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Sunday, October 28, 2007

Hey Clarence, your back won't hurt as much if you take that boulder off your shoulder
Posted by Jill | 2:02 PM
Just because you have a book published doesn't mean anyone wants to read it. And just because someone doesn't want to read hundreds of pages of an accomplished, educated man whining and kvetching about how terrible his life is doesn't make that person a racist.

Clarence Thomas and his friends, who rail against "the entitlement society", seem to think Clarence is entitled to adulation from everyone:

They're calling themselves "Friends of Justice Thomas," and they say that Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and his bestselling memoir have gotten a bum rap from the "mainstream media."

So, headed by Wendy Long, one of Thomas's former high court law clerks, the friends announced this morning the launch of a website named after Thomas's book, www.mygrandfathersson.com. The site features favorable reviews of the book, which tops the New York Times bestseller list, as well as links to blog entries and video and audio of interviews with Thomas. The site, says Long, is an effort to give readers an alternative to what she characterized as "agenda-driven, ignorant, and in some instances racist attacks on Justice Thomas" by the Times and other media.


I hate to tell these people, but Clarence's Complaint is #2 on the New York Times bestseller list. Sorry, Clarence, but I Am America (and So Can You) is #1.

(h/t)

UPDATE: Thomas' devaluation of his Yale law degree isn't something that was done to him by racists, it was done to him by himself. Trey Ellis at HuffPo explains:

George Bush the First's appointment of a black man who was patently unqualified to the highest bench is exactly what affirmative action is not supposed to be about. The point is to open up gatekeepers like elite law schools and medical schools. Once the students graduate, however, they, and every other job applicant has to rise to a certain standard. My sister is a heart surgeon. Nobody is going to let her cut somebody open just to fill a quota. She has to be excellent at what she does. The bar for a lifetime appointment to our highest bench should have been just as high.

My mom went to Yale law school a few years after Thomas, after having graduated Magna Cum Laude from Howard. She was a thirty-five-year-old black mother of two teenaged kids. She knew she was brilliant, the best of the best, and thrilled at debating the other students. She never once said, "Oh, I'm only here because they needed a brown body. I really belong at the DeVry College of Law."

And that's how she raised me. Old school. Yes, racism still exists, she would tell me. So a B+ might do for the white boys, but you have to be that much better. How pathetic is it that Clarence Thomas writes that he graduated from Yale Law School with his head hanging low, convinced that the world knew that his diploma came with an asterisk of inferiority? When my mom's friends graduated they burst out of law school ready to kick ass and take names.

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