Justice Thomas Torched Affirmative Action in 2007 - Here's How the Left Still Proves His Point
In a 6-3 decision handed down Thursday, the Supreme Court ruled that colleges and universities violate the 14th Amendment when they consider race as a factor in the admissions process.
Justice Clarence Thomas, who sided with the majority, has spent much of his career battling the stigma that accompanies race-based admissions.
“Once it is assumed that everything you do achieve is because of your race, there is no way out,” Thomas told ABC News in 2007.
Thursday’s ruling gave Thomas an opportunity to amplify long-held objections to race-based preferences.
Steve Guest, a former adviser to Republican Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, tweeted excerpts from Thomas’s reply to dissenting Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson.
Justice Jackson “locks blacks into a seemingly perpetual inferior caste. Such a view is irrational; it is an insult to individual achievement and cancerous to young minds seeking to push through barriers, rather than consign themselves to permanent victimhood,” Thomas wrote.
Thomas added that “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.”
Justice Clarence Thomas blasts Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson’s arguments in his concurrence:
KBJ “locks blacks into a seemingly perpetual inferior caste. Such a view is irrational; it is an insult to individual achievement and cancerous to young minds seeking to push through… pic.twitter.com/c3fUQPWETP
— Steve Guest (@SteveGuest) June 29, 2023
Former first lady Michelle Obama, another prominent liberal, tweeted a lengthy response to the SCOTUS decision.
Ironically, Obama opened by acknowledging that in college she “sometimes wondered if people thought I got there because of affirmative action.”
True to her liberal form, however, she concluded with a paean to “our values of equity and fairness.”
I wanted to share some of my thoughts on today’s Supreme Court decision on affirmative action: pic.twitter.com/Wa6TGafzHV
— Michelle Obama (@MichelleObama) June 29, 2023
Tom Elliott, founder and editor-in-chief of the news company Grabien, tweeted an astonishing clip of Catherine Christian, MSNBC legal analyst, admitting the real purpose of race-based preferences.
“How do you diversify without taking race into account? What are you diversifying? You’re diversifying, you know, people’s income?” Christian said.
This is exactly why Justice Thomas so angrily opposes Affirmative Action. No matter how well he performed in the hardest courses at Yale, he could never escape the accusation he only got in thanks to his skin color. It robs meritorious students the reward of their achievement. https://t.co/qrKl0xK65G
— Tom Elliott (@tomselliott) June 29, 2023
Obama and Christian reveal the essence of liberal racism.
Affirmative action, to their minds, means equity and diversity. It has nothing to do with opportunity. It has everything to do with dividing people by skin color.
A lifetime in academia and law has taught Thomas to spot the telltale signs of this demeaning worldview.
In a 2022 essay for The Federalist, the aforementioned Tom Elliott explored the astonishing depth of liberal racism through Thomas’s own words. Elliott quotes extensively from Thomas’s 2007 autobiography, “My Grandfather’s Son.”
As a young man, Thomas first gravitated toward black nationalism. He took part in angry protests that degenerated into riots.
Before long, however, Thomas realized that he had unconsciously acted the way the Ivy League white liberals around him expected.
“I already knew that the rage with which we lived made it hard for us to think straight. Now I understood for the first time that we were expected to be full of rage. It was our role — but I didn’t want to play it anymore,” Thomas wrote.
Years later, Thomas accepted President George H. W. Bush’s nomination to the Supreme Court, despite the vicious attacks he knew he would endure from peddlers of phony tolerance.
“By then I’d shed the last illusions about white liberals: I knew that their broad-mindedness stopped well short of tolerating blacks who disagreed with them,” Thomas wrote.
These are painful and hard-earned insights into the liberal racist mind.
They ring authentic, however, for they echo the sentiments of another great American.
In an 1892 autobiography, Frederick Douglass reflected on his life as a slave in Maryland more than a half-century earlier.
Douglass recalls Christmas as a unique time on slave plantations. Masters and mistresses gave slaves an entire week of liberty from their normal duties. Festivities involved gifts, dancing and plenty of alcohol.
Masters and mistresses delighted in the sights of debauched black men and women drinking and sleeping away their cares for a week. White owners found it amusing, even gratifying to their benevolent self-image.
One thing white owners did not tolerate from their slaves at Christmas, however, was self-improvement.
Getting caught with a book could mean death to a slave.
Masters and mistresses preferred a slave with a bottle to a slave with ambition.
Go ahead, get drunk and enjoy yourselves. But don’t go thinking you might be somebody. Remember the color of your skin. You owe everything to us.
Slaves were expected to drink and dance.
Thomas has recognized, deplored and fought to eradicate this plantation mindset in the modern world.
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