The Two Clarence Thomases
One of my contentions in the book on Clarence Thomas I’m writing is that while Thomas was championed during his Senate hearings as a man of the South—the Pin Point strategy, they called it—he is in fact very much a product of the North. Specifically, a North that gave lip service to racial equality, that deemed racism a southern problem, but that was either exploding with raw hatred and bigotry or hiding that racism beneath a veneer of liberal do-good-ism. Re-reading several books about Thomas’s time at Holy Cross, where he was an undergraduate in the late 1960s and early 1970s, you get a strong sense of this, not just from Thomas but also from his black classmates and close friends, men like Edward P. Jones, who would […]
- Categories Political Theory, The Left, The Right