The opening of the new Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of African American History and Culture has been marred by a controversy over a political bias in the celebration of African American leaders. While the museum’s displays largely ignore Associate Justice Clarence Thomas, it celebrates the heroism of his accuser from his confirmation hearings, Law Professor Anita Hill. The failure to honor Thomas, in my view, is outrageous. His life story is not just one of the inspiring accounts in African American history, it is one of the most inspiring of American history. His triumph over abject poverty and discrimination should be celebrated by all Americans regardless of how you view his jurisprudential views. Now the Smithsonian has responded and its explanation is hardly compelling.
Thomas has the quintessential American story of perseverance and ambition in overcoming odds that would have left many in hopeless despair. Clarence Thomas was born on the Georgia coast in Pin Point, Georgia, on June 23, 1948. He grew up speaking Gullah, the creole dialect. His home was a one-room shack with dirt floors and no plumbing. He grew up without a Dad, who left him at two. As a result, at the age of seven he and his younger brother were sent to live with their grandfather, Myers Anderson, and his wife in Savannah, Georgia. He used his Catholic education to overcome segregation and prejudice to eventually go to Holy Cross and gained admission to Yale, Harvard, and the University of Pennsylvania law schools. After a series of legal positions, he became the chairman of the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in 1982 and later became just the second African American to join the Court.
Linda St. Thomas, chief spokesperson for the Smithsonian, insisted that it was just not a story that made the cut among the stories to be told: “There are many compelling personal stories about African Americans who have become successful in various fields, and, obviously, Associate Justice Thomas is one of them. However, we cannot tell every story in our inaugural exhibitions.” Really? But Anita Hill is such a story? I am not taking away from Hill or taking sides in their dispute. Yet, Thomas should have been on the top of any objective list of the great achievers among contemporary African American figures.
That is a story that should feature prominently in any museum on American leaders. The American public funded half of the cost of this $540 million museum and gave the museum a prime location on the mall. It should expect better.
What a travesty
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Justice Thomas is the left’s ultimate heretic – an African American who thinks for himself.
Here is a nice tribute in the Wall Street Journal by Juan Williams, a liberal who nevertheless admires Thomas the man. http://www.wsj.com/articles/juan-williams-americas-most-influential-thinker-on-race-1424476527
Thomas rode the wave but turned out to be just another sleaze like Trump. He’s Black so he gets in the museum. Hill is Black, put up a far bigger fight than Thomas for her rights: female, Black, in a situation where privilege and absolute authority prevail. Thomas is part illusion and part reality. The reality part should go into the museum. So too should the illusion part as that is also part of the Black heritage. Representing reality is always tough.
Thomas rode the wave but turned out to be just another sleaze like Trump.
You’re incoherent, and you’re a liar. Thomas had never in a legal career approaching 40 years in duration been credibly accused of corruption of any kind.
You need to take lessons on English comprehension. Thomas was a sleaze; there was ample proof that he sexually invaded the space of others through his childish banter. He was given a pass because he was Black. That is the wave he rode. The only corruption here is to be found in the schooling that you received.
You need to take lessons on English comprehension. Thomas was a sleaze; there was ample proof that he sexually invaded the space of others through his childish banter.
There was no proof. There was an uncorroborated set of allegations from a single employee who followed him from one place of employment to another and kept in touch with him for six years after she left his employ. A journalist covering the story at the time was struck dumb when he interviewed about 20 employees of the Department of Education and the EEOC who had worked with Thomas and Hill and discovered precisely one who believed her allegations. Among those testifying as a character witness on his behalf at his confirmation hearings was Diane Holt, who was a career civil servant, and Phyllis Berry, whom Thomas had actually fired. Hill did not include many details of her story which would have fixed any events in time, but Susan Hoerchner did (unwittingly). Hoerchner’s testimony made plain that Hill’s contemporaneous emotional upsets antedated her employment at the Department of Education.
While we’re at it, her allegation was that he bugged her for dates and told stories about porn films.
You’d benefit from growing a brain.
