Financial Gazette (Harare)
11 October 2007
column
Harare — United States Supreme Court Justice Brother Clarence Thomas has written his autobiography: My Grandfather's Son. Brother Thomas has opened and rubbed salt on old wounds. It reveals a dark side of American life where blacks who dare to think or act differently are persecuted by their own as well as by whites.
No matter how successful a black man is, and Judge Thomas sits in the US Supreme Court, blacks often find that they are reviled, in this case for their achievements as well as for their failures. The painful cuts are those that come from fellow blacks. Thomas, in his autobiography dares to speak about this double jeopardy, which is taboo in "blackspeak," here. Because of limitations of space, we will delineate the events and curses Brother Thomas endured.
He grew up in Savannah, Georgia, a town rich in black culture and also rich in racism and the Ku Klux Klan. His father and mother skipped town on him, leaving his grandma and grandpa to look after him. He mentions the extreme contempt in which African Americans of a dark color like himself were held. Our readers will want to know by whom? It was not by whites, but by blacks. I don't need footnotes and references for this. My children suffered a similar fate when we settled here in South Carolina.
Thomas attended a school run by Catholic Sisters who provided discipline, love and comfort all at the same time. They must have recognised his scholarly gifts, because even when he went to Yale Law School on an affirmative government scholarship, he always invited them to share his moments of success. They in turn, kept him in their kind hearts. For some reason, Thomas became a Republican and a conservative, especially in reference to the civil rights organisations and afrirmative action, the two forces that had given him a stepping stone. And there began his life struggles with heavy handed prejudice. His appointment in the Bush adminstration as Affirmative Action Commissioner, 1980-1990 and later Judge, brought nothing but contempt and derision.
The dark side is particularly painful when the detractions come from brothers and sisters. The exaplantion is that brothers and sisters here don't tolerate differences of opinion. Somebody has decided that the Democratic Party serves black interests and any black who challenges that wisdom is an Uncle Tom, a quisling and a sell out. Here are two examples. Former US Secretary of State, General Collin Powell is by all accounts regarded as brilliant and creditworthy character wise. Brother Harry Belafonte called him a "house Negro" carrying water for President George Bush on the Iraqi war. Brother Spike Lee had similar thoughts on Powell. Spike asked a question: "If Powell was told to bomb Nigeria, what would he do?" That question assumed that he would carry water for his plantation owner.
The fact that Thomas is a conservative is an unforgivable sin to the movers and shakers of the black world. His attitude (wrong in my opinion) about afrirmative action is that it has seen its time. It stigmatises all blacks who are either promoted above their abilities or subjected to unfair criticism as affirmative action appointees. Whites are perfectly happy to live in an all white world. Major institutions, like my university, appointed blacks (myself included) because the law compelled them to. During the previous hundred years since my university's foundation, the authorities never employed blacks above the rank of janitor. But surely Thomas is entitled to his opinion. Brother, the Reverend Al Sharpton organised pickets at his home, during confirmation hearings in order to force him to withdraw his name. In his hometown, Savannah, a black woman accosted him in the library and called him an Uncle Tom.
Thomas recalls a lethal combination of Senator Ted Kennedy and Senator J. Hefflin of Alabama, aided and abetted by Sister Professor Anita Hill. Hill had had an eye on the judge because he was recently divorced. The judge then did an unpardonable sin. He married a white woman, Ms Ginny.
Hill laid accusations against Thomas in the Senate; namley that Thomas read pornographic books, that Thomas had mentioned that his private part was the biggest in the universe (or some such wicked boast) and that he treated women badly. All these charges work perfectly into the stereo-typical black image of men whose sex organs are bigger than their brains. Thomas recounts in his book that whereas as a child, he had been brought up to fear the Ku Klux Klan horsemen drapped in white gowns and carrying crosses, now he was face to face with a high-tech lynching. The more things change, the more they remain the same.
Former Judge and then US Senator Hefflin, who came from Alabama, a state quoted by Martin Luther King as dripping in the blood of the saints and innocents, sat in adjudication over Thomas.
Hefflin and Kennedy were liberals. They formed the other side of prejudice. White liberals, like black leaders, have no tolerance for blacks who do not support their agenda. They regard such conservative blacks as worse than Judases. There is a reason for bitterness. White liberals say that they suffered ostracisation and persecution from their own kind in order to secure black rights. Now there are people like Powell and Judge Thomas who support the side that sought to keep them as slaves. We do not invite such blacks to parties, lest one be tainted as "one of them." Thomas' story is an experience in self inflicted contempt by fellow blacks because of skin shades, oppression by the Ku Klux Klan and later ostracisation by heatrless blacks who brook no deviation from their own thoughts. The Washington Post newspaper writers, K. Merida and M. Thomas called such a life: A Supreme Discomfort. Thomas's life shows the dark side of growing up black in America.
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