The Enigma of Clarence Thomas by Corey Robin

Author:Corey Robin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.

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IF IT WASN’T clear to everyone at the time, it’s since become clear that Thomas lied to the Judiciary Committee when he stated that he never sexually harassed Anita Hill. The evidence amassed by investigative journalists over the years is simply too great to claim otherwise.45 It’s also clear that when Thomas elected not to rebut or refute Hill’s accusations but rather to repulse them—claiming that he was the victim of a “high-tech lynching for uppity blacks,” that he had been “hung from a tree,” that he had been brought down by an “assassin’s bullet,” that the Senate and liberal interest groups were like the Ku Klux Klan and the Knights of the White Camelia—he was telling, if not the truth, then at least his truth.46 The people who know Thomas best say that his reaction to Hill’s accusations was authentic, the moment when he revealed himself, as he understood himself, to the world. Even Kendall Thomas, one of Thomas’s sharpest critics in the legal academy, does not deny “the depth of … feeling” behind the vivid and violent metaphors Thomas used against his accusers. Nor does he question Clarence Thomas’s “conviction that, but for the color of his skin, he would never have been asked to answer these questions about the content of his character.”47

With the passage of time, the intensity of Thomas’s feelings about the hearings has only grown. After five years on the Court, he described the hearings as “just a whipping … a plain whipping.” His 2008 memoir contains references to himself as Bigger Thomas of Native Son, who is unjustly accused of raping and intentionally murdering a white woman (Bigger Thomas does accidentally kill the woman; he also deliberately rapes and kills a black woman), and Tom Robinson of To Kill a Mockingbird, who is likewise unjustly accused of raping a white woman. Thomas’s memoir also compares liberals and Democrats to slaveholders and the KKK.48

Anita Hill was an overdetermined figure for Thomas, so laden with political and social meaning he could not but respond to her accusations as he did. For years, he had been explaining that black men—stolid, moral, responsible, authoritative, upstanding black men—were the key to the fate of the black community. For years, he had been narrating his family story, extracting from the examples of Myers and C. a larger political truth about the toxic effects of liberalism on African Americans. For years, he had been constructing in his head a constitutional order founded upon the power and example of black men. There never was any room in this dreamscape for black women. At best, they were victims of black male criminals and ne’er-do-wells empowered by the rights revolution to abandon their responsibilities. At worst, they were like his mother or sister, treacherous sources of dependency and dissolution.49 One way or another, black women would fail to provide the firm authority that black boys needed if they were to grow up to be responsible and powerful black men, able to protect their families from a threatening white world.

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