Clarence
Thomas has played the role of judicial
undertaker for modern voting
rights, standing at the edge of hard-won
Black political power with a
shovel in one hand and confederate state
legal theory in the other.
Rather than guarding the fragile protections
born from blood, jail
cells, church bombings, murdered organizers,
and bodies beaten on
bridges, Thomas has used his seat on the
Supreme Court to help
squeeze, thin, and dilute the very laws
designed to keep states from
turning the ballot box back into a private
country club with a velvet
rope and a Proud Boy vigilante at the door.
No
Niggers Allowed’
signs are being readied
His
jurisprudence does not merely “question”
civil rights
enforcement. It treats federal protection of
Black voters like some
irritating historical overreaction, as if
America just imagined
literacy tests, poll taxes, racial terror,
and election officials
with Confederate breath.
Thomas
has become one of this rigged Court’s most
dependable votes for
returning power to the once Confederate
states with long, ugly
résumés of voter suffocation, then
pretending everyone should be
shocked when those same states reach for the
old tricks with new
stationery. In the long war over voting
rights, Thomas has not been a
bystander. He has been a black-robed
wrecking ball, helping turn the
promise of “one person, one vote” into yet
another American
promise with fine print.
Clarence
Thomas
has become the definition of a
traitorous Uncle
Tom so
thoroughly,
so spectacularly, so almost
effortlessly, that even the
phrase itself may need to file a
defamation complaint for being
forced to carry his oversized
luggage.
We’re
talking RMS Titanic International Steamer,
Collector Signature Set.
Clarence
Thomas is not merely “controversial.” That
word is too soft, too
polite, too scented-candle for the damage he
represents. He has
become so disconnected from the Black
communities that once might
have claimed him, defended him, explained
him, or at least shrugged
and said, “Well, he’s still one of us,” that
he can no longer
move through Black America as kin-folk.
In
many Black neighborhoods, from Harlem to
Houston, from South Central
Los Angeles to the South Side of Chicago,
Uncle Thomas would not be
greeted as a hometown son. He would be
received as a walking betrayal
in a black robe, a con- man carrying a
Supreme Court title like a
forged church fan.
The
chump
could need a haircut, a handshake,
directions, or just a quiet
place to sit down, and the room
would likely go colder than a
landlord’s heart in February. He
would not be embraced. He would be
studied.
Measured. Side-eyed. Treated
with the same frosty silence
reserved
for a man who sold the village,
cashed the check, and then came
back
asking where the barbecue was
being held.
Clarence
Thomas is not merely disliked in Black
America. He is spiritually
trespassing.
Now,
let’s
be clear before somebody drags out
the tired little history
flashcards. Booker T. Washington was
criticized by W.E.B. Du Bois and
others for accommodation,
yes, but Washington operated
inside the death grip of Jim
Crow, where
survival often required a
chessboard, a mask, and a
stomach made of
cast iron. Sammy Davis Jr.,
James Brown, and Jackie Robinson
caught
hell for backing Richard Nixon,
and rightly so in many corners.
Snoop
Dogg may find out that
tap-dancing near MAGA’s campfire
comes with
cultural burns. Tim Scott, Ben
Carson, Herschel Walker, and the
rest
of the “yes sir, thank you sir,
may I carry your grievance
basket,
sir” brigade have all made their
little pilgrimages to his porch.
But
Clarence Thomas is in a category by himself.
Those
others may have embarrassed the family.
Thomas has tried to rewrite
the will, sell the house, bulldoze the
cemetery, and then lecture the
ancestors about property rights.
What
makes
Thomas different is scale. What
makes him dangerous is power.
What makes him unforgivable, at
least to many Black Americans, is
that his betrayal does not end with
personal profit, social climbing,
or grinning for photo opportunities
beside people who would have
called security on him in another
era. No, Clarence Thomas has used
one of the most powerful seats in
the nation to help undermine the
civil rights accomplishments that
made his own rise possible. That is
not irony.
That is historical arson.
These
other
Stepin
Fetchit impersonators
may
dance for a check, a title, a
cabinet post, a Fox News
segment,
or a warm pat on the head from
the same crowd that mistakes
Black
obedience for Black excellence.
