(Feb. 17) 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…. [The full column is at this link.]
Further note: After I wrote this piece, the Post offered a grudging “clarification” that itself was almost insulting. It read as follows: “A previous version of this story imprecisely referred to Justice Clarence Thomas’s opinions as often reflecting the thinking of White conservatives, rather than conservatives broadly. That reference has been removed.”
“IMPRECISELY?” REALLY? IS THAT THE BEST THE POST COULD DO? THE ORIGINAL WASN’T “IMPRECISE;” IT WAS INEXCUSABLE.
