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This week, Slate is publishing three exclusive excerpts from The Race Card: How Bluffing About Bias Makes Race Relations Worse, by Richard Thompson Ford, published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux (2008). Ford examines the claims of bias that pervade modern American discourse in an attempt to understand why a growing number of people claim to be victims of bigotry in a country with fewer and fewer real bigots. In today's selection, drawn from the introduction, Ford argues that sometimes what people call racism is really just a political struggle or ideological conflict. He sets the stage with the 1991 nomination of Clarence Thomas to the U.S. Supreme Court, in an effort to determine whether and in which ways his detractors were truly racists.
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StumbleUponAlmost all Americans agree that racism is wrong. Many believe that it remains a serious problem that affects many people on a regular basis. But a lot of people also worry that the charge of racism can be abused. We can all think of examples: Tawana Brawley's claimed assault seemed to have been a staged hoax. Michael Jackson—a musician who enjoyed the most lucrative career in the history of recorded music—teamed up with Brawley's former handler, Al Sharpton, to accuse his recording label, Sony Music, of a "racist conspiracy" to undermine his popularity after sales of his disappointing latest album are, well, disappointing. The multimillionaire—who, through untold plastic surgeries, has achieved the Aryan phenotype of Snow White— declared fearlessly, "When you fight for me, you're fighting for all black people, dead and alive." (That rumbling you hear is the sound of thousands of former slaves, sharecroppers, and victims of Jim Crow turning in their graves.) Prince, a musician whose contract was not quite as good as Michael Jackson's but still extraordinarily generous, complained that he was a "slave" to his record label (years later Prince made a deal with Jackson's old label, Sony, apparently unafraid of the racist conspiracy). Clarence Thomas, when charges of sex harassment surfaced during his confirmation hearings for the Supreme Court of the United States, compared his critics to a lynch mob. And of course there's O. J. Simpson. We all know what happened with O. J. Simpson (don't we?).
The Race Card will examine the prevalence of dubious and questionable accusations of racism and other types of bias. I will argue that the social and legal meaning of "racism" is in a state of crisis: The term now has no single clear and agreed-upon meaning. As a result, it is available to describe an increasingly wide range of disparate policies, attitudes, decisions, and social phenomena. This leads to disagreement and confusion. Self-serving individuals, rabble-rousers, and political hacks use accusations of racism, sexism, homophobia, and other types of "bias" tactically, in order to advance their own ends. And people of goodwill may make sincere claims that strike others as obviously wrongheaded.
***
The year 1991 marked the end of an era in American civil rights. Thurgood Marshall—the first black Supreme Court justice, the lead attorney for the NAACP in the historic racial desegregation case Brown v. Board of Education—announced his intention to retire from the bench. Immediately the speculation and maneuvering concerning Marshall's replacement began. It was widely expected that another African-American would be—indeed, would have to be—appointed. Liberals and civil rights groups began a predictable campaign directed at the Republican president—George H. W. Bush—who would nominate Marshall's successor. It was crucial, they insisted, that the nation's highest court include a person of color. The Bush administration would demonstrate the racial insensitivity—indeed bigotry—that its enemies had long suspected if it appointed a white person to fill this vacancy. Partisan politics and ideological litmus tests surely should be put aside in this instance. Marshall's vacancy should be filled by a person who could understand and express the unique experience of racial minorities in this country.
Beltway conservatives must have bristled at this bind. The liberals were using a blatant racial quota—something conservatives vehemently opposed on principle—to push the president to a more liberal nominee. Many of the "New Right" became conservatives in reaction to this kind of identity politics. They had seen their neighborhood schools forcibly integrated through racial busing imposed by liberal judges. They felt that their cherished family alma maters had succumbed to the cheap thrills of radical chic and caved in to the pressures of black nationalist mau-mauing and feminist hectoring. "Disadvantaged minorities" displaced their sons in the entering classes of Ivy League universities; militant feminists demanded integration, disrupting the comfortable esprit de corps of campus men's clubs. The traditional liberal arts curriculum had been watered down with overtly political ethnic and feminist authors, a concession to a misguided and trendy pluralism. The grande dame of classical education—Western Civilization—had been raped by radicals and begat such bastardizations as "World Civilizations" and "Cultures, Ideas, and Values." In the newly hyper-liberal colleges, they had been forced to sit through what they felt were self righteous screeds about "white male oppression," and they were browbeaten by pious professors and students alike, each competing to be more sensitive and tolerant than thou.
And were the people who got into college through race and gender quotas grateful to be there? Hardly. Instead, they harangued and harassed, complained and cajoled for ethnic studies, feminist studies, special theme houses, "sensitivity" days, mandatory tolerance workshops. They held marches, sit-ins, and rallies for every conceivable left-wing cause.
The Senate confirmation hearings began as a duller than average legal theory symposium involving issues such as "fidelity to the Constitution" and the meaning of "penumbral rights." After Hill's accusations they morphed into a Jerry Springer episode that had put on airs. The nation witnessed a parade of disgruntled former coworkers, jilted ex-lovers, and other "character witnesses" testifying to the integrity or duplicity of Thomas and Hill. The Clarence 'n Anita Show offered the viewing public that most comfortable scene of American pop theater, wherein the vain and cocky black man gets taken down a notch or two by the headstrong black woman. Hill played a demure Sapphire Stevens to Thomas's somber Amos Jones, with EEOC colleague and Thomas supporter John Doggett making a cameo as Kingfish Stevens.
