When Affirmative Action Worlds Collide: Clarence Thomas and Ketanji Brown Jackson

When Affirmative Action Worlds Collide: Clarence Thomas and Ketanji Brown Jackson

In connection with the recent SCOTUS affirmative action decision, Clarence Thomas took special care to offer a critique of Ketanji Brown Jackson’s dissent in the case, as discussed in Professor Jacobson’s post entitled, “Clarence Thomas Reading His Epic Takedown Of KBJ’s Affirmative Action Dissent Left Her ‘Visibly Angry.’” From Thomas’ description:

JUSTICE JACKSON’s race-infused world view falls flat at each step…. A contrary, myopic world view based on individuals’ skin color to the total exclusion of their personal choices is nothing short of racial determinism …. Worse, the classifications that JUSTICE JACKSON draws are themselves race-based stereotypes…. “

Here’s more of what Justice Thomas had to say on the matter.

I find it particularly interesting to look at the backgrounds of Justice Thomas and Justice Jackson, the two black justices who are on such opposite sides of this issue. Although they may have ended up serving on the same Supreme Court, they started out in very different places.

While we’re on the subject, who had the privilege and who didn’t? Who appeared to have been more oppressed by racial discrimination?

Clarence Thomas is 75, and was born under segregation in the deep South. Ketanji Brown Jackson is 52 and was born in unsegregated DC and grew up in unsegregated Florida. But that’s just the beginning of how different their early worlds were.

From Clarence Thomas’ Wiki profile [emphasis mine].

Thomas was born on June 23, 1948, in Pin Point, Georgia. Pin Point was a small, predominantly black community near Savannah founded by freedmen after the Civil War. He was the second of three children born to M. C. Thomas, a farm worker, and Leola “Pigeon” Williams, a domestic worker. They were descendants of enslaved people and spoke Gullah as a first language.…

Thomas’s father left the family when Thomas was two years old. Though Thomas’s mother worked long hours, she was sometimes paid only pennies per day, struggled to earn enough money to feed the family, and was forced to rely on charity. After a house fire left them homeless, Thomas and his younger brother, Myers, were taken to live in Savannah with his maternal grandparents, Myers and Christine Anderson.

Thomas experienced amenities such as indoor plumbing and regular meals for the first time while staying in Savannah. Myers Anderson had little formal education but built a thriving fuel oil business that also sold ice. When Thomas was ten years old, Anderson started taking the family to help at a farm every day from sunrise to sunset. He believed in hard work and self-reliance, and counseled Thomas to “never let the sun catch you in bed”. He also impressed upon his grandsons the importance of a good education.

More can be found here on Justice Thomas’ background experiences. His mother was eighteen when he was born, and they lived in “a one-room wooden house near the marshes. It had dirt floors and no plumbing or electricity” [emphasis mine]:

A devout Catholic who created his own fuel oil business in Savannah in the 1950s, [Thomas’ grandfather] provided the example of self-motivation in the face of segregation that would inspire his grandson. Through hard work and a refusal to submit to the poverty and degradation of menial work, he “did for himself,” as one of his favorite expressions went. He fed and cared for Clarence and Peanut and paid for their education at St. Benedict the Moor; at this all-black grammar school, white nuns exercised firm discipline. The racist vigilante group known as the Ku Klux Klan often threatened the nuns, who rode on the backs of buses with their students and demanded hard work and promptly completed assignments.

It’s not hard to imagine why Thomas is offended at the idea that a legacy of slavery hampers every single black student today.

Clarence’s favorite retreat was a blacks-only library in Savannah—the Savannah public library was for whites—funded by the Carnegie family. His browsing there helped to formulate his ambition: He would one day have the sophistication to understand magazines like the New Yorker.

Remember that Justice Thomas’ first language was Gullah.

Justice Thomas had direct experience of affirmative action and its effects:

In his memoir, “My Grandfather’s Son,” Thomas says he felt “tricked” by paternalistic Whites at Yale who recruited Black students.

“After graduating from Yale, I met a black alumnus of the University of Michigan Law School who told me that he’d made a point of not mentioning his race on his application. I wished with all my heart that I’d done the same,” he wrote.

“I learned the hard way that a law degree from Yale meant one thing for White graduates and another for blacks, no matter how much anyone denied it,” Thomas wrote. “As a symbol of my disillusionment, I peeled a fifteen-cent price sticker off a package of cigars and stuck it on the frame of my law degree to remind myself of the mistake I’d made by going to Yale.”

Justice Thomas’ early hardship is a contrast to that of Justice Jackson, whose story is rather different, to say the least:

Johnny and Ellery Brown, Jackson’s parents, have been married for 54 years.

Intact family.

Both Miami natives, [Brown Jackson’s parents] were raised in the Jim Crow South, attended segregated primary schools, before graduating from historically Black colleges and universities, according to her White House biography. They settled in DC and both worked as public school teachers.

So it’s actually Justice Jackson’s parents who are of Justice Thomas’ raised-in-segregation generation (although perhaps not so poverty-striken as Thomas’ rather extreme situation), and they became teachers. Then her father went to law school.

“My parents taught me that, unlike the many barriers that they had had to face growing up, my path was clearer, such that if I worked hard and believed in myself, in America I could do anything or be anything I wanted to be.”

It sounds as though Justice Jackson’s parents may have been of similar mindset about that as Justice Thomas himself, since this quote resembles his philosophy.

For decades there have been many criticisms of Justice Thomas from the left, many of them quite vicious and personal. And yet his story and achievements against great odds would be legendary . . . if only he were a Democrat rather than a conservative.

[Neo is a writer with degrees in law and family therapy, who blogs at the new neo.]

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