Whoopi Attacks Justice Thomas, Doesn't Realize She's Proven Him Right on Affirmative Action
“The View” co-host Whoopi Goldberg inadvertently proved that race-based affirmative action policies for college admissions undermine the credibility of the minorities who benefit from them.
On Wednesday, Goldberg — a high school dropout — condescendingly lectured U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas on the meaning of the word “diversity.”
She played a clip of Thomas speaking Monday during oral arguments in a civil rights lawsuit filed by Students for Fair Admissions against the University of North Carolina.
UNC is one of numerous colleges nationwide that admit students using affirmative action policies that artificially limit admission for Asian and white applicants in favor of black and Hispanic students.
During oral arguments, UNC attorneys insisted affirmative action was necessary in the college admissions process in order to engineer “diversity” in the student body.
“I’ve heard the word ‘diversity’ quite a few times, and I don’t have a clue what it means,” Thomas said sarcastically. “It seems to mean everything for everyone.”
Goldberg reacted by suggesting that Thomas — the longest-tenured Supreme Court justice and the second black person to serve on the high court — was unqualified because he was a beneficiary of affirmative action.
“Actually, no, that’s not what it means, sir,” Goldberg said. “You know, being inclusive means that when you look around that court, you’re seeing women who may not have had the ability to go to law school had affirmative action not been there to make sure that women were allowed in the school.”
She continued: “You are sitting on a court where — and I know that you don’t like to admit this — but you might have gotten some help because you would not have been allowed in the college of your choice had it not been for affirmative action.”
Essentially, Goldberg suggested Thomas was admitted to college because he was black and not because he was qualified.
Her attack shows how desperate Goldberg was to discredit Thomas, who graduated ninth in his class with an English honors degree from Holy Cross before moving on to Yale Law School.
If Thomas were a liberal, he’d undoubtedly be lionized as a role model for black Americans. But because he’s conservative, he’s ridiculed and his accomplishments are downplayed.
Goldberg’s pointed dig is one of the many arguments that affirmative action opponents have argued: The patronizing policies — which are supposed to help underperforming black and Hispanic students — end up hurting them because outsiders assume they’re unqualified and only got their jobs or were admitted to schools because of their race.
This is an argument that Thomas has himself made to explain why race-based preferences are wrong and detrimental.
In his 2007 book “My Grandfather’s Son” (excerpted by ABC News), he wrote that his race was taken into consideration when he applied to Yale Law School.
“I asked Yale to take that fact into account when I applied, not thinking that there might be anything wrong with doing so,” he wrote.
However, after graduating, Thomas said, recruiters from top law firms were skeptical of his credentials because of the stigma associated with affirmative action.
“Many asked pointed questions, unsubtly suggesting that they doubted I was as smart as my grades indicated,” the justice recounted in his book.
“Now I knew what a law degree from Yale was worth, when it bore the taint of racial preference. I was humiliated — and desperate,” he wrote.
In 1991, when Thomas was nominated to the Supreme Court, he said the stigma of affirmative action cast a long shadow over his career accomplishments.
“Once it is assumed that everything you do achieve is because of your race, there is no way out,” he told ABC News in 2007. “It is irrebuttable and it is proved to be true. In everything now that someone like me does, there’s a backwash into your whole life is because of race.”
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