What, then, are we to make of the most widely discussed case of all, that of Clarence Thomas? The charges of betrayal made against Thomas were many and mean. He disgraced his race by marrying a white woman. He relied upon affirmative action to get ahead and then pulled up the ladder after him. His conservative political views condemn others of his race to lives of poverty and desperation. He does the white man's bidding.

Did he rely on affirmative action to get ahead? Were his qualifications for college and law school indeed below the standard for admission?

Did he pull the ladder up after him? I don't see it. Colin Powell and Condoleeza Rice were advanced just as he was, so I don't see how any of the opportunities he enjoyed were removed from others.

Nor do his conservtive political views condemn others of his race to lives of poverty and desperation. They have plenty of ways to raise their standard of living. The only thing conservative politics has taken away from blacks is the opportunity to be paid with a life of leisure in exchange for agreeing to remain at the bottom without upward progress (the requirement to continue receiving Welfare payments). Blacks are still free to make use of the public library and cheap paperback books to educate themselves, to attend private colleges that admit high-scoring students regardless of financial need, to learn trades, to open Mom&Pop grocery stores, etc., etc.

Does he do the White Man's bidding? Ted Kennedy is a white man, and Thomas most certainly doesn't do his bidding!

So, basically, the accusations against Clarence Thomas are vile lies which, to the extent that they are not ignored, should be resented and condemned.

If whites can disagree about the advantages and disadvantages of socialism and free enterprise, then so can black people, and it is presumptuous and patronizing of black people to suggest otherwise..

Did he rely on affirmative action to get ahead? Were his qualifications for college and law school indeed below the standard for admission?

Did he pull the ladder up after him? I don't see it. Colin Powell and Condoleeza Rice were advanced just as he was, so I don't see how any of the opportunities he enjoyed were removed from others.

So, basically, the accusations against Clarence Thomas are vile lies which, to the extent that they are not ignored, should be resented and condemned.

In the 60s, Thomas attended Holy Cross as an undergraduate on a scholarship set aside for minorities. He was admitted to Yale Law as part of a minority quota program (it sought 10 percent minority enrollment) and enjoyed a substantial financial aid package. In the 80s, speaking to staff at the Equal Opportunity Employment Commission, he characterized affirmative action programs as “all that stand between the first 17 years of my life and the second 17 years.”

In the 90s, at Stanford, Rice described herself as a “beneficiary of a Stanford strategy that took affirmative action seriously.” She again acknowledged herself as a beneficiary repeatedly in 2003 when asked to comment on the Michigan University affirmative action lawsuit. I recall Powell acknowledging himself as an affirmative action beneficiary during his military career in My American Journey. In a recent magazine piece, he recalls winning command of a brigade and being accused by white colleagues of only getting it because he was black. Powell’s response was that he didn’t care how he got it as long as he performed well in the job.

All three successfully exploited the access codified affirmative action programs provided qualified women and ethnic minorities to seats at the table – seats that are otherwise generally just beyond reach to members of those groups.

Powell continues to support affirmative action; Rice supports a more restricted version. Thomas stands alone among the three in asserting minorities and blacks in particular would benefit from its abolishment.

The people who will be affected by Thomas’s anti-affirmative action Supreme Court votes are those pursuing academic and professional careers in the wake of those votes. Rice and Powell are Thomas’s contemporaries, not his inheritors. They were exploiting the opportunities affirmative action provided at the same time Thomas was, not after the gate was lowered.

Nor do his conservtive political views condemn others of his race to lives of poverty and desperation. They have plenty of ways to raise their standard of living. The only thing conservative politics has taken away from blacks is the opportunity to be paid with a life of leisure in exchange for agreeing to remain at the bottom without upward progress (the requirement to continue receiving Welfare payments).

If you believe that compulsive self-destruction is what keeps poor blacks (poor people in general) mired in the cycle of poverty, despite the plenty of ways they have to raise their standard of living, read no further.

If you suspect otherwise, Bill Strickland just published an eye-opening memoir called Make the Impossible Possible. Strickland is the founder of a wildly successful arts and vocational corporation for the poor called Manchester Bidwell that has lifted thousands of participants out of poverty and into the middle-class. He's also a MacArthur “genius” award winner, a college affirmative action beneficiary (and subsequent cum laude graduate), and all-around inspiration. More important, he lived the circumstances that so many poor blacks get trapped in and does a great job of explaining the elements and interventions that helped him escape and thrive – and how he incorporates those elements so effectively into his programs. It’s a relatively short, fast read. I’m not saying it will change your political affiliation, but it might add some nuance to your views on the interplay between race, poverty, and achievement.

