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By Root 952 0

cloaked fashion, of a peculiar form of racism aimed only at conservative blacks—a fusion of racial and ideological bias of which Thomas was now the target. The senators recoiled at the near accusation and were no doubt caught off guard by it. Unfortunately, none of the senators appeared sure enough in his own perspective on race to address such a charge. Everyone could agree that lynching was deplorable. And no one wanted to be accused of being involved in one, neither the senators nor the members of the public. All too ingeniously, Thomas made it clear that anyone who supported the charge of harassment would be figuratively engaging in the deplorable act of lynching. The truth of the claim of racism or the appropriateness of the lynching metaphor in the context of an accusation by a black woman against a well-placed black man didn’t matter. Thomas, through his “high-tech lynching” speech, drew a line in a sense, and listeners were given the choice of either siding with racism or siding with Judge Thomas.

Thomas further charged that my statement and testimony were the product of a conspiracy by “someone or some groups.” Though he failed to assert who or how the conspiracy evolved, this statement, like so many of the Republican senators’ statements, went unchallenged. Since the day the public became aware of the charge, the Republicans had been looking for some connection between me and a group opposed to Thomas. Of course, no such connection existed. Nevertheless, the committee members allowed Thomas to assert a conspiracy without requesting any evidence of one. Their knowledge of the roles that interest groups generally play in politics may have hampered them from challenging Thomas’ assertion that interest groups were involved in this particular instance.

As I watched Thomas’ testimony from my hotel room, I could not help but see the irony in his claim of racism. In the years that I had known him, he had always chosen, both publicly and privately, to belittle those who saw racism as an obstacle. In the case of his sister, he asserted that the real barriers to economic and political achievement were a lack of industry and initiative and a reliance on remedial programs. Yet, now having met an obstacle to his own dream, he blamed racism. I wondered if he might then change his mind about the impact racism had on other lives. To me Judge Thomas, as the nominee of a then very popular president, was unlike individuals who found themselves outside power trying to assert their rights against the powerful. He had aligned himself with power—the very power that had exploited racism for political purposes in the infamous Willie Horton ad. Thomas was no Thurgood Marshall, whose nomination to the Supreme Court had been challenged by segregationists exploiting racist ideas and claiming that, as a black man, Marshall was not smart enough to serve on the Court. Thomas was not being challenged by separatists because of the color of his skin. In fact, Thomas’ challengers seemed to be painfully sympathetic to the racial implications of claims that he might be incompetent.

Thomas’ current claim of victimhood was so stunningly out of character that it at first struck me as disingenuous. That his confirmation had suffered a brief suspension was the result of circumstances initially set in motion by Thomas himself. Later, however, I concluded that his remarks were less disingenuous than merely calculated, just as his earlier remarks belittling racism had been. The remarks he made in the hearing were calculated to defuse the Democrats before they’d had an opportunity to approach him about the harassment charges themselves. And they were calculated to win sympathy from a public that, through the passage of antilynching and civil rights laws, had decried the use of violence to curtail the social and political activities of blacks. What better weapon to use against liberals like Kennedy and Metzenbaum or a senator from Alabama like Heflin than the fear of being labeled a racist. A claim of racism coupled with a claim of ideological persecution