The daytime drama came to a head when a beleaguered Thomas described the hearings as a "high-tech lynching for uppity blacks." Although race had thus far served as a silent inoculation against critique, here it was deployed openly as a full-strength antibiotic. Thomas sought to link his struggle to sit on the highest Court in the United States to the struggles of African Americans to avoid physical mutilation, torture, and death. He implicitly evoked the experience of blacks such as Emmett Till, a young black man from Chicago who was tortured and killed by whites after teasing a white woman in Mississippi. He compared milquetoast Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee to an angry mob armed with firearms and strong rope.
Irony notwithstanding, it's possible that race did play a role in validating Hill's accusations. These charges had an ugly racial overtone, intended or not: the black man as sexual predator. That's how many of Thomas's colleagues and much of the nation would receive them. The people who advanced the charges and pressed the issue had to have known this. These charges were probably more believable to many people and certainly much more damaging psychologically to Thomas because of his race. Mightn't an embattled Thomas reasonably have suspected that part of the reason so many believed her and not him, part of the reason her story, tarnished by the passage of time, gained the luster of plausibility and for many the gleam of Truth, was that her account confirmed one of the most pernicious of racial stereotypes?
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Remarks from the Fray:
Since Thurgood Marshall--the pre-eminent Supreme Court advocate of the twentieth century--left his post as United States Solicitor General to accept appointment to the Supreme Court, seven presidents have nominated twenty-two persons to fill sixteen vacancies on the high court. Exactly one of such nominees has been black, and no other black person has even received serious, "short list" consideration. That is a de facto quota of one, strictly adhered to by presidents of both parties.
Clarence Thomas spent his pre-1991 career toadying to Republicans--first to John Danforth and then to the first President Bush. During much of this time, he was specifically critical of affirmative action programs. It is perhaps ironic that he accepted a quota appointment--what more persuasive example can an affirmative action critic now cite than the Thomas appointment itself?
It is Thomas's conduct once his nomination was in trouble, however, that bespeaks supreme hypocrisy. He invoked the racially charged word "lynching" and thereby dishonored the memory of those who had in fact met their end at the wrong end of a rope. The consequence of a refusal to confirm then-Judge Thomas to serve on a higher court would have been his continued service on the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit--hardly comparable to a lynching.
Abe Fortas was not lynched when Republican senators filibustered his nomination for chief justice. Claement Haynesworth, Harold Carswell, Robert Bork, Doublas Ginsburg and Harriet Miers were not lynched.
Clarence Thomas is a steaming pile of hypocrisy.
--John in Nashville
(To reply, click here.)
The man is, simply put, a lackey of the right wing of the Republican Party, playing the race card to defend it when this perfectly obvious conclusion is pointed out. For just one example, in his book Thomas rails about how Howell Heflin, the Alabama Senator, is "a slave owner" while Strom Thurmond, whose politics were much more openly racist than Heflin's even were until it became convenient to change his tune in 1991, gets a free pass. He remains public friends with Rush Limbaugh, whose appeals to racism are a national scandal that even the NFL got tired of.
There is no question that a black man has every right to take a conservative position but there IS a question whether or not a black man has a right to take a position that opposes black voting rights, as Thomas will undoubtedly do in the upcoming Indiana case. With zero, repeat, zero evidence of past fraud, the Indiana legislature passes a law which forces Indianans who lack photo IDs (estimated at around 12% of the total electorate) to go get them and pay for it. That's a poll tax. Everybody knows it, and everybody knows how it was used as a "low-tech lynching" of the right of black people to vote in the old South. Thomas's vote is not a "conservative" one in this case -- it's an act of racial treason.
--the_slasher14
(To reply, click here.)
If Thomas' response felt rhetorically overblown, I'm sure it was only to those who did not feel already somewhat guilty about the line of questioning up to that point - what it implied to everyone, regardless of racist sentiments. Surely no liberal university educated person could have missed the implications of what it would mean to others.
All of this clouds the central fact—that the desire to nominate a black person in the first place had led to the nomination of the man who has consistently been perhaps the most dedicatedly conservative, anti-progressive Justice since his eventual confirmation all those years ago.
The liberal desire to be liberal had not only forced the Republicans to choose from a far narrower field, but had also given them a 100% walk card to send a true walk-the-line believer to the court. That is, until the sex allegations surfaced...and the righteousness and guilt briefly retreated to the closet.
I wonder what all those people clamoring for a black justice back then really thought would happen once they got their nominee. Did they really believe that an African American candidate would ultimately fulfill liberal demands for a more progressive set of rulings simply by default of his "ethnic experience," and regardless of whatever larger ideologies he might subscribe to as an individual? First black, then whatever else, so long as the "values" don't contradict?
In our quest to recognize and validate the inherent cultural value of racial identities, we establish new categories of identity into which we further compartmentalize each other and ourselves. When the individual, like Thomas, with all his ...um...individuality comes along, it's the same guessing game we play with everyone - regardless of who they are.
So what happens? Thomas shows us who he sees himself to be in the only way that should matter to us - through his rulings. When deciding the laws that govern all of us collectively, Thomas has shown us consistently that he sees himself as a walk-the-line conservative first and foremost. The only black identity he's ever expressed much interest in has been his own, the one inside his head. Everything else seems to be a wash...
--xmensch
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