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There were four dissenters to the U.S. Supreme Court decision upholding the use of affirmative action at the University of Michigan Law School, but only one, Justice Clarence Thomas, the high court's only African-American, attracts outright sneering.
Commentators love to point out the hypocrisy of Thomas, who has benefited from being black from college on. New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd dripped with contempt when she called Thomas's dissent in the case of Grutter vs. Bollinger, "a clinical study of a man who has been driven barking mad by the beneficial treatment he has received."
It is true that Thomas was admitted into Yale Law School under a program that sought to fill 10 percent of its seats with minorities. But, except for Yale, Thomas got where he is because of a cynical use of race, not some positive program of enrichment and outreach for disadvantaged minorities. Why liberals keep pointing to Thomas' career as a kind of affirmative action nirvana that should be emulated for future beneficiaries is beyond understanding.
Thomas was attractive to the Reagan administration because he was a black man with conservative views. Those were his primary qualifications for attaining the top posts at the Education Department's civil rights office and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. And those same attributes won the then 43-year-old Thomas a seat on the U.S. Supreme Court in 1991, appointed by the first President Bush to replace Thurgood Marshall.
Republicans used Thomas to put a black face on their own policies. He was, as they say, a token - an unfortunate manifestation of this nation's obsession with race.
No wonder Thomas writes with such force about the need to erase race consciousness from government. His career, as stratospheric as it has been, will always be tainted by the race factor. And he feels this stigma palpably.
"When blacks take positions in the highest places of government, industry, or academia," Thomas wrote in his Grutter dissent, "it is an open question today whether their skin color played a part in their advancement."
This is the irony of Thomas's life: His strong views on boot-strap achievement and individualism bought him a life of promotion based almost entirely on his group affiliation. Whether the benefit came from the good graces of Yale Law School's minority outreach program or the political expediencies of the Reagan and Bush administrations, Thomas has been demoralized by that nasty chafe, the constant wonder if personal accomplishment could have gotten him half as far.
Thomas' critics may snigger that here he is sitting comfortably in one of the most powerful seats of government, trying to tell everyone else to make it on merit. But this attitude only proves Thomas right. Minorities who are pushed along a special track because they couldn't otherwise compete are seen as unqualified; and the only way this looming suspicion will end is if affirmative action does. As Thomas said in Grutter: "It is uncontested that each year, the Law School admits a handful of blacks who would be admitted in the absence of racial discrimination. ... Who can differentiate between those who belong and those who do not? The majority of blacks are admitted to the Law School because of discrimination, and because of this policy all are tarred as undeserving."
Since advancing to the court, Thomas has used his position to try to dismantle a well-intentioned spoils system that diminishes its beneficiaries as much as advances them. His passion to have the government abandon its damaging paternalism is demonstrated in the way he chose to begin his Grutter dissent.
Thomas wrote: "Frederick Douglass, speaking to a group of abolitionists almost 140 years ago, delivered a message lost on today's majority:..."What I ask for the negro is not benevolence, not pity, not sympathy, but simply justice. ... All I ask is, give him a chance to stand on his own legs! Let him alone!...(Y)our interference is doing him positive injury."'
Thomas may have attained a pinnacle of power but he suffers from a lack of dignity. Affirmative action programs, as Thomas has said in earlier cases, "stamp minorities with a badge of inferiority." It is a badge Thomas wears heavily.