Thoughts on Clarence

A lengthy interview with Clarence Thomas was featured on Sunday's 60 Minutes. Steve Croft follows Clarence back to his hometown village and talks with Clarence about his hardscrabble upbringing under his mother, an oyster-shucker, and his grandfather, a fuel oil truckdriver. Against this backdrop, Judge Thomas claims to have learned the value of hard work--of not expecting handouts--and of personal responsibility. And, indeed, he appears to have learned the lesson and is a shining example of the work ethic. That being said, one wonders how it could be possible that he was selected for a position on the Supreme Court. Indeed, his Republican Masters had much to gain from selecting someone such as he. Why? His rural experience and his work ethic have effectively blinded him to institutional racism and the effects of that. Thomas was chosen, no doubt, because work was understood by him to be a simple affair: you simply put your shoulder to the wheel and grind away. Unfortunately, even my limited experience working at the New York Botanical Garden in the Bronx taught me that work in urban contexts is not even close to that. How you will work, who allows you to work, under what conditions will you work, how long will you work, whose ass must you kiss in order to be able to work, how high can you go in the work--all these are considerations that an urban worker must constantly navigate in order to rise. To be sure, the rural worker knows about these as well, only less so, I would say. And that is no doubt true about Clarence Thomas. This is why Clarence Thomas will have no truck with fancy urban claims of institutional racism and the like. His experience was of a simple Reaganite type: you either work or you don't (and are lazy). He does not understand the plight of his own people and what they go through even in order to procure and hold onto the miserable jobs they do. He was chosen for his ignorance, if that makes sense. He was chosen because he could be trusted to ignore the conditions of life as they effect the urban black and instead think that his rural work ethic would suffice as a solution.