Cruising around the web tonight I ran across this interesting headline by Melinda Henneberger:

Clarence Thomas: Affirmative Action Not Needed… Even Though My Office Is “All White Males”

Notice the immediate implication.  Because Thomas has white clerks, then there is an immediate need for Affirmative action.  The relative merits and qualifications of the clerks is apparently not a factor.

That is a clear representation the liberal need for affirmative action:  Race is more important the ability, which last I looked is racism.  The story goes on.

Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas famously opposes affirmative action, and clearly feels slandered by the suggestion he ever benefited from such a thing.

So, if we no longer need such programs, how’s that working out in Thomas’s own office?

Not well, as it turns out: “Mine happen to be all white males,” Thomas said of his current crop of clerks. “I don’t have quotas.”

Again, the implication is that if they are all white it is a failure of affirmative action to balance the playing field not just for blacks, but for women as well.  So by their standard, Thomas is a racist.

When Rep. Jose Serrano, a Democrat from New York, asked about diversity today at a Congressional hearing on the Supreme Court’s budget, it was Justice Anthony Kennedy who answered first: “We’ve made strides,” he said, but there is just tremendous competition for qualified minority law students. “The profession as a whole is very conscious of it, very conscious.”

“Conscious,” Serrano persisted, “but, have we made progress?”

Of the most recent class of 57 clerks, Kennedy answered, only 7 were minority. And the number of women in the group has fallen dramatically, from more than a third to only 17 percent this year.

So, now the whole court is racist.

And not just that, she again touches the subject of Clarence’s actual abilities.

In a rare interview last week, Thomas told a writer for Business Week that the notion he was recruited to attend the College of Holy Cross because he is black was “a lie. I don’t mean a mistake. It’s a lie.”

After Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in 1968, Holy Cross did begin recruiting young black men. But that had nothing to do with his entrance the next year, Thomas said: “A nun suggested Holy Cross. That’s how I wound up there. Your industry has suggested that we were all recruited.”

“That was the creation of the politicians, the people with a lot of mouth and nothing to say, and your industry. Everything becomes affirmative action.”

And the comments on the post are revealing:

R-i-g-h-t, Justice Thomas. S-u-r-e. We understand that everything you’ve gotten and done has been totally on merit. Uh-huh. Anybody wanna buy a bridge?

By: dakine01 on March 08, 2007 at 03:14pm

Clarence Thomas doesn’t believe in affirmative action? Is he saying that he got his position without regard to his race?

By: expatsteve on March 08, 2007 at 03:20pm

That’s pretty rich, because the color of his skin is the ONLY reason Clarence Thomas sits on the Supreme Court.

By: OutragedMom on March 08, 2007 at 03:22pm

 

And in a great indication of tolerance a couple got racist:

That’s right, Uncle Tom, didn’t get his position from affirmative action, he got it by grinning and sucking up. He should be very proud of himself.

By: blackdemocrat on March 08, 2007 at 03:28pm

Clarence Thomas is now and has always been an Uncle Tom. The fact that his staff is underrepresented by minorities of all types reaffirms who and what he is.

By: clearvision on March 08, 2007 at 04:23pm

Two commenters did however protest:

So is it the liberal contention that unless white folk help black folk, black folk can’t make it on their own?  Wouldn’t that paternalistism be racist?

By: Gwinnett on March 08, 2007 at 03:37pm

That’s pretty rich, because the color of his skin is the ONLY reason Clarence Thomas sits on the Supreme Court. By: OutragedMom on March 08, 2007 at 03:22pm

Flag: [ flagged ]

WOW…That was the most racist thing I’ve read on any blog, right or left…

By: Phocion on March 08, 2007 at 03:30pm

I do find that encouraging.

The true irony is they, in their hatred and intolerance, totally prove why affirmative action is useless and dangerous.

Consider this:

• If their presumption is correct, and Thomas was hired for his race
• And if he was a direct benefactor of affirmative action recruiting
• And if, as they contend, he is otherwise not qualified for the position

Then riddle me this:  How is affirmative action good?  How is putting unqualified people into places where the primary qualification that matters is race or gender, a good thing?

The answer, of course, is that only liberals can properly make discerning decisions of that magnitude because conservatives just grab for the first person who sucks up, I imagine. 

So according to liberals, any prominent black hired by a republican is an Uncle Tom.  Any prominent woman would be considered likewise, I would expect.

It could not be that liberals are pandering self serving racists or sexists, who do not see women and minorities as being capable of being qualified on their own abilities. 

It would have nothing to do with the fact that liberals believe minorities and women must be coddled, carried and carefully led to positions of merits by their enlightened liberal patrons.  Such arrogance and hubris would never be a reasonable conclusion.

No, I would never say any of that.¹

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1. Yes that is a paralipsis [back]

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