Clarence Thomas, His Autobiography, and Related Matters Pertaining to America and the Supreme Court – National Affairs

If he caught a break here or there rather than relying wholly on self, well, everyone should and most do catch at least some good breaks in a world filled with bad ones.

We have a chapter at MSL of BLSA, the Black Law Students Association. The chapter is open to persons of any race, color, etc., but is primarily comprised of African Americans. Every year the national BLSA puts on a trial competition among BLSA Chapters. There are six regional competitions, and the top two teams in each region go to the national finals held a few weeks later. MSL competes in the Northeast Regional Competition. This year there were a total of 15 teams in the Northeast Regionals, with MSL sending four separate teams. We do not know all of the other schools, because of “secrecy” maintained to insure against bias in judging, but we nonetheless know that other schools included one of the country’s most prestigious schools, Harvard, and still others were well thought-of ABA schools like St. Johns, Rutgers, Syracuse, Albany, Pace and Touro. It is no secret that ABA schools, especially ones like Harvard, enroll African Americans who have the very best academic records and aptitude test scores of any black students.

As far as we know, this has not happened before. And, especially because the luck of the draw is needed so that teams from a given school do not play each other, with one knocking out another at or before the quarterfinals, it is not likely to happen again. But how and why did it happen this time? Why did teams from the non ABA MSL sweep the competition – competition which apparently included nothing but teams from ABA schools, including one of the country’s most prestigious law schools that gets African American students with the best previous grades and test scores? The answer is not complicated, and should make someone with Thomas’ views as pleased as punch. MSL’s coaches and team members worked very hard to prepare for the competition. Hard work was the only secret.

So this little story, which happened only last week, is more living proof of the rightness of Thomas’ view of the importance of hard work and discipline in one’s work.

Then, too, there is the question of Thomas’ bitterness – bitterness hardly describes it – over the fact that he has been savaged for his views, he feels, by liberals and by lots of fellow African Americans. One sympathizes with this. It is very difficult when people whom you expect would be your friends, or at least to disagree amicably rather than viciously, instead turn on you and either fail to support you or, even worse, savage you. Such, unhappily, too often seems the tale of those who are ahead of the conventional wisdom or, at least, are out of step with it. One gets a strong whiff of this every now and again in the writings of the estimable Paul Krugman. Ibsen wrote of it in Ibsen: 4 Major Plays, Vol. 2: Ghosts/An Enemy of the People/The Lady from the Sea/John Gabriel Borkman (Signet Classics), a play which somehow or other made a lasting impression when I read it as a freshman in college. This writer himself has written in a memoir of what it is like to be out of step with conventional wisdom. So one understands and sympathizes with Thomas’ deep unhappiness at having been ill treated, at least as he sees it, just because his views are different than those of other African Americans and white liberals.

The other point is Thomas’ relationship to accuracy or truth. I will not speak of the Anita Hill matter, as to which each side has its partisans and its proofs, with some marveling at the idea that either of these two people might be lying. I shall speak, rather, of two other matters that Thomas himself brings up in his book. In one, Thomas went to the Bush compound at Kennebunkport to be told of his impending nomination to the Supreme Court and to appear at a press conference announcing it. Thomas describes the Bush compound thusly: “As we drove through the gate, I looked with surprise at the modest wooden buildings. I’d gotten the impression from the news stories I’d read about Kennebunkport that it was a lavish private resort, but it was obviously a comfortable, unassuming retreat meant for family and friends.” Well, a few years ago I was in Kennebunkport with some friends for a few days and, like lots of touristas, I went to see the compound; you of course cannot enter it but you can stare at it from the road. This compound is “modest”? This compound is “unassuming?” Boy, we should all have such modest and unassuming places by the ocean. One cannot say Thomas’ description is a falsehood, since the nature of the compound could be thought a matter of opinion rather than fact. And yet, to tell readers all over the country that the Bush compound is modest and unassuming certainly does raise questions. Is Thomas simply an inaccurate person, which if true, has its ramifications? Was he possibly being disingenuous, conceivably even somewhat dishonest, in order to give a patron family the appearance to the public of being regular guys rather than avatars of wealth, of position, of the American aristocracy? Who can say? I only know that one finds it impossible to share his view of the compound.