Clarence Thomas: A Biography
by Andrew Peyton Thomas
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Book Summary Information
Author: Andrew Peyton ThomasEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2002-11-01
ISBN: 1893554597
Number of pages: 672
Publisher: Encounter Books
Book Reviews of Clarence Thomas: A Biography
Book Review: More Archaeology than Biography
Summary: 2 Stars
Although the author uncovers every detail of Justice Thomas' life in excruciating detail, he repeatedly stumbles over his own tail by making the narrative morally all upside-down. This tome is more like white "southern Archaeology" than Black Biography.
As but one instance of what will surely irritate others, the early chapters are devoted almost exclusively (and incessantly) to the possible influence that early Puritan religious racists values, including such vigilantes as the Ku Klux Klan, may have had on Mr. Thomas' fore-parents, on his orientation to American society, and on his formative outlook as a person. While this makes for interesting reading if one is white, the emphasis is all wrong if not entirely misplaced, from the point of view of a Black.
As but the most glaring example of the authors many mis-drawn conclusions (from a virtual welter of otherwise useful facts), the author concludes that Justice Thomas' strong values and piety were somehow derived entirely from these confusing if not entirely morally conflicted, bankrupt and contradictory racists examples: that is, from the severe practices of ex-slave owners, vigilantes, unfair overseers, etc.
Respectfully, this is not a point a view that either the Justice or any other Black reader is likely to share, or would wish to have emphasized in a biography even if they did share it. In neither case would they draw from them the same lessons or conclusions that the author has drawn here.
It is a fact that Blacks throughout the worst of America's racist criminality, were at all times clear about what kind of inhumanity the white system represented and with which they were dealing.
It is a first order mistake to think (as the author has done) that simply because Blacks "went through the motions" of mimicking white society, they respected it. Blacks "going along with white society to get along" should never be mistaken for respecting it, and one should never make the mistake of thinking that Blacks would therefore draw the wrong moral lessons from white practice and examples. It was a rare instance indeed that a Black of the segregation era actually "looked up to whites" or respected white American society. Even the author has ample evidence of this among his many facts, yet he repeatedly draws the easy, white stereotypical, and wrong conclusions.
But more than this, he compounds this unconscionable error by virtually ignoring the counter-examples (of upstanding racially un-conflicted white humanity) standing right before his eyes: If one wanted to emphasize "the whites" who did have a dominant influence on Justice Thomas (and his family), one did not need to excavate the sordid history of violence and lynching that seemed so easy for the author to write about. One needed go no further than the Irish Nuns, who not only used the same "tough love" that Thomas' own grandfather used, but also were not conflicted about their moral attitudes towards their "colored children."
When white teachers sit at the back of the bus with their "colored charges," no further examples of white humanity are needed. In the eyes of Blacks, this single act trumps all of the white vigilantism of the past 300 years. Surely it must have been clear to the author (at some level) that it is a certainty that whatever Justice Thomas and his elderly grandparents learned from white people, it was learned from the humanity of the Nuns and not from the lessons of the "hooded vigilante nightriders" of prior generations.
Another equally egregious error that followed the same easy stereotypical pattern, again despite ample counter-evidence right before the author's eyes, was the fact that both of Justice Thomas' parents abandoned him, and although it was clear that from the Justice's point of view, the weightier of the two was the abandonment by his mother, this author still preferred to discount this weightier abandonment and emphasize that of the father.
These are not mistakes that a reader can easily overlook. They destroy, in a very violent way, the implicit confidence between reader and author. And while I will continue reading the book to the bitter end, my "crap-detection" antenna has clearly been raised to "Full Alert."
What Price Ambition: The Pathos of Clarence Thomas
As noted above, the subject of this biography, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, was presented early in his adult life, with the perennial dead man's choice: either your soul and dignity, or fame and fortune (on terms dictated by others). This biography is the story of his life, one filled from beginning to end with more than the normal amount of tragedy and pathos, told well by a talented biographer (who's flaws I have pointed to above). It is about a good, descent and intelligent black man who was dealt an unusually bad hand in his early life; and about how he tried to square the circle and end up victorious by playing all of the angles with the cards dealt him. But how in the end he merely became a victim of his own ambition exploited by cruel and cynical political games played above his head, the rules to which were dictated to him by the politics of others, who all along had Machiavellian plans for him and his life.
