The Green[e]house Effect: a Weblog

Maureen Dowd, Arbiter of Black Authenticity

More pernicious thinking on how black people should properly think, courtesy of a Maureen Dowd column on the Michigan affirmative action cases:

[W]hy, despite his racial blessings, does [Justice Claernce Thomas] come across as an angry, bitter, self-pitying victim?

It's impossible not to be disgusted at someone who could benefit so much from affirmative action and then pull up the ladder after himself. So maybe he is disgusted with his own great historic ingratitude.

When he switched from a Democrat to a conservative as a young man, he knew that he would be a hotter commodity in politics. But he also knew that it would bring him the scorn of blacks who deemed him a pawn of the white establishment — people like Justice Thurgood Marshall, who ridiculed Clarence Thomas and others as "goddamn black sellouts" for benefiting from affirmative action and then denigrating it.

Do you notice how she sticks in the shiv by borrowing that "sellouts" line from Thurgood Marshall? That takes real class, MoDo — if you're going to chuck insults, at least you could make them yourself, instead of hiding behind someone else.

Look, I hold no brief whatsoever for Justice Thomas. I disagree with his jurisprudence, and I don't admire much about him personally. But the civil rights movement, if it was about anything, was about giving him and every other African American the freedom to be whatever they want to be. It would be a ridiculous fate if those who marched and died freed us of the tyranny of others' bigotry just so we could act like bigots towards ourselves. Or — when it comes to Ms. Dowd and others like her — so we could replace a discredited bigotry with a more socially acceptable kind that's just as condescending, just as intellectually bankrupt, and just as wrong.

Correct me if I'm wrong here, but last time I checked, blackness was a skin tone, and maybe even a state of mind — but not an ideology. Black people disagree with each other. We always have, and always will. What's great about this country — especially now that we have a full stake in it — is that we have the freedom to disagree as much as we like.

I might deride Justice Thomas's ideas for a fair approximation of eternity, but I don't presume to tell him that his beliefs make him any less black than I am. Dowd has no standing to appoint herself to make that judgment, either — and in the America I live in, none of us does.

Posted by Greg Greene at June 25, 2003 05:25 PM