Thomas beat the rap, that’s it. He also benefitted from being Black at a time when the Supreme Court needed that diversity. It happens all the time, the pendulum swinging both ways. Perhaps that is why he is only noted in the museum. Hill took on the establishment and placed her career on the line. You can cherry pick all you want because hindsight is 20/20. However, just as is being shown with the deplorable Trump, the best do not always make it to the top. Trump illustrates that sometimes the absolute worst and most incompetent do, unfortunately. So, watch tonight, your hero will be flaming out. He is nothing more than entertainment, a horror show.
You operate under the illusion that there is something other than static between your two ears.
You must be a Trump supporter. You can’t beat that for an insult, no matter what you come up with.
Check to see if these once-prominent AA intellectuals are in the museum: Zora Neale Hurston, George Schuyler, Lawrence Dennis. All were right-wing in the latter parts of their lives.
Searches of Zora Neale Hurston and George Schuyler turn up a dry hole on their site. You can have a look at one of James Baldwin’s ink wells, though.
Searches of Charles Diggs, crook Congressman of Detroit, turn up a reference. Searches of Oscar de Priest, Republican of Illinois, turn up nothing. Blacks were shut out of Congress from 1901 to 1929. They’ve been continually present since 1929, since de Priest was sworn into office after his election in 1928.
The consistency of this no doubt is on the level of the Soviet Encyclopaedia.
I say good for him. Why would you want to be in a racist liberal museum? I’d rather be known as an American and in a museum that celebrated all.
Clarence Thomas is one of those whose acclaim will not come in his lifetime.
This is most unfortunate for him personally but tends to be inherent in independent thinkers of significant position. He is up to the task. Here is a quote from a speech:
“It pains me deeply – more deeply than any of you can imagine – to be perceived by so many members of my race as doing them harm… I have come here not in anger or to anger, though my mere presence has been sufficient, obviously, to anger some, nor have I come to defend my views, but rather to assert my right to think for myself, to refuse to have my ideas assigned to me, as though I was an intellectual slave.”
I wish I could say I was shocked at Prof Turley diatribe on Clarence Thomas. Clarence Thomas will never be more than a footnote in Black History. Its not Left or Right, Clarence Thomas just doesn’t exist to Black people and Black people don’t exist to Clarence Thomas. If only his “blackface” didn’t remind him. Yes He’s on the Supreme Court so he will back his way into the museum but in reality I wonder to myself. whether He wants to be in a museum dedicated to the African-American experience.
The bias of the left never ceases to amaze me.
Is that because the Right is unbiased? Just like CNN is in the bag for Hillary but we won’t mention Fox News now, will we.
Of course Thomas should have been mentioned in the museum. But the hyperbole of Prof Turley (Thomas is not one of the most inspiring stories in American history) is laughable.
TIN pretty much nailed it. Thomas is the perfect person to dam@ with faint praise.
I never ceased to be amazed how FOX news gets irrelevantly inserted into more conversations by those on the Left than it does from the Right.
Nevermind the fact that FOX is in the minority in terms of TV news. Then again, let’s name the liberals FOX has employed – Megyn Kelly, Juan Williams, Bob Beckel, Chris Wallace, and Shepard Smith. That’s off the top of my head.
Now, for the class, pick another major outlet and identify just one prominent conservative on their front-facing staff.
I agree with TIN above. I met Clarence Thomas briefly when he was an associate attorney general in Missouri for A.G. Danforth. This is when he had the Confederate Flag on the wall over his desk. There is another reference about a flag on a device on his desk. I saw a flag. I was walking by his office with another A.G. assistant when I spotted the flag. “What’s up with that?” I asked the other guy. “Oh, that is just Clarence. He is UnReconstructed.”
In case you don’t know what “Reconstructed” or UnReconstructed” meant in 1979 or so, consider the Reconstruction Amendments to the Constitution passed after the Civil War. 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments. The 14th is the one mostly considered here. Civil Rights lawsuits were grounded on the 14th Amendment and then the Civil Rights Acts.
In any event. I refer to Clarence as Uncle Clarence. As in Uncle Tom.
He deserves a place in this museum because he is a Supreme Court Justice. So does Thurgood Marshall. I bet he is in there.
And so the “narrative” continues, like a slow winding river
Sure you did, Don. Sure you did.
Sorry, not buying. The Confederate flag meme was a newspaper fallacy of the time, later corrected. He had a Georgia state flag on his desk.
