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Thread ID: 7635 | Posts: 3 | Started: 2003-06-26
2003-06-26 12:31 | User Profile
Outrage As Justice Thomas Blasts Affirmative Action By David Rennie in Washington The Telegraph - UK 6-26-3
Clarence Thomas, the only black judge on the United States Supreme Court, has triggered liberal anger by denouncing positive discrimination as a "cruel farce".
He said it leaves successful blacks marked with the lifelong stigma that they only succeeded because of their skin colour.
Justice Thomas, a hate figure for many black intellectuals, issued a blistering dissent to this week's supreme court ruling upholding the right of universities to consider race as a factor when admitting students.
His remarks drew deeply on his own history as a pioneering black member of the Yale Law School who was appointed to the nation's highest court by the first President Bush, despite a distinctly average legal career.
The grandson of a sharecropper, Mr Thomas derided affirmative action as "a faddish slogan of the cognoscenti", and challenged the very concept of "diversity", as claimed by the University of Michigan law school, which was at the heart of this week's court ruling.
"The law school's racial discrimination does nothing for those too poor or uneducated to participate in elite higher education, and therefore presents only an illusory solution to the challenges facing our nation," he wrote. He accused the law school of wanting to have merely a mix of skin colours in its classroom, or indulging in what he called "racial aesthetics".
In his most personal remarks, Mr Thomas wrote that when some blacks are given a helping hand, "all are tarred as undeserving" whether or not they were actually qualified in their own right.
"When blacks take positions in the highest places of government, industry or academia, it is an open question today whether their skin colour played a part in their advancement," he wrote. Maureen Dowd, a liberal pundit in the New York Times, called the judge "barking mad" in a commentary on his remarks.
"It's poignant really: it makes him crazy that people think he is where he is because of his race, but he is where he is because of his race," she wrote. "It's impossible not to be disgusted at someone who could benefit so much from affirmative action and then pull up the ladder against himself."
é Copyright of Telegraph Group Limited 2003.
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2003-06-26 17:54 | User Profile
I thought Dowd's column was pretty good, larger disagreements notwithstanding. "I'll have what they're having," she said of Booshy and Clarence.
2003-06-27 04:09 | User Profile
Clarence Thomas, the only black judge on the United States Supreme Court, has triggered liberal anger by denouncing positive discrimination as a "cruel farce".
It's only "positive" if one has the proper dungish tincture, Rennie.