Clarence Thomas Gets It

Some Thoughts on Affirmative Action

Ever since the end of June, Americans in the media have been chattering about the implications of the Supreme Court ruling in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard. This case, in which several Asian-American students sued the university for racial discrimination, ended with the court ruling for the plaintiffs, and banning race-based preferences in college admissions.

Already people have had time to argue every question under the sun – is what happened good or bad? More important than most people think, or less important? How aggressively will lower courts enforce it? And so forth.

Yet the result itself was unsurprising; most people expected that the five solid originalists on the Court would rule that the US constitution and the Civil Rights Act do in fact forbid discrimination on the basis of race. (The Court’s final split was 6-3; Chief Justice Roberts joined the conservatives in the majority, leaving only Sotomayor, Kagan, and Jackson to dissent).

The decision is very unlikely to be overturned in the future, or even to generate the sort of electoral backlash among Democrats which Dobbs v. Jackson did last year, since race-based preferences are just too unpopular.

First off, consider the fact that the proponents of race-based admissions feel the need to use euphemisms like “affirmative action.” Generally speaking, political factions that rally around a euphemism are doing so because they don’t actually feel very good about the thing they’re defending. Just think of how Southerners before the civil war often talked about the sanctity of their “domestic institutions” without naming the “institution” they were defending, or the way that pro-abortion people today talk about “a woman’s right to choose,” without saying what it is that the woman should be able to choose to do.

But of all these content-free labels, “affirmative action” really takes the cake. What is being “affirmed?” What “action” is being taken? If you didn’t already know the answer, a hundred guesses would not suffice.

And race-baiting liberals need to talk around what they’re doing, because (according to a recent Washington Post poll) 63 percent of Americans oppose race-based preferences, and even among black people (the most likely race to support them) that fraction opposed is 47 percent.

Just about the only people who support race-based admissions are (1) the one-half or so of US blacks who have bought into victimhood culture, and (2) ivory-tower liberals like the famous law professor Laurence Tribe, who, a few days after the decision, gushingly tweeted that “Justice Jackson’s dissents will someday be the law.”

Let’s take a moment to unpack that sentiment. If Jackson’s faction is ever in control of the Court again, it will be at least 20 or 30 years in the future. When this happens, affirmative action is only going to come up again if black people still need to be held to lower standards in order to get into top universities at the same rate as other races. Not only does Tribe unthinkingly assume that this will happen, he seems to be looking forward to it – indeed, to him it is the most natural thing in the world that blacks will always and only be victims, always a downtrodden class in need of special treatment from people like himself.

What a miserable worldview to hold! What a useless ally for black people who actually want to make the most of their potential, and compete in academic and professional life by the same standards as other Americans!

On the other side of things, with about as opposite a view from Tribe’s as a man can have, is Justice Clarence Thomas. As a black man who grew up poor, in the rural south, when segregation was still going strong, one would think that liberals would have a lot of respect for Thomas’ opinions on racial issues. But they don’t, because his opinions are basically that he wants to live in a society where race doesn’t matter all that much.

Thomas, in his concurring opinion, denounced the idea that “the legacy of slavery and the nature of inherited wealth... locks blacks into a seemingly perpetual inferior caste.”

“Such a view is irrational," says Thomas; “it is an insult to individual achievement and cancerous to young minds seeking to push through barriers, rather than consign themselves to permanent victimhood. If an applicant has less financial means (because of generational inheritance or otherwise), then surely a university may take that into account. If an applicant has medical struggles or a family member with medical concerns, a university may consider that too. What it cannot do is use the applicant’s skin color as a heuristic, assuming that because the applicant checks the box for “black” he therefore conforms to the university’s monolithic and reductionist view of an abstract, average black person.

“Accordingly, Justice Jackson’s race-infused world view falls flat at each step. Individuals are the sum of their unique experiences, challenges, and accomplishments. What matters is not the barriers they face, but how they choose to confront them. And their race is not to blame for everything—good or bad—that happens in their lives. A contrary, myopic world view based on individuals’ skin color to the total exclusion of their personal choices is nothing short of racial determinism.”

This, it’s worth remembering, is coming from a man who knows what he’s talking about. Clarence Thomas was born in 1948 in Pin Point, Georgia – a tiny black community on the seashore where most people speak Gullah rather than English. After his father left him, he ended up being raised by his maternal grandfather Myers Anderson, on whose farm he often worked from sunrise to sunset.

The habits of hard work and discipline that Thomas picked up in his farming days eventually got him to Yale Law School, where he struggled at first. But through long, dedicated hours in the libraries, he managed to keep up with his class and eventually graduate with his J.D. Yet after he graduated, he had trouble finding work, and as classmate after classmate hailed off to a prestigious job, Clarence Thomas felt like he was searching in vain.

By then it was the 1970s, and race-based preferences were in full swing. Thomas suspected that, because he had been on the receiving end of some or another affirmative action program, people were assuming that he hadn’t worked as hard for his degree as white people had for theirs. He wondered whether, if he had graduated from a less prestigious school than Yale – but in a more meritocratic world, where nobody’s diploma was tainted by flexible standards – he might have had an easier time finding a job.

In his memoir, Thomas wrote: “Once, I peeled a fifteen-cent sticker off a package of cigars and stuck it on the frame of my law degree to remind myself of the mistake I'd made by going to Yale. I never did change my mind about its value.”

