Surely, Clarence Thomas knew the real reason he was invited on those fancy trips | Opinion
Several years ago, when my son was 6, he and I went to Disney World.
I made the weeklong reservation in my name and, over the phone, suggested to a Disney executive a column on navigating the park as a single parent.
Everything was Kool & the Gang, and the executive and I made plans to meet at one of the property’s restaurants. Since neither of us knew what the other looked like, he had me paged over the loudspeaker. After being seated, I noticed people looking at us, and then one kid, then another, sallied forth and asked for an autograph.
“Wow: Fans,” I thought. “I didn’t know they got the News & Observer all the way down here.” The third kid said something about being an Atlanta Falcons fan, but that I was his favorite player.
That’s when it hit me: they thought I was Barry Sanders, the Hall of Fame running back for the Detroit Lions. I was crushed to discover that they weren’t fans of my facility with the English language, my ability to get right to the point of complex issues, my unrivaled knowledge of every episode of “Sanford & Son.”
“Crushed” is also how I suspect Clarence Thomas feels upon discovering that Harlan Crow, the billionaire who has been his globetrotting buddy for decades, wasn’t just interested in his sparkling wit and charm when he invited Thomas to faraway places with strange-sounding names aboard his private jet and yacht. Most of us would question why Ol’ Harl’ is always inviting us places, taking us on tours of his private Nazi and Hitler collection. We’d definitely want to know why he was buying up and refurbishing real estate we own, including our mama’s house.
But not Clarence. He insists that he thought Crow simply wanted to hang out and eat filet mignon with him. Hahahaha.
No one should be surprised at Thomas’s apparent ability to delude himself into thinking that his power to influence all aspects of American life for decades to come had nothing to do with his popularity, and that Harlan was only interested in him for his witty after-dinner bon mots.
Thomas, after all, is the guy who has also deluded himself into thinking that racial affirmative action crushes the souls of anyone who receives it — except him.
It can be persuasively argued that each of Thomas’s high government jobs — with the civil rights position at the U.S. Department of Education, then at the EEOC, then at the U.S. Court of Appeals and, finally, the U.S. Supreme Court — owed, wholly or in part, to his being Black.
Even Thomas has acknowledged in various speeches and writings that being the beneficiary of such policies, from government and private institutions, helped him escape a life of poverty in rural Georgia.
For everyone else, though, he thinks it’s a soul-crusher and leads to nothing but dependency. That’s why he has voted against just about any iteration of affirmative action that comes before the court with the vigor of a man shooing flies away from his freshly baked cake.
Me? I proudly acknowledge that a key opportunity for me was from an affirmative action by someone. When I applied for a job to become the first Black reporter in the history of my hometown Richmond County Daily Journal in 1982, publisher and owner J. Neal Cadieu called me and said simply “It’s time.”
Uncharacteristically, when his grasping nature was reported on Thomas responded. In a statement released through the court, he called the Crows among his “dearest friends.”
I’ll bet they are: if I knew someone with a yacht like that, they’d be my dearest friend, too. A chastened Thomas said in that same statement that he understands now that the guidelines for reporting “personal hospitality” have been changed.
“And, it is, of course,” he said, “my intent to follow this guidance in the future.”
That should be easy to do, since it seems that Ol’ Harl and Clarence have already jetted or sailed everywhere worth seeing.
Except, perhaps, Disney World.