Yes he had a Georgia flag on a stand up plate thing on his desk with the confederate flag in the corner of the Georgia Flag. But, at the time I walked by he had a Confederate Flag on the wall above his desk behind his chair which you could see from the hallway door. And yeah this happened. I met him briefly later. He was a nice guy. Danforth promoted him to be head of the EEOC and then the DC Court of Appeals and then to replace Thurgood Marshall on the Supreme Court.
Yeah, sure.
The toads who would know for sure would be former assistant attorney generals working in Jeff City, MO back in the Clarence days.
Thurgood Marshall was in his later years a triumph of the taxidermist’s art.
You misspelled “originalism”. It is not spelled “Unreconstructed”.
Thomas should be included because he’s a Supreme Court Justice. But the “overcoming poverty” angle is a bit of a stretch. Yes, his mother was poor, but he lived with his grandparents from the age of 7 onwards. They were solidly upper middle class and he attended Catholic school through elementary and high school. He likes to play the poverty angle to gain sympathy, but then lectures other blacks to pull themselves up by their bootstraps, even though he never did. One of his law professors remembers that Thomas wore bib overalls and a “big, floppy, sharecropper’s hat” to class every day. The professor thought perhaps Thomas was poor and couldn’t afford more appropriate clothes. At the time, he had graduated from Holy Cross and had been in a seminary for awhile before changing careers. His Yale Law attire seems more of a ploy to gain sympathy as a po’ black sharecropper, since he reportedly dressed as a preppy college student at HC. And then of course there was his “high tech lynching” accusation when he was questioned about the sexual harassment charge. Playing the race card when it suits his interests, and being a right wing conservative the rest of the time.
So he started out poor, and through family help (not the government), was able to overcome the circumstances into which he was born. Sounds like a legitimate life experience to underpin his conservative views.
And the term lynching is not exclusive to blacks. It’s a phrase that, especially at the time, was in common usage along the same lines as “witch hunt,” yet no one seriously thinks witch culture is being referred to. These sorts of observations always say more about the observer than the accused.
Your argument is thin.
Seriously? Thomas’s references are replete with racial imagery and references and grievances. The man is unfortunately hung-up about being black, an issue that is also thoroughly researched in the biography, “Supreme Discomfort.” And he goes into more detail in his autobiography, “My Grandfather’s Son.” Have you even bothered to read his own words?
At no time in his life has Clarence Thomas conducted himself as a racial particularist. He’s never held any of the sorts of public employment, non-profit employment, or academic employment characteristic of the type. He doesn’t belong to any black-nationalist organizations that anyone knows of, or the NAACP that anyone knows of. He espouses no black particularist ideologies, nor does he promote a signature collection of public policy stances consistent with that. His jurisprudence would have been anathema to Thurgood Marshall, whose idea of interpretation is that you press the button and get what you want. He does not belong to any black religious denominations either. His wife is white.
We get it. You loathe the guy. This getting to be a bore.
I don’t loathe him at all. I think his is an interesting story, but I’m not going to make it something it never was, either. The statements that he “grew up in a shack with dirt floors and no plumbing,” and that his mother was a domestic who “worked for pennies a day” are bunk. I read the biography by a writer who went to Pin Point and Savanah GA and saw the houses and took pictures of them and interviewed relatives and neighbors and teachers. Yes, his mother was a maid and was poor but she didn’t work for “pennies a day” between 1950 and 1955. My grandmother was a maid during those same years and she earned the federal minimum wage. And Thomas’s home life from the age of 7 on was solidly middle class. So I see him as a highly accomplished person, but no, he wasn’t born in a log cabin that he built himself. If you’re bored by the complexities of what makes Thomas the man he is, there’s nothing I can do for you….
Yes, seriously. Speaking of reading some specific words, did you bother reading mine, because you’re certainly not responding to them.
Thank you.
They were solidly upper middle class
His grandfather was a farmer, and his life on that farm was rather hardscrabble.
Not in the bio I read. His GF had a local oil delivery business and was considered by neighbors a successful businessman. Not wealthy, but definitely upper middle class.
I can’t find the book right now, but it’s also in Wikipedia. It says the GF had a successful fuel and ice delivery business in Savannah. I do credit Thomas for his honesty in admitting that he benefitted from AA, and releasing his law transcripts, unlike Obama.
