The casual racism of the establishment media has been around forever. And for more than 30 years, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas has been a particular target of the liberals’ racist animus.
A Wednesday Washington Post feature on House Majority Whip Jim Clyburn of South Carolina, full of liberal shading throughout, contains a supreme example of the sort of snide racism that liberal elites seem to think is not just acceptable but enlightened.
In quoting Democratic Rep. Bennie Thompson of Mississippi, writers Cleve Wootson Jr. and Marianna Sotomayor produced this doozy of a sentence: “’If you know that a person has been vetted by Jim Clyburn, you know that person won’t go to the court and end up being a Clarence Thomas,’ [said Thompson,] referring to the Black justice whose rulings often resemble the thinking of White conservatives.”
Republican U.S. Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas saw the sentence and reacted appropriately in a tweet calling it “a disgusting smear by the Washington Post against the great Justice Thomas. Justice Thomas has a distinguished 30-year record on the Court, but to the Post, he merely ‘resemble[s] the thinking of White conservatives.’”
Indeed, the short sentence is objectionable in multiple ways. First, race has nothing to do with the subject. Thomas’ rulings have no color to them — his constitutional conservatism owes nothing to ethnicity. To say otherwise is to insult both Thomas individually and conservatism as a governing philosophy.
Second, the way the sentence is constructed, by mentioning Thomas’ race in light of “the thinking of White conservatives,” creates a clear inference that Thomas’ thought is subordinate to that of conservatives who are white. For anyone even remotely familiar with the fierce independence and clarion consistency of Thomas’ work, this is nonsense bordering on defamation.
Finally, to say that Thomas’ work “resembles” that of “White conservatives” carries the inference that Thomas’ work is not just subordinate to but also derivative of white thinkers. Again, this is outrageous. Thomas’ rulings “resemble” nobody else’s. Thomas writes in distinctive prose with forceful logic and rigorous scholarship, creating a style that is readily identifiable for clarity and its rare combination of intellectual thoroughness with succinctness.
This is all par for the course from leftist self-styled elites. For them, race is a defining characteristic, and minorities who do not think according to the Left’s assumptions about how they should think are assumed to be doing the white man’s bidding. These assumptions are pervasive in establishment media and academia, but they should be offensive to blacks and whites alike. They are assumptions that subsume individuality to race. In sum, they are, by the appropriate definition, textbook “racism.”
The Post should apologize for its smear, and it should reprimand both the reporters and all who edited the article while leaving the offensive characterization intact. Journalists need to learn that the way to stop making racist assumptions is to stop trying to assign particular thought patterns to particular races.
