“My sadness is that we are probably today more race and difference-conscious than I was in the 1960s when I went to school. To my knowledge, I was the first black kid in Savannah, Georgia, to go to a white school. Rarely did the issue of race come up,” Thomas said during a chapel service hosted by the nondenominational Christian university. “Now, name a day it doesn’t come up. Differences in race, differences in sex, somebody doesn’t look at you right, somebody says something. Everybody is sensitive. If I had been as sensitive as that in the 1960s, I’d still be in Savannah. Every person in this room has endured a slight. Every person. Somebody has said something that has hurt their feelings or did something to them — left them out.And this:
“That’s a part of the deal,” he added."
"Throughout his career, Thomas said, he has experienced more instances of discrimination and poor treatment in the North than the South.Read the whole thing.
“The worst I have been treated was by northern liberal elites. The absolute worst I have ever been treated,” Thomas said. “The worst things that have been done to me, the worst things that have been said about me, by northern liberal elites, not by the people of Savannah, Georgia.”
Actually this comports with the musings of Duck Dynasty's Phil about the negligible racism of his youth in the South. That comment raised the "northern liberal elites'" anger to a raging boil: the narrative has been breeched. It is racist for a Southerner to claim he is not racist.
5 comments:
What’s so remarkable about this statement that it neglects the fact that in the mid-60s, when he was a kid, you could get killed if you were a black person for speaking about race
We are all guilty of this on occasion, a little revisionist history. We tend to look back and say things were better back then. He knows, and the history books tell us, things were not good in 1960s Georgia. So many people’s realities were so very different from what he’s saying it is!
Perhaps what he is saying is that no one tried to destroy him back then, as even elitists in his own race are doing now.
http://www.examiner.com/article/ala-dem-calls-clarence-thomas-uncle-tom-disparages-marriage-to-white-woman
I grew up in North Carolina. My Mom was a Quaker. We had a small farm and grew about 3 acres of tobacco as the cash crop. We always had black people working in one capacity or another on the farm with us. My brothers and I played with the black kids in the neighborhood, and had sleepovers together. My Dad always paid black workers the same thing for the same job as he paid the white workers. When Mom fixed lunch for the workers, everyone (black and white) ate the same thing in the same place. If we had tomato sandwiches and banana sandwiches, we all ate together on the front porch. If Mom fixed fried chicken and all the trimmings, we all ate together in the dining room. Mom would take us on visits to both black and white people in the community who were poor and in need. She would take whatever she could to help them. (My middle name was chosen to honor a black man who worked with my grandfather in the Post Office.)
Schools were integrated during my last year in high school (1965-1966). We knew that the schools would be integrated the year before. There were some of the rednecks in my class who made very offensive remarks about the situation. I remember in particular a remark about what they would do to any "nigger lover." My instantaneous response was that if any of them called me that to my face, they would lose their teeth. (I wasn't very big, but had a reputation of fighting any bully at any time until someone pulled me off of him.) We had only three black kids join our high school that year: Richard Matthews and Patricia Graves joined my class, and Patricia's younger brother Larry joined the junior class. They were good students, and they were scared and they missed their own classmates. Richard played guitar in the style of B. B. King and Larry played drums. I played guitar (in the style of a beginner) and a white girl named Debora Macon played piano. We jammed together in the high school auditorium at lunch almost every day. There may have been mutterings about it among the rednecks, but not one of them was ever stupid enough to say something to me about it. At our last high school reunion, Richard and his wife came. Richard went into the Army after graduation and was wounded. He was honored at our reunion and thanked profusely, even by the rednecks (some of whom are still bigots).
In short, my parents taught me to be accepting of other people, regardless of their skin color. I never heard anything discriminatory nor ever saw anything discriminatory in what my parents said and did. They treated all people with dignity as "fully human" beings.
However, I did hear and see other blatant displays of prejudice in the white community, including by some of my kinfolk.
My only point is that there were pockets of sanity amidst all of the insanity associated with the racial discrimination of that time. Justice Thomas may have experienced some of that sanity while growing up. I suspect you would have to ask him in order to get the truth, rather than assume that he is viewing his own past through rose colored glasses.
Robert
Thanks for that insight; great comment.
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