Dunno, man. I’m picturing the typical lefty lawyer’s office back then and I see a cramped, wood-paneled cell of a room; overstuffed ashtrays spilling butts across a heavily-gouged pine desk ringed with circular coffee stains; maroon shag carpeting rank with mildew smell and hiding God-knows-what horrors; and a single small, cloudy pane, which must’ve once functioned as a window onto a picturesque brick-alley vista, allowing only the cruelest tease of somber grey cloudlight to filter in.
Compare then the chamber of the conservative attorney: its Persian rugs tastefully revealing just enough of the Italian marble tile beneath; a room so enormous that acoustical engineers were employed during its design, to prevent any canyonlike echo even during the frequent post-trial jubilation; its crystal decanters of single-malt scotch doubled in the mirror over the wet bar; its centerpiece a mahogany desk that would dwarf a snooker table, hand-carved so opulently it would move Bernini to tears.
I used to love CBS’s Sunday Morning show. Low key, with coverage of arts & sciences, as well as in-depth reports on issues. Sort of like Church for us agnostic heathens.
Until Virginia Thomas appeared for an interview just after the Supremes handed the Presidency to W. She & the smarmy interviewer discussed the ugly rudeness that had been so prevalent in DC–ignoring the time & money wasted on slamming Clinton. Now that we had a Republican President, things would be much “nicer.”
The interviewer neglected to ask about Mrs Thomas’s current job–working at the Heritage Foundation, vetting candidates for positions in the incoming administration. The administration that was incoming because of a Supreme Court decision.
Nowadays, I’d rather spend my Sunday Mornings watching Bargain Hunt on BBCAmerica.
Whenever we treat someone differently because of his race, I believe (as a default assumption) we’re doing something wrong.
For you to say, in essence, “Thomas is a conservative, and so few blacks are conservatives, so I’m entitled to suggest his convictions are conveniently-held shallow positions,” is wrong. If you believe that all conservatives’ positions are ersatz, that’s not a racial distinction, of course – merely an idiotic one. If you believe that a black conservative’s positions may be more readily dismissed as ersatz than a white one’s, then you are a racist.
And just for the record: I am Hispanic. My father arrived here in this country with nothing. My childhood was … not a wealthy one. Yet even while we had nothing, my family didn’t hold the ridiculous position that we should somehow be given extra opportunities or preferences to make up for our state of poverty. I didn’t feel then that affirmative action programs were of value to society.
I don’t feel that today, either.
Is my position on this point weaker or more suspect than an identical view held by my next-door neighbor, lily-white Jonathan Wasp III?
I don’t know how accurate your depiction is. I’m sure some lefty law firms were like that, but it needn’t be a firm fighting for lefty causes, just a law firm with lefties in hiring positions. I have no idea how common or uncommon that was.
But what about lefty Congresscritters? Surely there were plenty of those around. He wasn’t top of his class, but a middle of the pack Black guy from Yale Law School must’ve stood out in a crowd in the 60s or early 70s.
I’d like to see the quote from the book that supports that he said that. I saw the 60 Minutes piece. He said that in his own personal experience, he got worse from White liberals (during his confirmation process) than he ever got from the Klan. But he was not generalizing. At any rate, I think we should ask those who are making that claim to cite the passage from the book, in context, so we can judge for ourselves.
Yeah, I know. I confess that like most of my other suppositions and beliefs, I based that mainly on stereotypes and clichés I vaguely recall from movies and TV.
I don’t live all that far from you, and I’m half-Wasp on my father’s side.
That being said, I still grew up in the sort of household where my brothers and I, when we were teenagers, would help our parents clean insurance and dental offices and work in restaurants to help our family get through a steel strike.
I do not deny for one second that many people in this country were denied certain opportunities on the basis of race. However, there are tons more denied opportunities for countless other reasons, and I have never seen an affirmative action plan that could address that.
The education, family stability and poverty problems that affect black families in the inner city also affect millions of white people in places like Appalachia and the Rust Belt. Yet little affirmative action reaches them, and increasingly the primary beneficiary of affirmative action programs is the black middle class.
Now, this kind of thing isn’t helpful to race relations, especially among people who frankly carry some residual cultural racism. And this kind of thing can be exploited, frankly. Remember, that famous Jesse Helms ad didn’t show a man in a white shirt. It showed a man in a red plaid workshirt.
Now, personally, I’m not particularly resentful. And I’m grateful for the opportunities I did get, which I think I took advantage of well. But I know an awful lot of people back in Pittsburgh who feel that affirmative action is screwing them over.
If one of its goals is to advance racial harmony and understanding, it has to do a better job. If it can’t (and I think it can) then it ought to be abolished.
Making it class-based rather than race-based would be a huge first step.
It certainly seems that Thomas did some thinking before he changed his views.
Please spell out the difference between “traditional conservative values” and “those adopted” by Thomas. Also, remember that Thomas has often described himself as more libertarian than conservative.
If you are “well known” then you are probably of at least moderate means. Most well known thinkers of both the conservative and liberal camps are doing pretty well economically.
Well, that certainly explains it all, doesn’t it? He had been “indoctrinated” by those treacherous lefties who, as everyone knows, rule academia with an iron fist, and are utterly in the thrall of such radicals as…who, exactly? Hubert “Trotsky” Humphrey? Martin “Ruthless” King?
No doubt he would have sooner seen the True Path, had it not been for the relentless “indoctrination”.
Funny, but I wasn’t thinking about academia, but radical student organizations. He was, for instance, one of the founding members of the Black Student Union at Holy Cross. But he could have been thinking about some lefty profs as well. I was in college in New England about that time (maybe a few years later), and I sure had my share. And many were quite supportive of lefty causes on campus-- things like Affirmative Action, higher wages for workers on campus… things like that. I don’t recall any being supportive of Weather Underground type activities, but one needn’t be that far out to be a radical lefty.
Thomas has a point. There were few things that terrified black people, Jews, Catholics, and others more in the Jim Crow era than people chasing them with sanctimony. I understand that in some areas black mothers still use Ted Kennedy and Eleanor Roosevelt as quasi-mythological figures to scare their children into behaving.