Sadly, this tableau -- where a young not so innocent subject is a pawn on a chessboard played above his head -- is an all too familiar one in American professional life, and thus this book is the ultimate cautionary tale of what can happen, no matter ones race, when they arrive at the station of adulthood with nothing going for themselves but a fragile ego, a weak self-concept, a high-priced education, too much pride, a wandering and questionable moral compass, and always uncertain plans for the future. Any young American who strikes out to find his fortune and his place in the world with this particular constellation of personal qualities is likely to end up caught in the same ringer, filled with the same moral quicksand, that all but consumed Justice Thomas. Thus there is a theme running along the subtext of this saga, one that runs straight through, not only the heart of Justice Thomas' life, but one that might be eerily familiar to many, if all of us.
The author's Story
At an early age Thomas was abandoned, first by his father and then later by his mother. Since then, one of Thomas' highest instincts has been being able to sense how to adapt quickly and make the best of a bad set of circumstances. As the "unwanted ward" of his grandparents he was industrious, stayed out of trouble, did well in school, and respected and obeyed his grandparents. There frankly were no other options available to him. In Catholic school his Irish teachers were the first white people not to call him a "nigger" (or his grandfather "boy") and to treat him like a "real human being." Uncommon in the era of the 50s, they let him know he had a good mind and that they expected great things of him. As a result of his faith in the Catholic version of white humanity, and his good grades, Thomas entered the priesthood only to find he was isolated because of his race; and while he was not called a "nigger" to his face there, he was referred to as "the one black spot on an all white horse."
After MLK's murder, he gave up the priesthood altogether realizing that if a holy man such as King could be shot to death in broad daylight, and if racism existed even in the monastery, the holiest of sanctuaries, then racism must "trump" religion everywhere. At Holy Cross University, at last he thought he had found his "lost black family" with the Black Student Union and as a participant in activist anti-racist politics, only to again find himself disillusioned and "odd man out." He abandoned "the Black Cause" as quickly has he had embraced it and went on to get married to one of his liberal anti-racists cohorts. Together they headed off to Yale law school. At Yale he was stuck with, and stung by the "affirmative action baby moniker" and was devastated by his inability to get a job after completing his "high-priced" Ivy League education.
Seeing the glut of left-leaning Civil Rights Lawyers on the job market, and finally seeing the handwriting on the wall, Thomas gave up forever all hope of a fair, independent and dignified life under his own agency and on his own terms, and proceeded to cast his lot with those who needed him the most. He and his jobless over-educated "cut-buddies" made a very pragmatic, strategic and life-altering decision: They decided to sell themselves to the highest bidder.
Testing the direction of the wind and sharpening their new found rightwing, anti-liberal rhetoric, it was easy enough for Thomas and his friends to see that since the Republican Party was barren of black faces, their ticket into the future was to written on the coattails of Republicans and their conservative philosophy. With the most calculating of Machiavellian forethought, over night Thomas and his "cut-buddies" became card-carrying Republicans, as well as died-in-the-wool, newly minted Conservatives. And as they had predicted, their overnight conversions would not long go unnoticed, "the powers that be" could smell them coming a mile away, and made them all offers they couldn't refuse: "Give up your fight for liberal leftwing black causes; join our band of conservative brothers, and we will give you all the fame and fortune you can handle."
This was the smoothest deal Thomas had ever cut in his short, undistinguished, stifling, barren, increasingly cornered, young adult life. He had long daydreamed about becoming a Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. Here at last was his chance to take a short cut and cut a quick path to that goal on his own terms and at the same time leave those who had rejected him, forever in the dust. This was his golden chance to trade in a lifetime of self-loathing, isolation, abandonment, rejection and sulking about the hardship of black life, for his own blind unadulterated ambition. All he had to do was turn in his "black power card," turn away from his own half-baked liberal ideas, and learn to live with racism and embrace and tap dance to the new Reagan brand of the "conservative two-step." And never was learning to do these two things, so quick, easy, and painless as under the careful tutelage of John Danforth, a Missouri Congressman and minister who took Thomas under his wing and mentored him in the same way that Thomas' grandfather had done before him.
