Yes, Virginia Thomas, your husband does indeed have an apology coming. But it should come from black America collectively, not just Anita Hill.
It’s been 19 years since Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’ confirmation hearings, arguably the most contentious the U.S. Senate has ever held. Hill, now a law professor at Brandeis University, worked at the U.S. Department of Education and the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, where Thomas was her supervisor before his nomination.
After that nomination, Hill suddenly “remembered” that Thomas sexually harassed her. She testi-lied — oops, excuse me — testi-fied to as much during Thomas’ confirmation hearing. If you’re gleaning from my previous comments that I believe Hill lied through her teeth, then you’ve gleaned correctly.
And maybe that’s why Virginia Thomas left, according to various news sources, this voicemail message for Hill:
“Good morning, Anita Hill. It’s Ginny Thomas. I just want to reach across the airwaves and the years and ask you to consider something. I would love you to consider an apology sometimes and some full explanation of why you did what you did to my husband.”
Hill still stands by her testimony, and called Virginia Thomas’ call “inappropriate.” Perhaps, but not as inappropriate as accusing someone of sexual harassment and not providing so much as one corroborating witness.
Hill said she won’t apologize to Clarence Thomas, but the rest of black America should. We need to apologize to Clarence Thomas for subjecting him to the most vile, disgusting and scurrilous character attacks one black man has ever been subjected to.
That includes Thomas being called an Uncle Tom, a Sambo and a sellout. That includes two depictions of Thomas on the cover of the now-defunct Emerge magazine.
One showed Thomas wearing a handkerchief on his head; another depicted him as a lawn jockey. Inside one of those issues, another picture showed Thomas shining the shoes of Antonin Scalia, his fellow justice.
It should be worth noting that liberal Italian-Americans have not subjected Scalia to the same invective liberal black Americans have directed at Thomas. Italian-Americans are secure in their own identity; they accept that some of them are going to be liberal, others conservative and others moderate.
Only in America’s black community are the liberals regarded as saviors and the conservatives regarded as traitors. Or, as Elmer Smith, my colleague and fellow columnist at the Philadelphia Daily News so aptly puts it, “Black Americans are the only racial or ethnic group in the country with a credentials committee.”
The self-appointed members of that credentials committee decided long ago that Thomas was persona non grata. They’re not simply content to say that they simply disagree with his opinions, which are fair grounds for criticism.
They have to launch into their racial attacks, the way Malcolm X did back in the late 1950s and 1960s, with all that talk about Uncle Toms and house Negroes vs. field Negroes. If the credentials committee blacks who’ve targeted Thomas with racial attacks are using Malcolm X as their model and inspiration, there are a couple of things they should know.
1. It was Malcolm X, not any of the “Uncle Toms” he criticized, who confessed in his autobiography that he stood up a black woman, leaving her in the middle of the dance floor, to go chasing after a white woman.
2. It was Malcolm X who, on more than one occasion, made the revealing psychological slip, “I hate every drop of black blood — oops, I mean white blood — in me.
After the credentials committee makes that apology to Thomas, they need to check Malcolm X’s black bona fides.
