Hey guys,
I’m slowing down and starting to drown under the challenge of keeping fresh posts on Black Ink all by myself. One way to improve the situation is to recruit guest pieces. I have an old soccer buddy, who writes under the name of Pasquino. That’s the original Pasquino at right, one of the talking statues of Rome. Soccer-buddy-writer Pasquino sends out occasional e-mails expressing his views. I like his style and hope you will too. So, introducing an occasional Black Ink feature of guest posts, here’s Pasquino reacting to the Frank Rich column in this morning’s New York Times:
What’s great about Frank Rich is how he takes the pins out of the box and one by one pushes them gently through the fabric, pinning his subject to the wall.
This week the subject is Clarence Thomas. This isn’t a high-tech lynching, it is a matter of convicting Thomas out of his own mouth and the mouth of his supporters. And with history in newsprint. You can read the paragraph, and then go to the blue highlighted backgrounders about who these people are and were and what events shaped Clarence Thomas into the angry specimen he is today.
He’s a proud product of fair systems of integration and affirmative action, 
long overdue, but he is resentful of the fairness he received. Clarence Thomas wants to believe he’d have been chosen and advanced by the very people who pushed black Americans down for centuries. “A wish is a dream your heart makes,” said Walt Disney, who also made a lovely picture called “Song Of The South.”
Actually, Clarence Thomas wants to give White America a second chance to do right–or wrong, or evil; what’s important is that whites, not blacks, get to pick which. Which do you think it’ll be? Which route do you think Clarence Thomas’s friends will take? Do you think they want more black participation in government, in elections and in board rooms and universities and the better scarcer jobs? Or not so much?
Do you think most Americans would ordinarily choose someone just like them, without help, or would they normally choose someone who looks as angry as Clarence Thomas? Blacks have good reasons to be angry. After justice for people of color is reversed another time do you expect they will be more angry or less?
Pasquino is the nom de plume of Mpls. writer Eric Hanson.
Another reaction to the Rich article may be found on the blog of Ann Althouse:
http://althouse.blogspot.com/2007/10/orin-kerr-devastates-frank-rich.html
wherein she claims:
Sunday, October 07, 2007
Orin Kerr devastates Frank Rich…
… with facts that Rich should be quite embarrassed not to have checked.
Any opinions from the ink-stained wretches about the veracity of this claim?
wbgleason
I found Kerr pretty convincing. The Rich article is a familiar one. Thomas thinks differently than other blacks so he must be a race traitor. He doesn’t hold conventional liberal thoughts on what’s best for race relations so he must be a puppet for conservatives. Frankly, I found it embarrassing for the author.
I didn’t. Rich was right about Thomas misrepresenting the facts. Kerr and Althouse only compounded the misrepresentation. First, Rich was right in pointing out that Thomas accepted the Missouri Assistant AG job before he graduated from Yale so Thomas’s talk about his “worthless” Yale law degree is far from being able to be true. Kerr and Althouse seem to concede this.
But Kerr and Althouse, like Thomas, try to diminish the significance of Thomas’s Missouri Assistant AG work, conveniently forgetting that the time period in question is 1974 not 2007. Thomas is rightly disdained for disregarding “conventional liberal thoughts for what’s best for race relations.” That’s because these “conventional liberal thoughts” were from the African-Americans who struggled long and hard to advance the cause of ending Jim Crow and racial segregation. Thomas has spat in the face of those who made his advancement possible in the teeth of such segregation and, like the good reactionary he is, tried to pull up the ladder behind him. To answer the question, I would think blacks today have good reason to be angry about Thomas.
Now Thurgood Marshall and a number of other great African-American lawyers (like Paul Robson) and judges had been on the scene for a while in 1974. But there were few black lawyers and judges even in 1974. I was there and I remember how it was. (Heck, is. Why does the Minnesota Supreme Court even today require lawyers to take 2 credits of “Eliminating Bias in the Legal Profession” ever CLE reporting period?). Other than Marshall and Alcee Hastings, were there even any black federal judges in 1974? There were black lawyers but these served the African-American “ghettos” as people called them then. The legal community was even more segregated than the overall community. What Marshall and others had worked for was to get more African-American lawyers into the law schools other than Howard, and integrate the “white” law firms and the bench.
Thomas was probably one of the first African-American law graduates to benefit from their efforts to knock down the racial barriers that did exist for many years especially in the nation’s “elite” law schools. If Thomas has any cause to complain about his “worthless” Yale law degree, it’s not because of the degree but because of racial prejudice being as it was in 1974, the degree did not guaranty access of any African-Americans into the nation’s “elite” law firms.
It’s dishonest for Althouse and Kerr to claim that there was something second class about the Missouri Assistant AG job. Maybe Assistant AG jobs were never considered by some snobs on the same par as getting a job with Covington and Burling, but law graduates, white or black, interested in policy and politics often got (and still get) their experience in county attorney or Assistant AG jobs. Assistant AG jobs have always been a step above county or local jobs in cachet. It’s to Danforth’s credit that he did hire Thomas before graduation and saw this correctly as giving Thomas a big boost in his career. Althouse and Kerr reveal what elitist snobs they really are by dissing Assistant AGs.
Althouse and Kerr are like the swift-boat veterans for lies, using people’s dim memories of the early 1970’s, to gang up with Thomas to “swift-boat” Anita Hill. It’s incredible that Thomas, after getting his lifetime appointment to the Supreme Court still nurses a grudge. His use of the position to reopen old wounds and bully and attack a powerless, private citizen after all these years proves that he has not grown as a human being or a judge.