(Damn, Anita...)
Uncle Tom emiritus Clarence Thomas was in the news hard this week, slandering Anita Hill, revising history and trying to sell some copies of his new book.
In it he tries to blame the evil liberals for his contentious nomination process. Let's not mind the fact that he sexually harassed Anita Hill.
Pseudo news outlets like 60 Minutes gave him free reign to slander her without any chance for reply.
That's why I'm shining some light on her NY Times dissection of Clarence Thomas' little fantasy book tour.
Justice Thomas has every right to present himself as he wishes in his new memoir, “My Grandfather’s Son.” He may even be entitled to feel abused by the confirmation process that led to his appointment to the Supreme Court.
But I will not stand by silently and allow him, in his anger, to reinvent me.
In the portion of his book that addresses my role in the Senate hearings into his nomination, Justice Thomas offers a litany of unsubstantiated representations and outright smears that Republican senators made about me when I testified before the Judiciary Committee — that I was a “combative left-winger” who was “touchy” and prone to overreacting to “slights.” A number of independent authors have shown those attacks to be baseless. What’s more, their reports draw on the experiences of others who were familiar with Mr. Thomas’s behavior, and who came forward after the hearings. It’s no longer my word against his.
Justice Thomas’s characterization of me is also hobbled by blatant inconsistencies. He claims, for instance, that I was a mediocre employee who had a job in the federal government only because he had “given it” to me. He ignores the reality: I was fully qualified to work in the government, having graduated from Yale Law School (his alma mater, which he calls one of the finest in the country), and passed the District of Columbia Bar exam, one of the toughest in the nation.
Anita, preach on sista!, you are the Snitch of the Week.
After Anucha Browne's $11.6 million victory post Isiah Thomas' sex harassment suit (can someone please sexually harass me), I'm riding with my soul sister Anita on this one. Just please don't Marion Jones/Duke LaCross rape whore/Tawana Brawley me after I publicly ride with you.
It's getting hard out there.
Posts
People who call Clarence Thomas an Uncle Tom do so because they don't understand him (and probably don't care to). If I were to identify his problem, it would be one of the following two: a. that he has too much faith in Black people or b. he sat on the Supreme Court about 50 years too late.
ReplyDeleteWhat is there to understand?
ReplyDeleteHe is a bitter, self-hated disgrace who is mad that he can only get black women by forcing himself on them.
He was destroyed by America's trial by fire black men receive.
Fuck him.
If he sat 50 years earlier he'd be even more of a disgrace than he is today. Thurgood Marshall he is not. He had no experience when he was made a judge and he shut the door in the face of all blacks behind him.
He voted against desegregation and AA.
As I said, fuck him. This new wave of media forgiveness he receives is disgraceful.
Dowd
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/07/opinion/07dowd.html?th&emc=th
And Rich
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/07/opinion/07rich.html?th&emc=th
break it down pretty well.
For him to compare himself to Medgar and other blacks who really went through it makes me wonder what is really going on in the mind of Clarence Thomas apologists.
What's going on is that they probably know more about him than you do.
ReplyDeleteHe is not self-hating. He has been married to a Black woman. You are right: he is no Thurgood Marshall...but look how far integration has taken Black people.
You don't understand his perspective on race issues. Read some of his opinions and one of his biographies (less your current bias), and maybe you will. While it is fine to disagree with Thomas (ONCE YOU UNDERSTAND HIM), the blind vitriol he gets from even educated Black people is disturbing. It's a damn witch hunt.
Notice the Uncle Tom defender didnt have enough testicular fortitude to leave a name.
ReplyDeleteThomas is a Tom. His time on the Supreme Court has been antithetical to the cause of Black People in this country.
This piece of crap rails against the "evils of affirmative action" well let me give him a tour of the city of Cleveland public schools and then have him with a straight face say the playing fields are even.
Completely independent of the points made about Clarence Thomas:
ReplyDeleteI don't really understand how people feel it's in any way significant to claim that another person is afraid if they leave an anonymous message, rather than assigning themselves a handle. I've been accused of this on occasion. Now, it would make sense if posting under some username revealed intimate, personal details about oneself -- name, address, phone number, and so on -- but it doesn't. It puts an arbitrary name to the poster; that's all. You want to believe that I'm poster1936? By assigning myself a handle, what have I really offered about myself that would put me at risk? The chance that you could input the name into a search engine and possibly stumble upon some likely innocuous scrap of data I offered elsewhere? Please.
So what's the problem?
In my eyes, the only real difficulty that arises is a pragmatic concern about differentiating between multiple anonymous users within one thread. However, I've never had any significant problems in that respect, only minor inconveniences that quickly resolve themselves. Also, being able to connect a user's current post to those made previously isn't important to the content of posts. It's a social concern. People just want a continuity of identity, to be comforted by the appearance of a face behind a post, so they can feel like they're really talking to someone, rather than an amorphous, unclaimed soup of words. "Oh, that's just poster1936. I know him." It's a problem of community-building. That's all.
I should say this too: Most posts being responded to like this are furthering arguments that aren't reliant on credibility and can exist independently of the post. As such, all these arguments directed specifically towards the poster -- arguments which, in this case, don't even make sense when viewed in isolation -- are irrelevant and harmful to discussion. If Clarence Thomas is a self-hating black man abating progressive social reform (or whatever), it's certainly not because anonymous didn't assign himself a handle.
Few pretty basic points:
ReplyDeletea. Affirmative Action, while a system I support within the context of the bullshit system modern Black America has found itself dying within, is by no means devoid of evils.
b. CT has never presented the "playing fields" as equal. That is a lazy ass lie (which ignores classic issues of Equity vs. Equality) perpetuated by the white, liberal media
c. The stance CT takes against AA is antithetical to what you call the "the cause" of Black people because one can make a serious argument that what you see as "the cause" is antithetical to the SUCCESS of Black people.
Which leads me to
d. "The cause" of Black people does not exist. We don't all have the same cause. Neither have we ever had homogeneous goals.
There HAS been a purported "dominant cause" of Black people. That purported dominant cause was not selected by Black people. That cause was selected by White people.
Your problem, go14, is that you have happily swallowed every pile of steaming shit that the media and government have shoved down your undereducated throat. I challenge you to read the text of Malcolm X's famous oration, Message to the Grassroots. Because you are clearly lazy, I will even provide you with the link:
http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/malcolmxgrassroots.htm
What I would hope you gather from reading this speech is that Blacks are and always have been a heterogeneous people, and that the brainwashing which has made us to appear as anything other than that has been very deliberate.
You may think Clarence Thomas is an Uncle Tom, but I would argue he has more in common with Malcolm X than a shuffling, tap-dancing house Negro.
The truth of the matter is that CT has a viewpoint that most Black people have FORGOTTEN, and that most whites do not understand. Those who do understand it do not believe in it because they think Black people are sub-intelligent humans. Those few white people who understand his perspective, are scared shitless by it. And because the road of integration has taken us as a people so far backward, many Blacks who remember and understand his perspective (including myself) are frightened by it, also.
Summary: when you call CT an Uncle Tom you are doing exactly what you have been taught to do.
P.S. I agree with anonymous 2
Clarence Thomas =~ Malcolm X?
ReplyDeleteGet the fuck out of here.
Have you ever read the hateful, backward and toxic opinions in the cases he hears?
Clarence Thomas is Scalia with a bad skin tan.
Name one positive thing Thomas has ever done for blacks?
http://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/author.php?thomas
He divorced his black wife and removed himself from the black race.
His greatest accomplishment.