The Nine [60]
Indeed, Thomas believed virtually all government efforts to help black people wound up backfiring. He liked to point out that the handful of black farmers left in South Carolina were often blocked from selling their land for the best prices by environmental regulations. His favorite quote from his idol Frederick Douglass summed up his view: “The American people have always been anxious to know what they shall do with us…. I have had but one answer from the beginning. Do nothing with us!…If the Negro cannot stand on his own legs, let him fall.”
Once, and only once, Thomas tried out this argument on a skeptical audience. In 1998, he accepted an invitation to speak at the annual meeting of the National Bar Association, the largest organization of black lawyers in the country. A month before his appearance, a group of board members of the NBA wrote to Thomas purporting to withdraw the invitation, but he decided to come anyway. The hotel ballroom was tense when Thomas took the podium in front of about two thousand lawyers and judges, many of whom disagreed with him passionately on issues of civil rights. That the meeting took place in Memphis in the thirtieth-anniversary year of the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. gave the occasion even greater emotional weight.
Thomas began by recalling King’s death and his sense that “the whole world had gone mad.” Since that time, though, King’s supposed heirs had decided that the “racial divide was a permanent state…. Some go so far as to all but define each of us by our race and establish the range of our thinking and our opinions not by our deeds but by our color.” In other words, to be black was to share the orthodoxy of the civil rights movement. “I see this in much the same way I saw our denial of rights—as nothing short of a denial of our humanity.”
Thomas went on to describe how his despair grew when he was a law student, filling him with “anger, resentment and rage.” In time, though, he came to the revelation that “the individual approach, not the group approach, is the better, more acceptable, more supportable and less dangerous one. This approach is also consistent with the underlying principles of the country.” As a black man, he was entitled to these views. “I knew who I was and needed no gimmicks to affirm my identity. Nor, might I add, do I need anyone telling me who I am today. This is especially true of the psycho-silliness about forgetting my roots or self-hatred.”
Thomas concluded mournfully. “I have come here today not in anger or to anger, though my mere presence has been sufficient, obviously, to anger some. Nor have I come to defend my views, but rather to assert my right to think for myself, to refuse to have my ideas assigned to me as though I was an intellectual slave because I’m black. I come to state that I’m a man, free to think for myself and do as I please. I’ve come to assert that I am a judge and I will not be consigned the unquestioned opinions of others.”
Thomas received a polite reception from the audience, but by this point he and his adversaries were largely talking past one another. Rather than engage his critics, Thomas chose to attack straw men. No one quarreled with Thomas’s right to his own views; no one said black people had to speak with one voice; no one asserted that support for causes like affirmative action was obligatory for Thomas or anyone else; Thomas’s critics, no less than he, sought