When did he ‘admit’ he ‘benefitted from AA’? If his academic record was satisfactory, he didn’t need the mulligans. If he wasn’t working for the admissions office, he wouldn’t know about the procedure by which the mulligans were granted. Unless his board scores were waaay below the median for those admitted to the institution, he’d have no reason to believe he would not have been admitted in some counter-factual scenario. Thomas entered Holy Cross around about 1966, before there was such a thing as AA. He entered Yale around 1970, when AA was a novelty.
You can start by reading his bio, “My Grandfather’s Son,” or another bio, “Suprem Disconfort,” or even just go to Google and type in “did Clarence Thomas admit that he benefitted from AA.” It’s hardly any secret that he said that he benefitted from AA. Even CNN has a story online where Thomas says that colleges were actively recruiting less than stellar black students but then he turns around and complains that while he benefitted from it, he resented liberal whites who had a “paternalistic” attitude towards him.
You’re just ignoring my point. He cannot admit to something that was not admitted to him or manifest to him, and you haven’t presented one single quotation which can be assessed in context. Again, he was admitted to college in 1966. Talking about AA re 1966 is just anachronistic. What were his board scores and what was his percentile ranking on board scores among the 1966 matriculants?
The Civil Rights Act of 1964 predates both Thomas’s college and law school years. AA programs were most certainly in effect from the mid-sixties on. And no, I don’t know his SAT and LSAT scores. He said he benefitted from AA, and he’s obviously in a far better position to know than you or I.
Speaking for passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Hubert Humphrey said “If this bill contains language mandating quotas, I will eat it.” The first federal affirmative action plan came with LBJ’s Philadelphia Plan in 1967. It was deemed illegal until the Nixon Administration submitted a revised plan, I think in 1969. I am not aware of prior significant affirmative initiatives in academia. Thomas probably did not benefit from AA in his Holy Cross admission, but may, or may not have in his admission to Yale.
His grandfather owned a business as well as a farm. Thomas and his brother worked on the farm. It’s doubtful a man with a 3d grade education running a modest distributorship in the caste-ridden deep South of 1955 would have been regarded as ‘upper middle class’ by anyone.
Except his neighbors. Again, it’s in the bio. The people who lived around him thought him to be well-off. Yes, that’s relative, but that all that really matters. Maybe some mythological white folks living in mansions somewhere wouldn’t have thought of him as successful, but the people in the neighborhood whom he interacted with everyday respected his grandfather and thought of him as a successful businessman.
Yes, that’s relative, but that all that really matters.
Relative to whom? Holy Cross wasn’t recruiting among his neighbors. Neither was Yale. By that standard, any slum dweller counts as ‘upper middle class’ if he gets better pay and bennies at his hospital orderly job than the man down the street collecting relief payments.
It’s significant with respect to how he feels about himself. If, for example, you grew up in a mill town and everyone’s father was a millworker, but yours owned the only store in town, or was the only doctor in town, you would be thought of as economically superior to your peers and have a heightened sense of social standing. Then you go off to college and realize that your family wasn’t significant at all economically, but that new found information isn’t likely to shake the confidence you achieved growing up as a small town social elite. Thomas’s neighbors respected his grandfather and he says he took pride in being a part of that family.
he attended Catholic school through elementary and high school.
He was born in 1948. The economy of Catholic education was radically different in 1960 than it is today, because the schools were manned by religious who lived communally and were paid modest stipends. Where I grew up, Catholic schools were quite reasonably priced as late as 1980 and available to wage-earning families who thought it was worth it, and accessible to them even without scholarships.
Catholic schools were the ticket to success for generations of Irish, Italian and Hispanic immigrants. It’s really a shame that so many have closed and others have become unaffordable to the working classes. And many “Catholic” colleges have abandoned their roots. Georgetown is supposed to be Jesuit but is now an enormously expensive typical lefty institution. When I applied to the (Jesuit) Univ of San Franscisco in the early 80s, they asked for religious affiliation on the application. Now they no longer do, and most professors are not Catholic. Of course, people have a wide choice of colleges, but I regret that affordable Catholic elementary schools no longer exist to serve as a bridge to the middle class for the children of the poor and working class.