The question is not whether Rice and Thomas were included in the affirmative action program, but whether their scores were too low to qualify otherwise. Their critics imply the latter -- otherwise one could not say that their success was dependent upon it.

But I kind of doubt that Thomas and Rice have lower IQs than the average student at the colleges whose AA programs sought them out, and I suspect they would have qualified even with race-blind entrance requirements. If that's true, then Thomas is right to be indignant that people like you suspect that he would have been unqualified for admission on a race-blind basis. He is right that such programs smear the reputations of those blacks who are objectively qualified.

As for extra financial help for blacks, I think had affirmative action programs limited it to that and not been so flagrant in their preferences, no one would have complained. Students in school generally have no idea whether a classmate's tuition was paid by a scholarship or his Daddy -- but they do see a difference when a classmate comes from a culture that crippled his ability to do the kind of thinking required by IQ tests (and the many academic subjects the aptitude for which is highly correlated with skill on IQ tests).

Ironically, the end of race-based admission standards is probably better even for the less elite blacks. For example, law students who are likely to have trouble passing the Bar exam are more likely to be successful in a program that assumes students will have difficulty and coaches them for it -- in contrast to an elite school that treats passage of the Bar exam as nothing more than a minor bureaucratic nuisance for its brilliant students.

Affirmative action is used to bypass pure reliance on test scores in order to provide the particular venue with racial and income diversity. Bigot that you are -- you automatically associate this with helping the unqualified and Thomas has given support to that canard many times. But in fact those who are beneficiaries of affirmative action are those who can clearly perform the tasks involved, but could not get into programs because others of majority ethnicity are MORE qualified by standard measures. In the Bakke decision, which attacked affirmative action in medical schools, Bakke didn't argue that minorities chosen for med school were unqualified, only that he was MORE qualified on the standard measures -- grades and test scores -- and thus deserved selection over anyone below him. The issue is NOT whether or not Thomas or Rice could have qualified for the affirmative action programs which accepted them. It's that they got into those programs even though they were not the MOST qualified according to standard measures.

I have a good friend who is a professor at Michigan and when I asked him about the affirmative action lawsuits there, his reply was that he didn't know the specifics as they didn't affect his department, but he added "in MY department, if we relied only on grades and test scores, there wouldn't be a single WHITE person chosen. They'd all be Asians, and they're NOT better students. They're better test takers, but they don't have much creativity because they're trained to test taking rather than creative thinking." Since my friend is happily married to an Asian, I hardly think this is a prejudiced view.

It's the view of someone who is able to see beyond the standard measures for things that are more important than they are to the program. Ethnic diversity is simply another such thing, in that it provides points of view and life experience which the standard measures tend to filter out.

I think you're defending Thomas because his views reflect your own prejudices about most black people -- people who actually WANT "the opportunity to be paid with a life of leisure in exchange for agreeing to remain at the bottom without upward progress (the requirement to continue receiving Welfare payments)." Thomas is a sellout precisely because bigoted minds like yours are given aid and comfort by him.

And, also of course, because he WAS given breaks by affirmative action and now blocks as much of it as he can. You don't agree that that isn't "pulling up the ladder" because it destroys your defense of him, but what else is it when a man profits from a program which he proceeds to deny to others when he has the power to do so?

Two final points: Thomas is going to vote, in the next few weeks, to establish what is clearly a poll tax (in the form of a photo ID requirement that will disenfranchise some 12% of Hoosiers) in Indiana, in spite of the fact that the state of Indiana admitted in argument that they had no record of a single case of voter fraud with which to justify the program. I happened to be in Albany, GA, Clarence Thomas's home town, in 1963 as part of a group of people observing a voter registration drive in Albany's ghetto (I may have met him, for all I know). In spite of the incredible bravery of civil rights workers who lived under constant death threats and received beatings as a matter of course, nobody registered to vote because they were intimated by what can only be called terrorism. That a man whose youth was spent in such conditions to then vote for ANYTHING that limits the right of people to vote, without compelling evidence of fraud, is treason. If Thomas changes his mind and vote against it, I'll take another look at the man. If not, what's YOUR excuse?

The other thing is: what is this fixation you have with IQ -- you keep referring to it as if it had some meaning in this discussion. IQ NEVER comes into play in affirmative actions cases -- NEVER. Affirmative action cases are argued over test scores, grades, perhaps achievements in some cases, bravery in the case of soldiers, competence in the case of workers, but you cannot identify for me a single affirmative action case that involved an IQ test score.

