I started an ATMB thread because I really don’t get this.
https://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=898257
Clarence Thomas actually doesn’t act white at all. While he ends up voting with the white conservatives on the Court, he sometimes writes concurrent opinions because his ideology is in fact oriented around radical black separatism. This is a very interesting aspect of his persona that a lot of people don’t know. It doesn’t make his jurisprudence any better in its effects, but it’s a fascinating aspect of his biography and character.
IMHO, the man’s record is abysmal and reflects little sympathy to discrimination issues.
Short answer: yes.
Longer answer: if you have to ask, yes. It would be like handling a gun without knowing if it is loaded. Too many people could get seriously hurt. Err on the side of caution. Just say ‘no’ (to yourself). Trust me-my child is a lawyer-it’s a slur. Fighting words. And, no, I’m not going to tell you what it means-why perpetuate a slur?
Sean Illing
Let’s start with the most eye-popping claim of your book. You make a pretty convincing case that Thomas is — and remains — a “black nationalist.” What, exactly, does that mean?Corey Robin
[T]he main idea has always been that African Americans could carve out some measure of autonomy if they disengaged from the dominant institutions of white America. And this is where Clarence Thomas has always located himself. He was very active as a younger man in leftist black nationalist movements, but he begins to move to the right in the early ’70s.Thomas assumes that racism and white supremacy is ineradicable in America. It’s a permanent feature of the American condition. And the problem for him with contemporary liberal America, which he thinks really begins with the New Deal, is that white supremacy to a certain degree changed its spots but not nearly as much as most people think.
[Thomas] thinks depending on white people means depending on a force that’s as arbitrary and as whimsical as the weather, and very dangerous and ends up weakening black people and destroying the kinds of habits and skills and virtues that black people depended upon and developed over centuries of subjugation and oppression.[…]
Sean Illing
One of the strangest parts of all this is the fact that Thomas has managed to preserve his core black nationalist beliefs on the court while at the same time, as you put it, “remaining a hero to some of the most racist elements of the American polity.” Is this just a case of his supporters not bothering to understand what he actually thinks and why he thinks it? Or do many of them understand it and just don’t care?Corey Robin
I think they haven’t bothered to understand what he thinks. It’s clear that most white conservatives just don’t see it. Even the best scholarship on the right just doesn’t touch this dimension of Thomas’s thought, at least not as far as I can tell. And this continues to be part of the paradox of Clarence Thomas. He’s probably the most well-known member of the court, everybody knows who he is, and yet no one really knows who he is.
This is a total misreading of Thomas. What it misses is his flirtation with separatism as a college student did not come from racial pessimism as Robin claims but from his growing up Gullah. Gullah was his first language as a child. Gullah culture is not about separatism as an ideology but as how the people lived. For Thomas growing up, white people were not around much and did not matter. Thus to him the idea of black people waiting for white people to change before achieving is contrary to the way he saw life.
As a white person, I feel obligated to be offended on behalf of your Asian friend for inferring he has yellow skin.
ETA: And apologize for assuming their gender.