Catholic schools were Catholic schools. They weren’t a ‘ticket for success’. They just maintained a satisfactory disciplinary environment while the inner-city public schools went to hell in a hand cart and lagged behind the public schools in adopting pedagogic fads.
TIN – I remember my shock when they added an atheist to the theology department at Creighton University. The final blow was when my confessor told me he did not believe in the concept of Hell. Solved all my religious problems. 🙂
That’s funny! I was shocked as well when on the first day of a class on Catholicism at Georgetown the professor introduced himself as an Eastern Orthodox. I guess all the priests at that Jesuit university didn’t have time to teach lowly undergrads. I don’t know how it went as I dropped the class…..
The amazing series Seven Up should be viewed by all thinking people. It clearly demonstrates how the first seven years of a child’s life impacts their future as adults. To be sure, Thomas benefitted from his later years but the scars of poverty remained and he chose not to be victim.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Up_Series
What I don’t understand is why Thomas’ grandfather sent him and his brother to Catholic school, ensuring their futures, but did not do the same for his mother. The GF, by all reported accounts, had a successful fuel and ice delivery business, and was comfortably middle class. But Thomas’ mother worked as a domestic, and his father was a farm laborer who abandoned his family when Thomas was two, so he has no memory of him. Since the GF had the means to enroll Thomas and his brother in Catholic schools when they came to live with him, why didn’t he do anything to help his daughter (Thomas’ mother)? Maybe it was just the sexism of the times, that the old man would willingly invest in his grandson’s education, but not that of his own daughter…..?
Does it occur to you that you’ve overstated Myers Anderson’s prosperity, or that Thomas’ mother would have entered school around 1935, when Myers Anderson’s economic fortunes were different than they were 20 years later, or that Myers Anderson may have known his daughter wasn’t material for rigorous academic schooling?
Private schooling wasn’t going to ensure your future in 1960 or 1980 or 2000.
There’s a big difference between “rigorous academic schooling” and working as a domestic. Providing assistance for her to attend bookkeeping school or secretarial school rather than working as a maid would have made a significant difference in her life.
A man can be told many times that your are free. The prison that resides in one’s mind are often greater than actual imprisonment. I became acquainted with Bob Marley many years ago. I then listen to the man’s music. You listen to the music, you understand that one’s mind is the greatest imprisonment.
Too bad, the man not understand the wisdom.
Another author in a different publication referenced several prominent black leaders who happened to be omitted and Justice Thomas was not the only person.
If this was in fact by design it shows how with many they cannot separate themselves from their political ideology since it is too interwoven into their mindset and outlook on life.
In our form of government, the President, the Congress, and the Supreme Court are co-equal heads, although the President, being a single individual, get more attention as a leader. If Obama is celebrated, then Clarence Thomas should, too.
Reblogged this on Scoop Feed.
I was married to the BIL of a famous senator from the South during these hearings. I remember being at the dedication of the Institute of this senator and listening to men of power (Yes. I can name names) who knew and commented on Clarence Thomas’ known-to-many appetites. Their take was that Anita Hill was collateral damage because G.H.W. Bush wanted Thomas, and that was that. I was outraged and showed it. They were sympathetic because many disliked Thomas intensely. Some even sent private messages of agreement to me through family members. It was “the order of things in Washington.” I see this as karmic justice–something that rarely happens in American politics. BTW, we should NEVER forget Joe Biden’s behavior during this ridiculous fiasco.
Linda,
I see what you mean – that Bush needed a black and Thomas is a conservative. “The legal community also voiced apprehension about Thomas’s clear lack of experience since he had only served two years as a federal judge.” However, it still does not take away from his intellectual prowess (whether one agrees with his stance or not) and working hard to escape from his impoverished background.
We need to move away from affirmative action and identity politics. I just hope Eric Holder and Tim Scott aren’t in the pantheon.
BTW – meant to cite my source https://chnm.gmu.edu/courses/122/hill/hillframe.htm
No sentient being would take this comment seriously, and no decent person trafficks in 3d and 4th hand gossip.
That was my assessment at the time. Thomas was a black male conservative and that was what mattered to the men in the Senate who were conducting the hearings. A black female who had been sexually harassed was of no consequence to them. That Trump’s poll numbers took a significant hit after the vulgar tape came out shows that the status of women in the U.S. has improved significantly in the years since the Thomas hearings.
