Oct 11 2007
Clarence Thomas, the ‘Anti-Black’
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By Black Agenda Report executive editor Glen Ford
10/12/07
The most blatant and unashamed African American-hater on the U.S. Supreme Court - and probably on the national scene - is Clarence Thomas, a psychologically damaged ally of the worst sections of the white ruling class. Thomas is often described as a “complicated” personality, but that’s just a euphemism for a crazy self-loathing that he projects on the rest of Black America. Dirt-poor Pin Point, Georgia, the peers of his youth who called him “America’s Blackest Child,” and an overbearing grandfather who wanted more than young Clarence was willing to give, made Thomas useful to no one but Black people’s most implacable foes, for whom he has become a deranged pit bull. Viewers of 60 Minutes were permitted to learn none of that, as CBS circled its protective wagons around the Most Despised Black Man in Black America.
Clarence Thomas is a deeply troubled man - a grotesquely twisted, “Down Home”-grown Black personality at war with the demons of his dark-skinned, dirt poor youth. Although Thomas has accumulated many “enemies” - earned and imagined - since his entrance to the white world in the 10th grade in Savannah, Georgia, his core pathology is Black-directed - a trait so obvious it was immediately perceived by a succession of white Republican racists who rocketed him to the U.S. Supreme Court with obscene haste to become a hit-man against his own people.
Thomas is a perverse right-wing joke played on Blacks and, being of above average intelligence despite his mental illness, he knows it. But it is a knowledge he cannot endure, a burden that has made him a pathological liar, who blurts out contradictions so antithetical to each other that they cannot possibly coexist in the same brain without a constant roiling and crashing that puts him at flight from himself and all those who remind him of his now hopelessly entangled torments and tormentors.