Fortunately, this wasn’t the end for Clarence Thomas. In 1974 he was hired as an assistant attorney general in Missouri, and after seventeen years working in various legal jobs, he was appointed by George H. W. Bush to the US Supreme Court. In all this time, the views he formed as a young man about hard work, legal equality, and the injustice of affirmative action remained unchanged.

In Thomas’ view (and in the view of the other conservative Justices) race-based preferences are bad on many levels. To begin with, they’re bad for the immediate victims (Asians, in this case, who were suing because they claimed that white people were getting an unfair preference over them – a fact which made it into somewhere like one percent of all media discussions of the matter.)

They’re also bad for the supposed beneficiaries, who will spend their early years being told over and over again by respectable society that they’re not capable of the same things other races are capable of – a message which (as any serious psychologist knows) will produce lazy and unmotivated youth. And finally, they’re bad for the most hardworking members of the victim class –people like Clarence Thomas himself – whose degrees will always be undervalued by a market that suspects they didn’t have to work as hard for them.

(I recall once having a conservation with a friend who argued that affirmative action on a large scale is probably bad, but that it could potentially be a good thing if the racial preferences were ‘slight,’ and applied in a careful way by well-trained experts. My response was something like: “So you think it would be a good idea to make black people’s college degrees worth slightly less than white people’s?” That shut him up pretty good.)

Liberals will respond to all of this by talking about slavery and Jim Crow, and how the harms done by those things are still with us today, and how they’re the main reason why black people are worse off than white people in so many ways – income, educational attainment, incarceration, domestic violence, and so forth.

To a large degree, the liberals are right. Slavery was awful. And it’s a clear historical fact that freeing people from slavery doesn’t immediately make them equal, in every way, to the other free members of society.

It’s worth noting that pretty-much all ancient and early modern historians took it for granted that recently-enslaved populations still had a “slavish” character that made them different from peoples with long traditions of liberty and self-government, such as the ancient Athenians or Romans, or latter-day Anglo-Americans. (One can even argue that this idea shows up in the Hebrew Bible, when the Children of Israel, after being freed from slavery in Egypt, showed themselves to be indisciplined, fickle, and whiney, and it’s only after forty years of wilderness wandering that a new generation arises which is fit to inherit the Promised Land.)

In the United States, many early black civil rights leaders, such as Booker T. Washington, had much the same perspective. They knew that black people had lived for two centuries in a state of slavery, where families were constantly being broken up, where hard work counted for little or nothing, where hardly anyone knew the value of education, and where (apart from the few slaves who escaped north) the only real outlets for ambition and cleverness were to find ways to slack off creatively, or to steal from the master’s kitchen. And they knew that the social problems that this environment created were not going away overnight.

This is why Washington, the founder of the Tuskeegee Institute, was very cautious about demanding immediate political equality for blacks in the South, and preferred to focus his efforts on things like universal literacy, small business ownership, and creating a black professional class with the same capabilities as its white counterpart. Washington’s black opponents, people like W. E. B. DuBois, loved to call him a sellout, but in the end his strategy paid off. By the mid-20^th century, a critical mass of whites were convinced that black Americans were their intellectual and social equals, and were willing to join forces to do away with the remaining legal barriers to black progress.

People like Booker T. Washington, Thomas Sowell, and Clarence Thomas have long recognized that this is the only real way forward for black Americans. That is, they must admit that life isn’t fair, and that they’ve inherited social problems that aren’t of their own making. But also, the only way they’re going to get out is through hard work, taking responsibility for their own fate, and holding themselves to the same standards to which everyone else is held.

The anger of Clarence Thomas is borne of a realization that, for nearly sixty years, the political Left has been doing its level best to reverse all of this progress. Whether through affirmative action, leniency toward black criminals, or thinkpieces about how it’s racist for a boss to expect his employees to show up on time, they are always looking for ways to insist that, because blacks have been treated badly in the past, they should be held to lower standards in the present.

The end result of all this is simply to create a culture of victimhood, and to create generation after generation of black men who feel no sense of self-ownership, and no drive to escape the circumstances which, unfair as they are, can only be escaped by people who see themselves as the authors of their own fate.

Democrats offer black Americans their pity, but they do not offer solutions. Telling an impressionable young person that, because his ancestors were slaves, he shouldn’t have to do as well on his schoolwork as other people, or show up to work on time, or refrain from shoplifting, is what you do when you don’t really care whether that person makes anything out of his life.

Who ever heard of a man showing up to an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting, and being told that AA usually aims for total abstinence, but since this particular man came from a family with a history of heavy drinking – and since he suffered a traumatic childhood as a result – he should be allowed to keep on downing half a pint of gin each day, and they’ll call it good?

Yet this is, in effect, the way that America’s most influential politicians respond to the serious social problems afflicting the black race.

What America did to its black population early on in its history was a brutal injustice. At the same time, blacks living today are never going to overcome the baleful effects of slavery if the law doesn’t hold them to the same standards as everyone else – and if they don’t hold themselves to those standards.

Victimhood culture is bad. Life isn’t fair, but feeling sorry for yourself never makes it fairer.  And equal protection means equation protection.

Clarence Thomas gets it. When will the rest of us?

This essay was originally written for the American Thinker.