Your assessment was stupid. Joseph Biden and Howard Metzenbaum weren’t giving any mulligans to a Republican nominee and Metzenbaum was instrumental in trafficking in gossip about Thomas. There just wasn’t enough evidence that Hill’s accounts were true.
They didn’t care whether the accounts were true or not. How many women did it take before the lovable Bill Cosby was no longer “America’s dad?” I stopped counting at 50….
What does Thomas have to do with Bill Cosby? The two situations were 20 odd years apart and have little in common other than they feature women making claims difficult to substantiate. And what gave you the idea that Howard Metzenbaum was happy to let the opportunity to humiliate Thomas go to waste?
Sorry, I don’t know who H. Matzenbaum is…..
My goodness, why should anybody be surprised by this? Who is such a naif that they don’t realize the exhibit is not about African-Americans. It is about maintaining the Democratic Party narrative of black victimology to race bait for votes. I am betting that Trayvon Martin is in there somewhere.
Sheeesh people! Wake up and smell the coffee. You live in a land of constant lies and propaganda. All designed to keep the Democrats in power. Everything must be sacrificed to the Almighty Narrative.
Squeeky Fromm
Girl Reporter
squeek, off topic – I saw a very funny “appropriation” of the LGTB moniker – “Let’s Get Behind Trump” =)
Also, according to The Guardian “Half of young Americans prefer meteor apocalypse to Donald Trump presidency: third of 18- to 35-year-olds also thought ‘Giant Meteor’ would be better than Hillary Clinton getting into the White House”
Kind of what you’ve been saying about Millenials fascination with zombies, etc. =)
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/oct/19/half-of-young-americans-prefer-meteor-apocalypse-to-donald-trump-presidency
Who is such a naif that they don’t realize the exhibit is not about African-Americans. It is about maintaining the Democratic Party narrative of black victimology to race bait for votes.
Pretty close to the mark.
I am betting that Trayvon Martin is in there somewhere.
Now that would be an upraised middle finger. Don’t give ’em any ideas.
What did Anita Hill do? Anything? I seem to remember her being in one of the Bimbo Brigades of the DNC. Nothing else comes to mind.
In those days before reverse racism reverse sexism replaced the other kind I was in the military. We were an equal opportunity unit. It was a paratroop unit and we regarded all ‘legs’ with equal disdain and double that for civilians.
In my later more mellow years i learned not all ‘legs’ were useless. Except for REMFs. All civilians are REMFs. Anyone who works in the Pentagon uniformed or not, all politicians and most of the media immediately qualify.
These days we added those who remember ‘the day.’ In the old days it took a lot more than one day to gain bragging rights. I suspect with the turn around rate in these never ending wars the progressives have going the current crop of respectables fit much the same mold.
RE stands for Rear Echelon…
Anita Hill has been, for close to 30 years, an oddball beneficiary of the patronage mill in academe. She started out in 1981 at a Washington law firm (which I think qualified as BigLaw). Per Susan Hoerchner she was miserable there (something Hoerchner retrospectively attributed to ‘sexual harassment’ by Clarence Thomas, even though Hill never worked for Thomas until after Hoerchner had decamped to California and lost contact with Hill). Even Hill boosters like Jane Mayer have offered accounts of her tenure at that firm which suggest she may have been out of her depth, but the only people who have an informed opinion about that would be people who’ve worked in BigLaw and know how to read between the lines. She’s hired by Thomas in January 1982 to work at the Department of Education, which suggests BigLaw did not suit her, as it does not suit most of those initially employed in it. She follows Thomas to the EEOC when he’s transferred there. After several years there, she lands a position at an unaccredited law school in Oklahoma and leaves Washington. After a while, she’s hired by the University of Oklahoma’s law school. Law schools are just about as mad for racial preference as any component of academe. She publishes one book, which reviewers remark demonstrates her command of written English to be less than stellar. She leaves the University of Oklahoma because of ‘academic politics’ and lands a job at the University of Pennsylvania as a professor of public policy. Think about that. She had no legal scholar’s LLM, no dissertation in any subject, no known training in quantitative methods, no publications in policy analysis of any kind, and she’s hired by a high-class research university to teach public policy. At some level, she has to know her academic career is phony, and that she’s a non-functional piece of decorative art put there by status-signalling bourgeois
Everything about her suggests she was satisfactory material for a common-and-garden law practice in Oklahoma City. Instead of earning an honest living doing bankruptcies or trusts and estates or real estate practice, perhaps getting married and having children along the way, she’s had this simulacrum of a professional life (and no domestic life at all). It’s tragic, in a petty sort of way.
