Clarence Thomas, the Anti-Black

Clarence Thomas is a deeply troubled man -- a grotesquely twisted, "Down Home"-grown Black personality at war with the demons of his dark-skinned, dirt poor youth. Although Thomas has accumulated many "enemies" -- earned and imagined -- since his entrance to the white world in the 10th grade in Savannah, Georgia, his core pathology is Black-directed -- a trait so obvious it was immediately perceived by a succession of white Republican racists who rocketed him to the U.S. Supreme Court with obscene haste to become a hit-man against his own people.

Thomas is a perverse right-wing joke played on Blacks and, being of above average intelligence despite his mental illness, he knows it. But it is a knowledge he cannot endure, a burden that has made him a pathological liar, who blurts out contradictions so antithetical to each other that they cannot possibly coexist in the same brain without a constant roiling and crashing that puts him at flight from himself and all those who remind him of his now hopelessly entangled torments and tormentors.

If African Americans had our own insane asylum, Thomas would be welcomed in and cared for, with proper compassion for the sorely afflicted. But there are no such facilities available to treat a man who forgives whites for Jim Crow and every other aspect of past and present discrimination -- indeed, embraces the most racist among them -- but can never forgive Blacks for the way they treated him in Savannah, Georgia and the outlying shanty town of Pin Point.

Thomas, the affirmative action kid, should have gone to Yale, where he proved to be as adept at navigating the curriculum as at least half the rest of the class. He should not have ascended anywhere near the U.S. Supreme Court, or to any government agency that affects the fate of the people he despises, and has since childhood felt despised by: African Americans, the only group that could make his young psyche scream by calling him "ABC" -- "America's Blackest Child."

Thomas titled his first and only book My Grandfather's Son, in honor of grandfather Myers Anderson, who physically rescued him from the abject poverty of Pin Point at age seven, at his destitute mother's request, but never let young Clarence forget that he was born in the mud of deepest, lowest class, Gullah-speaking (Geetchie) Blackdom. "Whenever he'd get angry at Clarence," a childhood friend of Thomas told Washington Post reporter Juan Williams, in 1987, "he'd say, 'Oh, you from Pin Point.' " Grandfather Anderson, a self-made, semi-literate businessman, alternately wielded "Pin Point" as the most cutting insult to the boy's value as a human being, and as the low-life nightmare to which Clarence must return if he did not show himself worthy of elevation above the mud.

Grandfather Anderson was a committed member of the NAACP, a regular contributor of money to the cause. He coerced Clarence to read his good grades aloud in front of NAACP meetings, an experience the shy child found painfully intrusive. When Clarence gained entrance to an almost lily-white Catholic seminary, with vague ideas about becoming a priest, old man Anderson warned, "don't you shame me and don't you shame your race.'"

Too much pressure for the emotionally fragile kid, who had been ceaselessly reminded that his Pin Point background was a shame on its face, and that he must begin his climb up from a deep hole to rise to the standards of the upscale-dominated Savannah NAACP -- a tall order for "America's Blackest Child." In a 2002 interview with Washington Post Reporters Kevin Merida and Michael A. Fletcher, Thomas said he "can't think of any" good the NAACP ever did. Civil rights leaders, in general, just "bitch, bitch, bitch, moan and moan, whine and whine."

The overbearing, unrelenting Granddaddy Anderson pinned his hopes on Clarence graduating from the Catholic seminary and using his credentials and education to assist other Blacks. However, Clarence quit in 1968, and Anderson put him out of the house. Thomas' lying memory begins to dominate the narrative at this point in his 19-year-old life, with estrangement from his Black anchor and hate-love object, Granddaddy Anderson. The old man and the NAACP expected great things from young Clarence, based on their standards, schedule and mission. Thomas claims he quit the seminary when, on news of the shooting of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., he overheard a white student say "Well, that's good. I hope the SOB dies" -- evidence that the Catholic Church had failed him.