That is personal prostitution.
Ugly,
yes. Pitiful, absolutely. But
usually limited.
Thomas
is different. Thomas has not simply fattened
his pockets, though
let’s not pretend he has been living like a
monk in a storage
closet. The deeper offense is that he has
helped create, bless, and
defend a legal climate in which the
victories of the civil rights era
can be chipped away, gutted, narrowed, and
buried under cold language
about originalism, states’ rights, and
constitutional restraint.
How convenient. The old plantation always
did love paperwork.
Clarence
Thomas has not merely turned his back on Dr.
King. He has,
symbolically speaking, shot King and the
giants of that era in the
back, then stood over the wound muttering
something about
jurisprudence. And no, that is not too
strong. It may not be strong
enough.
Because
the Black freedom struggle was never one
speech, one march, one
boycott, one bridge, one dream, or one saint
in a pulpit. It has been
a continuous heavyweight fight across
generations, round after round,
bell after bell, with Black folks absorbing
blows from slavery,
lynching, Jim Crow, redlining, police
brutality, voter suppression,
mass incarceration, medical racism, school
segregation, economic
theft, and every other polished little
cruelty America could dress up
as law and order.
So
when Clarence Thomas lends his power to the
erosion of those
protections, he is not merely betraying one
generation. He is
stabbing backward through time.
He
is stabbing Frederick Douglass in the ribs.
He
is stabbing Mary McLeod Bethune in the back.
He
is stabbing W.E.B. Du Bois, Ida B. Wells,
Thurgood Marshall, Fannie
Lou Hamer, Adam Clayton Powell Jr., Shirley
Chisholm, Angela Davis,
John Lewis, and every unnamed grandmother
who scrubbed floors, prayed
over children, paid poll taxes, dodged night
riders, and still
believed the next generation might stand
taller.
That
is
not exaggeration.
That is a cold, sober reading of
what happens when a Black man
benefits from civil rights,
climbs into power through doors
kicked
open by struggle, and then helps
white nationalists,
reactionaries,
and grievance-drunk
conservatives nail those doors
shut behind him.
Clarence
is
their
boy.
Their
good
boy.
Their
“proof”
that
racism is over, their favorite
exhibit in the Museum of
Convenient Negroes, their
black-robed alibi when they want
to
dismantle racial justice while
pretending they are merely
polishing
the Constitution.
And
the tragedy is, Thomas seems to wear that
role not with shame, but
with a kind of bitter, curdled pride. He
sits on the highest court in
the land like a thundercloud over Black
America’s hard-won
progress, using the robe not as a symbol of
justice, but as
camouflage for betrayal with a law degree.
Now,
should he be impeached? In a morally serious
country, that
conversation would not be whispered like a
scandalous church rumor.
The Constitution allows federal judges to be
removed through
impeachment by the House and conviction by
the Senate for “Treason,
Bribery, or other high Crimes and
Misdemeanors.” Whether this
spineless political class has the courage to
even hold that
conversation is another matter entirely.
America has a long and
glorious tradition of seeing the smoke,
smelling the fire, and
forming a bipartisan committee to study
whether matches are real.
But
beyond
impeachment, beyond courts, beyond
Congress, Clarence Thomas
should face another kind of
judgment:
communal
rejection.
He
should be barred from the symbolic table.
Banned from the moral
family reunion. Branded, politically and
culturally, for what he has
chosen to become. Black organizations, Black
institutions, Black
commentators, Black churches, Black
barbershops, Black educators,
Black elders, Black students, and Black
America at large should stop
pretending his robe makes him respectable.
A
robe does not sanctify betrayal.
A
title does not disinfect treachery.
A
lifetime appointment does not turn a sellout
into a statesman.
Clarence
Thomas is what happens when resentment gets
confirmed by the Senate,
when historical ingratitude gets lifetime
tenure, and when a man
climbs the ladder built by Black sacrifice
only to spend the rest of
his career sawing through the rungs beneath
him.
He
is not a bridge from Black America to
justice.
He
is the warning sign nailed to the bridge
after it collapses.