I don’t see any tragedy. She’s had some interesting, albeit fluff jobs, that probably pay fairly well. I read lawyer resumes all day long and it’s rare to see a black lawyer who works in private practice. Virtually all leave BigLaw or MidLaw within a year or so and go to the government or academia. Practicing law is hard work and when you’ve got the benefit of AA, why not get a cushy government or academic job that pays just as well and is a lot less taxing? Look at Michelle Obama…..graduated Harvard Law and went to BigLaw for a brief time, then was hired on to the Chicago health care system doing “community outreach.” That’s somewhat typical of black Ivy Law grads. As to Anita’s “lack of domestic life;” very few blacks get married. I don’t know why, but they just don’t. But that hardly means she’s not “gettin’ any.” LOL.
It’s tragic, because her career is a fraud. She has none of the sort of education you need to have to teach public policy and nothing in her publication record indicates she ever acquired it.
Michelle Obama quit practicing law in 1991 and had a series of patronage jobs of which her actual day to day labors are obscure to the outside observer. Barack Obama hasn’t been a working lawyer since 2002 and hardly practiced between 1996 and 2002. If I’m not mistaken, about 40% of the working-aged adults with law degrees are not practicing nor working in any position which requires legal training. There are somewhere between 670,000 and 780,000 working lawyers. About 17% have government employment. There are about 50,000 blacks in the work force with law degrees.
IIRC, lawyers work about 49 hours a week on average. It’s not medicine.
You’re showing your age, geezer.
The combination of a Third World Banana Republic w/alleged $13T GDP (or whatever they say it is now, they’re just screen characters on a display) is quite a unique thing to observe.
From the 1951 epic movie classic Quo Vadis: “…As long as there’s funds to pay the military, there shall always be Rome…” Roman General Marcus Vinicius
If one denies funds to resurrect Rome to its former global pre-eminence, does that not accurately define you as an “anti-Roman?” (My attempt to mock the term “anti-Semite,” which Wm. Buckley’s once-friend James Sobran defined as: “Not someone who hates Jews, but rather someone hated by certain Jews.”)
I did an internship at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery back in 2000 before it was renovated – one of the finest experiences I’ve ever had. The collection of museums are a true National Treasure (as is the Library of Congress) IMO. I am so elated that finally the African-American museum has been built and can’t wait to visit it – IMO it should have been built before the Air & Space at Dulles. But I digress….
Even back then there was a definite Liberal bias and PC/revisionist history was touted. I agree that Thomas Clarence should be featured – his story is compelling and the conflict with Anita Hill could also be included as it lead to a record number of women running for public office.
I wonder if Dick Gregory is featured? I just read his book “Nigger” a few years ago and laughed –and cried throughout.
Not the slightest bit surprised – that’s how the left rolls – you don’t agree with its politics – you’re gone, baby –
Clarence Thomas stands as a continuing embarrassment to those who claim hard work cannot overcome perceived injustices based on race or economic background. Anita hill stands as a role model for those who demand compensation or advancement based not on ability or hard work but on righting perceived injustices due to race or economic background.
Kurt,
Museums are windows to the world for those visiting. Be it Justice Thomas or President Obama, their stories give hope to youth and show a certain blindness to adult visitors that exemplifies the greatness of our country. The politics of our natio has no place in the Smithsonian. To comment that Anita Hill should be held in higher esteem than Clarence Thomas does disservice to the visitors to the museum.
Why honor an “Uncle Tom” that closes affirmative action that helped him.
He graduated in the middle of his class at Yale. He didn’t need any mulligans. (Exhibit #67000 in the file “SJWs always lie”.
Obama is not comparable to Thomas. Obama had two highly educated parents; a father who was a Harvard educated economist and white mother with a Ph.D in anthropology. He attended an elite private school in Hawaii and lived in Indonesia during his youth. He experienced none of the disadvantages of American blacks.