I must say, Professor Fsilber is a remarkably cogent and "articulate" fellow, for a bigot anyway. That he presumed an IQ score relates to access to Harvard or Yale is all the more fascinating since last I checked no such requirement is expected on any application I have read, and I have read many myself as I am making my way through the slough of law school myself. Perhaps by way of personal rejection, the assumption was made you were not quite "up to the task" but if one expects your failings to be the failings of all is a sad commentary on you. The several Black friends that I know had no such contention getting into the Ivy Leagues and the elite public schools. There goes the master race theory.

As far as Uncle Thomas is concerned, he was not qualified to attend Yale Law, and everybody knows it. Without that program he would never have been accepted. Unlike Rice (a child prodigy) Thomas was a so-so student, and whether he wants to admit it or not, was not a remarkably inspired student at Yale Law school. His rather average philosophy and work on the Court is all the more evidence of that fact (Oliver Wendell Holmes, he is not). Indeed, it was race that even put him on the Court to begin with, and we all know that as well. And yet, for all of this he starts playing this race game and assumes he is some sort of "victim" of discrimination when confronted with that very fact, the very thing that I was under the impression as a conservative he rallied against (You know, the BS about us Black folk "stop playing the victim game," etc. el).

But what do you expect from a man who has been nothing but an opportunist who, based on his memoir (not quite Obama's Dreams of My Father or Greenspan's The Age of Turbulence) needed white conservatives to do most of the thinking for him. It's rather sad. Not shocking, but sad all the same for a "genius."

As far as your novel claim about IQ scores and other nonsense of the trolling class (begs the question if he's so brave to share his Aryan opinions with people outside of the internet) is important to success. Again, last I checked it was not relevant because if it was G.W. Bush would never have been accepted into Yale and Harvard Business School. It's worth noting, however, that our chief did apply to the University of Texas Law School before attending HBS--and was soundly rejected.

IQ, I guess.

the_slasher14:

Affirmative action is used to bypass pure reliance on test scores in order to provide the particular venue with racial and income diversity. Bigot that you are -- you automatically associate this with helping the unqualified

... But in fact those who are beneficiaries of affirmative action are those who can clearly perform the tasks involved, but could not get into programs because others of majority ethnicity are MORE qualified by standard measures.

If it is not about helping the unqualified, then how do you explain the high flunk-out rate of affirmative-action enrollees? Perhaps you attribute it to black laziness, or to the bigotry of white supremist Ivy League professors refusing to give affirmative action students good grades out of sheer racism.

the_slasher14:

In the Bakke decision, which attacked affirmative action in medical schools, Bakke didn't argue that minorities chosen for med school were unqualified, only that he was MORE qualified on the standard measures -- grades and test scores -- and thus deserved selection over anyone below him. The issue is NOT whether or not Thomas or Rice could have qualified for the affirmative action programs which accepted them. It's that they got into those programs even though they were not the MOST qualified according to standard measures.

Too bad the AA people got greedy and didn't limit the program to students who were qualified-but-perhaps-not-most­-qualified, opening it up to people who were lets-give-him-a-chance-and-hop­e-he-rises-to-the-challenge qualified.

the_slasher14:

I have a good friend who is a professor at Michigan and when I asked him about the affirmative action lawsuits there, his reply was that he didn't know the specifics as they didn't affect his department, but he added "in MY department, if we relied only on grades and test scores, there wouldn't be a single WHITE person chosen. They'd all be Asians, and they're NOT better students. They're better test takers, but they don't have much creativity because they're trained to test taking rather than creative thinking." Since my friend is happily married to an Asian, I hardly think this is a prejudiced view.

His marriage is a strong argument against anti-Asian hatred, but many a man has been willing to marry a hot women whose intellect he does not consider to be her strong point. I have no way of judging the accuracy of his racial generalization, but I do think it's interesting that this was exactly the kind of thing that was said about Jews at Harvard a hundred years ago to justify limiting the acceptance of Jews to a small percentage.

the_slasher14:

It's the view of someone who is able to see beyond the standard measures for things that are more important than they are to the program. Ethnic diversity is simply another such thing, in that it provides points of view and life experience which the standard measures tend to filter out.

And yet, no one argued the value of ethnic diversity for its own sake -- until the courts ruled out other justifications for maintaining a quota for blacks. Ethnic diversity doesn't seem to be important for all-black dormatories, nor for faculties of African American Studies.

the_slasher14:

I think you're defending Thomas because his views reflect your own prejudices about most black people -- people who actually WANT "the opportunity to be paid with a life of leisure in exchange for agreeing to remain at the bottom without upward progress (the requirement to continue receiving Welfare payments)." Thomas is a sellout precisely because bigoted minds like yours are given aid and comfort by him.

