An Excerpt From Clarence Thomas’ New Book

by John Hawkins | October 9, 2007 7:33 am

I just finished reading Clarence Thomas’ superb new book, “My Grandfather’s Son[1],” and I enjoyed it immensely.

The book reminded me a bit of David Horowitz’s, “Radical Son[2],” although Thomas’ book isn’t nearly as long.

Over the next couple of days, I’m going to post a review and quotes from the book, but today I wanted to give you a little teaser.

The excerpt you are about to read occurs when Thomas is starting to become increasingly angry and frustrated with how unfair his confirmation hearings are to him.

“(Anita Hill) has claimed at her press conference to have been too afraid of me to complain about my alleged misconduct — yet she’d lobbied aggressively to follow me from the Department of Education to EEOC. She said she’d never called me — but the telephone logs of my secretaries at EEOC and the court of appeals proved that she’d done so repeatedly. She claimed that other members of my staff could corroborate her story — but they denied it. In the end only three EEOC employees would support her version of what supposedly happened between us — but all of them had either been fired or left the agency on bad terms, and none, to my knowledge, had worked there at the same time as Anita. Having spent years at the EEOC reviewing such claims, I was sure that this one would have been thrown out of court in an instant. But did any of these things matter? Not in the least. The mob was howling and it wouldn’t be satisfied until it had tasted my blood.

The more I reflected on what was happening, the more it astonished me. As a child of the Deep South, I’d grown up fearing the lynch mobs of the Ku Klux Klan; as an adult, I was starting to wonder if I’d been afraid of the wrong white people all along. My worst fears had come to pass not in Georgia, but in Washington, D.C., where I was being pursued not by bigots in white robes but by left-wing zealots draped in flowing sanctimony. For all the fear I’d known as a boy in Savannah, this was the first time I’d found myself at the mercy of people who would do whatever they could to hurt me — and institutions that had once prided themselves on bringing segregation and its abuses to an end were aiding and abetting in the assault. Hypersensitive civil-rights leaders who saw racism around every corner fell silent when my liberal enemies sneered that I was unqualified to sit on the Court; editors and reporters who claimed to be objective substituted a pretense of balance for true fairness, presenting outrageous, wholly unsupported allegations side by side with spluttering denials. The implausible was now being treated more favorably than the obvious.”

Endnotes:
  1. My Grandfather’s Son: http://www.amazon.com/gp/redirect.html?ie=UTF8&location=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.amazon.com%2FMy-Grandfathers-Son-Clarence-Thomas%2Fdp%2F0060565551%3Fie%3DUTF8%26s%3Dbooks%26qid%3D1191928218%26sr%3D8-1&tag=brassknucklesweb&linkCode=ur2&camp=1789&creative=9325
  2. Radical Son: http://www.amazon.com/gp/redirect.html?ie=UTF8&location=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.amazon.com%2FRadical-Son-Generational-David-Horowitz%2Fdp%2F0684840057%3Fie%3DUTF8%26s%3Dbooks%26qid%3D1191928295%26sr%3D1-1&tag=brassknucklesweb&linkCode=ur2&camp=1789&creative=9325

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