But the big game did not begin in earnest until Thomas' first appointment as Legal Council for the Department of Education. There he "cut his teeth," "made his bones," and acquired his conservative bona fides. It was at this time that he was first given a legal dagger and taught how to openly stab his people in the back. However since he was still a virgin, he was at first allowed to do so quietly from the sidelines. With legalese, Thomas was taught how to throw a legal dagger like a cruise missile, at a safe "standoff" distance from the main arena, and then how to find and use appropriate legal rationale to "home in on the target" as they were used to justify dismantling the hard won civil rights gains accumulated over the better part of a century. Desegregation laws went un-enforced; bussing programs were stopped and reversed; school programs for the poor and disadvantaged were sliced to the bones; and most of all, the much feared, "Affirmative Action" was stopped cold in its tracks.
As Thomas began to lose his virginity and succeeded beyond even his own imagination and well beyond his "handlers" expectations, only then did he realize that the trap door had shut behind him. He had been snared by his own unbridled ambitions, and now there was "no turning back." The time had come for him to pay the piper. For the first time in his life, Thomas, the moral virgin, the "runaway priest to be," had found himself in a "moral and philosophical no man's land," where he could no longer straddle the fence, or talk and back his way out. He was now "owned" by the opposing side. He was "their black Trojan Horse;" their political cruise missile, hurled into the lion's den. Without any question, Thomas had been sent up the old proverbial creek in a boat without a paddle.
To make a bad situation much worst and to ensure he learned how to play by the new rules, Thomas was further Baptized in fire: He was given a staff of all liberals, not one consisting of his old "cut buddies," who by now had all landed jobs elsewhere in the Reagan administration. Included among his staff were the now infamous feminist and liberal Anita Hill. All of Thomas' staff, including Hill was of course sympathetic to the other side, and had insisted on maintaining at least a modicum of their dignity and sense of independence from an administration clearly at war with everything that had meaning to black citizens: progress in race relations. They admired and prayed to the very laws, institutions and political philosophy Reagan opposed as if they were sacred Black totems. They did so to the very laws, institutions and philosophy whose job it was for Thomas to dismantle. In fact even more cynical than this, Thomas was also expected to dismantle his own job and the Department of Education itself, all in the name of higher conservative principles. Thomas's staff all hated him: both for who and what he was, as well as for what he had allowed himself to become, and they told him so. And to underscore this point, at the earliest opportunity, all but the least able of them, quickly abandoned him, as did his wife.
But Clarence Thomas had seen this movie before and knew its ending by heart: He was not about to allow it to again derail his carefully laid plans by snatching victory from the jaws of defeat. This time Thomas would not be denied the brass ring of a seat on the Supreme Court. His "if you can't beat them, then join them" philosophy, had by now congealed and crystallized in his mind. Thomas was no longer a virgin, but a chameleon: Clarence Thomas had learned to change colors and become whatever he was told he was. Although he would be the last to admit it, subconsciously Thomas was a defeated man; there was no more fight left in him. In his unconscious mind, there was no longer such a thing as "independent agency" left completely and solely up to one's pride and ego. Life was too short and too complicated an affair for that; and anyway, life was just a series of compromises to be made in reverse order: first after consulting with the "powers that be," and only afterwards with ones own conscious. Independence, agency and pride also came in colors too: the color of money and ambition.
Through no fault of its own, Thomas became the darling of the rightwing as during his confirmation hearing for his appointment to the Courts, he managed to "fall uphill" through the hi-tech lynching engineered by the opposing side who had put the same dagger in Thomas' back that he had used to gut a century of Civil Rights legislation. It was only poetic justice that they had placed the dagger in the hands of his erstwhile lover and office mate, Anita Hill. In the end and on the surface Thomas seems to have won the battle to gain his ambitions: He married a white woman and was confirmed as a member of the Court. As this author makes eminently clear, Justice Thomas, ever driven by ambition, chose fame and fortune dictated by a philosophy alien to his being, over dignity and maintaining the council of his own conscience and soul. And arguably he did so at the very high price of guaranteeing that his most important victories would forever be pyrrhic.
Whatever else may be said about Justice Thomas, he still sits mostly mute, almost sphinx-like on the Supreme Court with a tattered and shredded reputation as dark and as black as his skin or his judge's robe. Fairly or not, Justice Thomas is still seen by many, if not by most, as the conservative caricature of the Twenty-First Century: The "Uncle Tom," handpicked to fill the Supreme Court Justice seat normally reserved for an "authentic black." By any standards, such a legacy is a bitter pill to swallow and a very high price to pay for fame and success.
Although my original comments hold, I now upgrade the book to Five Stars. Altogether, this was a very worthy project.
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