It has been 16-years
since Clarence Thomas had anything to say about his confirmation hearings
on the road to becoming a Supreme Court Justice.
On October 1, 2007 a Thomas autobiography titled, My
Grandfather's Son went on sale. A copy of the book, was obtained
by The Associated Press.
Here is some of what the AP's Mark Sherman reports
is in the Thomas book:
Anita Hill was a mediocre employee who was used
by political opponents to make claims she had been sexually harassed.
Powerful interest groups were out to stop him
at all costs and they chose "the age-old blunt instrument of
accusing a black man of sexual misconduct."
Thomas describes Hill as touchy and apt to overreact,
not someone who would wait a decade to level a charge of harassment,
and complained to Thomas only about his refusal to promote her.
Thomas says now that he was "one of the
least likely candidates imaginable" for such a charge, having
made clear his desire to run an agency staffed mainly by minorities
and women.
Thomas acknowledges that three other former EEOC
employees backed Hill's version of events, but he says they either
had been fired or had left the agency on bad terms.
You may recall that Hill, who is also black, worked
for Thomas at the EEOC. She came forward after Thomas was nominated
to the high court to accuse him of sexual misconduct going back ten
years. Thomas denied the charges by Hill that he made inappropriate
sexual remarks, including references to pornographic movies.
When the story about the contents of the Thomas
book broke, Anita Hill wrote an OP-ED piece for the New York Times titled: "The
Smear This Time".
In the piece, Hill makes the following statement:
I stand by my testimony.
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.
Hill also speaks to the accusation of being a mediocre
employee:
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.
Hill ends her NYT OP-ED piece on a positive
and optimistic note:
But questions remain about how we will resolve
the kinds of issues my testimony exposed. My belief is that in the
past 16 years we have come closer to making the resolution of these
issues an honest search for the truth, which, after all, is at the
core of all legal inquiry. My hope is that Justice Thomas’s
latest fusillade will not divert us from that path.
BC has written extensively about
Clarence Thomas. Most recently (July 5, 2007 - BC Issue 236) BC Columnist
David A. Love had the following words in his column titled, "The
Man Who Desecrates the Legacy of Thurgood Marshall":
Recently, in a watershed decision, Parents Involved
In Community Schools v. Seattle School Dist. No. 1, the conservative
majority of the Supreme Court outlawed voluntary racial integration
plans in public schools. A number of school districts around the
country initiated the policies to desegregate and achieve diversity
in public schools, in an effort to offset racially divided housing
patterns. The Court essentially said that desegregation is discriminatory,
and compared white students who don't get the school of their choice
to black students who lived under Jim Crow segregation in the 1954
Brown v. Board of Education case.
The ruling is a resounding victory for the White
Citizens' Council, and the racist governors who once blocked the
schoolhouse door. The spirit of Jim Crow lives on in the hearts and
minds of this Supreme Court's regressive, segregationist majority,
over 50 years after Brown. "Diversity is illegal" is the
new standard, it would seem, and we must do everything in our power
to resist this.
"This is a decision that the court and the
nation will come to regret," said Justice Stephen G. Breyer.
Meanwhile, siding with the majority, Justice
Clarence Thomas concluded that school districts have no interest
in remedying segregation: "But without a history of state-enforced
racial separation, a school district has no affirmative legal obligation
to take race-based remedial measures to eliminate segregation and
its vestiges… As these programs demonstrate, every time the
government uses racial criteria to 'bring the races together,'… someone
gets excluded, and the person excluded suffers an injury solely because
of his or her race… Simply putting students together under
the same roof does not necessarily mean that the students will learn
together or even interact. Furthermore, it is unclear whether increased
interracial contact improves racial attitudes and relations… Some
studies have even found that a deterioration in racial attitudes
seems to result from racial mixing in schools."
Additionally, BC has also commented
on Uncle Thomas in political cartoons reflecting our view of his support
for the death penalty and opposition to affirmative action. We will
let these images speak for themselves.
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