Justice Clarence Thomas Speaks On Plight Of Minority Communities

Justice Clarence Thomas speaks on plight of minority communities

Clarence Thomas doesn’t have any answers as to why such widespread levels of hopelessness and poverty continue to dog minority communities. All he can tell you for certain, is everyone was born equal and the need for affirmative action, if it ever existed, has long since run its course.

Thomas, whose do-as-I-say not as I do view as it relates to affirmative action are legendary, delivered the remainder of his mixed message philosophy earlier this week before a Duquesne Law School audience of more than 1,200.

“We we’re told under all circumstances that we were inherently equal,” the man immortalized as just the second of African American descent to ever ascend to the Supreme Court recalled of his times growing up under the teachings of a band of Catholic nuns in his Georgian hometown. “My family was not inferior. I have never believed it and I never will.”

It’s that kind of narrow-minded defiance that has long seemed to blind Thomas to all the trees sprouting amid the forest of arriving at social equality. Blessed as he’s been to be able to matriculate to such universities and institutions as Yale Law School and the Supreme Court, he seems to hold little obligation in now playing things forward.

In his memoir, My Grandfather’s Son, Thomas, 64, most passionately spoke of a personal sense of ineptness he struggled with in coming to cope with the self-assessment some may have thought he somehow received special treatment in coming to realize his greatest achievements.

“I’d graduated from one of America’s top law schools, but racial preference had robbed my achievement of its true value,” he wrote. In his Supreme Court confirmation hearings, he even dared to outline his objections to affirmative action based on the simplistic argument “all disadvantaged people aren’t black and all black people are not disadvantage.”

I wonder if Thomas has ever considered the flipside of that equation; the one, which long ago proved to blacks the road less traveled can be far more damning. Even now, with hundreds of years of slavery and indentured servitude now finally behind us, we all still know that being young, gifted, and black doesn’t always get you what you might deserve.

"In poor black neighborhoods, virtually every crime is drug related," Thomas told the overflow crowd. "The question is how do you respond; how do you deal with difficult things in a way that's constructive?"

What’s certain is neither instance is simply a case of osmosis, that the condition, more often than not, is what breeds the emotions.

In closing, Thomas waxed a sense of heartbreak he now feels over the “persistent poverty and social troubles” now plaguing black communities.

Finally, something on which we all can agree.