....
What saddened me was the fact that an organization
whose independence had once been a byword in the
Deep South had been reduced to doing the bidding
of the AFL-CIO. -- P.228
(It would surprise many if not most who read and/or
post on the board that the modern KKK and NCAAP
were founded and supported by the same small group
of men on the 'divide and conquer' principle) gs
"Judge, I know you don't believe me,"
Joe Biden
replied, "but if any of these last two matters come up,
I will be your biggest defender." (The other matter to
which he was referring was the leak of my draft opinion.)
He was right about one thing: I didn't believe him.
Neither did Virginia (Thomas' wife). As he reassured
me of his goodwill, she grabbed a spoon from the silverware
drawer, opened her mouth wide, stuck out her tongue
as far as she could, and pretended to gag herself. -- P.249
I met for the first time an Anita Hill who bore little
resemblance to the woman who had worked for me
at EEOC and the Education Department. Somewhere
along the line she had been transformed into a
conservative, devoutly religious Reagan-administration
employee.
In fact she was a left-winger who'd
never expressed any religious sentiments whatsoever
in the time I'd known her, and the only reason why
she'd held a job in the Reagan administration was
because I'd given it to her. -- P.250
I'd graduated from one of America's top law schools --
but racial preference had robbed my achievement of
its true value. I'd been nominated to sit on the Supreme
Court --
but my refusal to swallow the liberal
pieties that had done so much damage to blacks
in America meant that I had to be destroyed.
-- P.252