I have no interest in discussing or defending my own prejudices. I would say that I think it's presumptuous (i.e., rude) for you to try and tell me what it is I believe.

the_slasher14:

And, also of course, because he WAS given breaks by affirmative action and now blocks as much of it as he can. You don't agree that that isn't "pulling up the ladder" because it destroys your defense of him, but what else is it when a man profits from a program which he proceeds to deny to others when he has the power to do so?

I liken it to the white who benefitted from slavery or Jim Crow segregation while growing up, who then proceeds to deny those benefits to other whites when he has the power to do so.

the_slasher14:

Two final points: Thomas is going to vote, in the next few weeks, to establish what is clearly a poll tax (in the form of a photo ID requirement that will disenfranchise some 12% of Hoosiers) in Indiana, in spite of the fact that the state of Indiana admitted in argument that they had no record of a single case of voter fraud with which to justify the program. I happened to be in Albany, GA, Clarence Thomas's home town, in 1963 as part of a group of people observing a voter registration drive in Albany's ghetto (I may have met him, for all I know). In spite of the incredible bravery of civil rights workers who lived under constant death threats and received beatings as a matter of course, nobody registered to vote because they were intimated by what can only be called terrorism. That a man whose youth was spent in such conditions to then vote for ANYTHING that limits the right of people to vote, without compelling evidence of fraud, is treason. If Thomas changes his mind and vote against it, I'll take another look at the man. If not, what's YOUR excuse?

I think the main purpose of this is to pre-empt voter fraud by illegal aliens. I don't see it as an attempt to disenfranchised blacks, or any other specific category of legimate voters.

the_slasher14:

The other thing is: what is this fixation you have with IQ -- you keep referring to it as if it had some meaning in this discussion. IQ NEVER comes into play in affirmative actions cases -- NEVER. Affirmative action cases are argued over test scores, grades, perhaps achievements in some cases, bravery in the case of soldiers, competence in the case of workers, but you cannot identify for me a single affirmative action case that involved an IQ test score.

I never said IQ did have anything directly to do with AA. I merely expressed my skepticism that AA brought Thomas into programs for which he was intellectually incapable, thereby distinguishing him from so many such people who are brought in under today's racial quotas. (Even among those who do not drop out, many must take refuge from academic standards within all-black pseudo majors such as Black Victimology. Someone who might have made a perfectly good accountant at a middle-tier school now becomes a less-than-worthless political apparatchik.)

It also seems ironic for cos1979 to note that it was race that put Clarence Thomas on the court, when it was the Democrats who were demanding that the position be filled by a black person. But the Warren Court had already done enough damage, and it was the conservatives' turn to influence the Court in a conservative direction, and I don't know of anyone else who would have better satisfied those two concerns. In any case, I certainly don't think Thomas is any less clear in his thinking than, say, Sandra Day O'Connor. At least he respects the Constitution -- to me that is the most important attribute in a Supreme Court Justice.

Personally, affirmative action is not an issue that I care about very strongly. If a school reserves 10% of its places for people on sentimental grounds, to me that's no different than if they had chosen to shrink the size of the class by 10% (which is their perogative). I'm more concerned about other issues, and it is for the sake of those issues that I am deeply grateful for Clarence Thomas' presence on the Court.

Much of the discussion here is about affirmative action and the relative merits and drawbacks of such programs, as well as the identity crises that go along with being a high-achieving black celebrity, as well as a low-achieving black citizen. I'd like to elaborate some on what is REALLY holding black people back.

I doubt that anybody really appreciates the weight of the social factors which oppress black students attempting to achieve. If a child grows up hungry, as I did, in a home where rats are crawling on them at night, with parents who verbally berate them or beat them, the power of that can't be underestimated. Some people seem to think that willpower and hard work can overcome the legacy of pain and alienation that such a history engenders. I'm not so convinced. Despite my upbringing, I managed to get into an elite affirmative action preparatory program called Prep for Prep, and then into Harvard. I then dropped out and spent the rest of the ten years since in the mental health system. The book by David K. Shipler, The Working Poor, talks a lot about the conditions in the inner city which lead to the cycle of poverty being perpetuated. I'm not sure anybody who reads that book can refute the fact that inner-city and poor children's lives are colored by their conditions. When you add in a culture that denigrates the very process of education and learning, you have a lethal mix.

