Clarence Thomas the Supreme Court Justice still looking for acceptance.

U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas claims his 1970 Yale law degree was worth only 15-cent.  He wrote, “I learned the hard way that a law degree from Yale meant one thing for white graduates and another for blacks, no matter how much any one denied it. I'd graduated from one of America's top law schools, but racial preference had robbed my achievement of its true value."

This statement tells us much about Thomas. He is still bitter because he says “white” Yale graduates received job offers that he did not receive. He blames affirmative action programs for his problem that racial prejudice caused.

Universities had preference programs for the children of previous graduates. They had them before, during and after the civil rights era. However, those programs did not reduce the value of the diplomas of students in the white group.    

Thomas grew up in the South and he endured much racism. He graduated from Yale when American society was still adjusting to ideas of equal opportunity mandated by new Civil Rights laws. No rational adult expected an instant change in values.  So Thomas acted irrationally when he bitterly blamed affirmative action and not racism for his sparse employment opportunities.

Thomas does not talk much about the value of the education he received at Yale. Instead, he complains that Yale’s diploma failed to make him the equal of his pale-skinned classmates.  This suggests he had unrealistic expectation about the power a Yale diploma had to neutralize racism.  

Thomas couldn’t allow himself to believe that it was racial prejudice against his skin color that stopped law firms from hiring him. In fairness to those law firms, maybe Thomas had personality traits that made him incompatible for the positions he sought.

Tax and antitrust law was the area of law Thomas chose for a specialty at Yale.  Reportedly, he did not want to practice civil rights law. The tax and antitrust legal area was very constricted by racial considerations. Few corporations employed people labeled black in management positions. They probably would resist taking legal advice about antitrust law from a lawyer labeled black.  Thomas should have chosen this specialty understanding that he did so as a trailblazer against racism. Instead, he seemed oblivious to social realities.

The man who hated affirmative action programs so much still used themto help his career. In addition, he was a lawyer who firmly resisted practicing civil rights law, but he readily accepted President Regan’s appointment as assistant secretary for civil rights in the Department of Education. Later, he accepted promotion as director of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC). Both assignments were clearly affirmative action selections given his lack of experience in civil rights law.

As EEOC director, Thomas directed the federal government’s legal fight to end workplace discrimination. However, he changed EEOC policy in ways that dramatically weakened federal enforcement. Among other things, he ended government class action lawsuits based on statistical evidence of discriminatory effects. He destroyed direct federal government support for those of us fighting racial discrimination in jobs we qualified for without affirmative action aid.

I say we to complete my ethical duty as a writer to report my involvement with some Thomas EEOC changes. The local EEOC office told me that my evidence of workplace discrimination normally qualified as a case for a federal government lawsuit against my employer.  However, Clarence Thomas changed the policy so that EEOC could only certify that I had cause to file a personal lawsuit against my employer, one of the world’s biggest corporations. I learned the name Clarence Thomas for the first time that day and I never forgot it.

Thomas is not in my group of favorite people. Nevertheless, I understand that it was Reagan Administration policy to weaken the federal government’s fight against workplace racial discrimination. If not Thomas, then it would have been another EEOC director destroying those civil rights advances.

Many people see Clarence Thomas as a man of contradictions. I see him as a person persistently in denial.  He was a student who took many tough courses to prove he was not inferior to his white classmates.  He says that effort was futile. Still, I suspect from his comments that he continues to attack the phantom of affirmative action to prove he is not inferior to white lawyers who will never attain his position of Supreme Court Justice.

Kenneth Brooks, Ethicalego,  is an independent writer. Contact him at opinion@ethicalego.com.  Write to P.O. Box 882, Vallejo, CA 94590