These are CHILDREN we're talking about. Children who do not have the inner resources to ignore or rationalize the fact that all the paintings at MOMA are done by whites and all the security guards are black. Children who depend on the very people who are beating or molesting them for a sense of identity and place in the world. Children who are supposed to be fighting valiantly against the evils of racism and achieving in unfriendly institutions when they're still learning to manage their budgets and do their laundry. I agree that all races should absolutely be making use of public libraries and the privilege of education and NPR and PBS. However, does anybody really pay attention to the undeniable fact that the same immigrant groups which achieve so miraculously in the United States are those for whom family is an imperative unlike any other? Asians, Jews, Africans and other high-achieving immigrant groups both have historically held the family above all. I'm not sure what the statistics are on Latinos.

But when family is not an imperative what suffers is more than the parents' marriage. When family is not an imperative children fall between the cracks. They get beaten, they get berated, they get neglected, they get molested by boyfriends just passing through. Their incomes suffer, so they have to live in substandard housing with mold and lead paint and mice and roaches and rats. They go to substandard schools where learning is the joke that black popular culture suggests it is. They go hungry. Under these circumstances, I wouldn't have the energy to go to the public library either.

Except, oh, yeah. I did. Supported by teachers who adored me and parents who, however cruel, venerated education, I worked my way to Harvard, escaping a childhood of abuse and neglect. And promptly lost my scholarship for "lack of soft skills", like bathing and housekeeping and time management and social relations. Maybe the ghetto creeps who made fun of my Oreo ways and love of learning knew something I didn't. Maybe my time would have been better spent learning how to get along socially, how to relate to people, how to wash my body and keep a house clean. I'll never know.

So back to affirmative action. Until the social infrastructure of the nation has been repaired to the point where children are warm, fed, and protected from atrocity, I don't think we have any business talking about whether or not affirmative action is beneficial. We are talking about CHILDREN here. Children should not be expected to bear the burdens of adults- namely, the burden of racism. Why are we talking about how they "perform"? Is it really about that? 18- and 19-year-olds perform like they've been indoctrinated to perform. And why are we expecting a white child from a 2-parent household, maybe not rich but certainly comfortable, who has never known the sting of hunger or the iciness of parental rejection, up to the same standards as a kid with a single mother who is two generations away from a grandmother or grandfather who worked in the factory or as a washerwoman and for purposes of survival had to view the white man as an evil force of nature, who grew up in a tenement which may not have been as clean as it could have been, who simply was never exposed to the idea of investing one's money or taking a yearly vacation or even sometimes eating three meals a day? The ratio of poor white children living in poverty is one in ten. The ratio of black children living in poverty is one in three. A child's first 25 years sets the stage for the rest of their lifetimes- where they go to school, who they marry, where they settle down, lifestyle habits, so on and so forth. A child born into poverty, 99 times out of 100, is way behind the rest of the children at the starting line.

Much of what fsilber says is true. But truth doesn't always tell the whole story. As long as the government keeps looking for quick fixes to deep-rooted problems, nothing will change.

Too much to respond to here. Two points I note in particular:

1. My friend's Asian wife also has a PHD, so I don't really think he regards her as a bimbo -- nice try. As for your remark about the Jewish quotas, nobody -- Jews or Christians -- believed that the quotas were just because Jews were uncreative grinds. Everybody knew that it was done to preserve an class network -- one which still exists, BTW, as witness our "gentleman's C" President who somehow got into Harvard Business School.

2. You liken "pulling up the ladder" to the white who enjoys the benefits of Jim Crow and then doesn't pass it on to other whites. These are the words of someone who doesn't understand what Jim Crow was. Jim Crow wasn't "affirmative action." The benefits of Jim Crow were passed on to ALL whites -- in the form of their being able to vote; to serve on juries that would acquit whites of crimes against blacks; to hold jobs and offices that were open to whites only, etc., etc. It was the systematic suppression of the rights of citizens based upon color alone. AA is almost never based only on color -- nobody argues that D- black students should be admitted over A+ whites (as happened under Jim Crow in segregated colleges), but that a certain number of A- blacks get a leg up. Yes, some whites benefitted a hell of a lot more from Jim Crow than others, but even the poorest of them got something out of it. Thomas, on the other hand, got a benefit from AA that was specific to him and very, very few other blacks, and since then has attempted to DESTROY even that. The analogy is ridiculous.

Clarence Thomas belongs on the court, and Ruth Bader Ginsberg does not. Its that simple.

jg