He’s Vilified and Hated By Many Black Americans

Why I Read His Book Anyway

As readers, it is a part of our human nature to migrate to books that align with our pre-existing views and opinions. Often we throw shade on narratives that we ardently disagree with. As opposed to pursuing our own course of critical thinking, our reading choices are frequently the result of recommendations from close friends and media pundits.  

Sadly, we tend to choose only those books we are comfortable with as opposed to those offering an alternative viewpoint or surprising new piece of information. We resist the opportunity to stretch our thinking which might allow us to see things from a different voice, lens, or context.

For many of us My Grandfather’s Son: A Memoir written by is indicative of one such book. Shocking, revealing, and unflinchingly honest, it chronicles the story of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, one of America's controversial and vilified leaders. 

Throughout the book’s pages, Thomas sounds off, revealing esoteric elements of his life that he holds dear. In his life story of transcending the evils of racism that he experienced as a young adult through the ethics of hard work and self-reliance, Justice shares the inner recesses of his fascinating journey in his own words

Thomas for many is another interesting study in black conservatism. An avowed black nationalist Marxist and Malcolm X admirer while in college, Thomas later pivoted to the right, asserting that the only hope for Black Americans was to turn within and be self-reliant.  

While typically demure about his political party (most assume that he is a Republican), Thomas has publicly admitted in the past to having “some very strong libertarian leanings.” 

In 1991 during his Supreme Court confirmation hearing, he was accused of sexual harassment by his former colleague Anita Hill. Amid a highly publicized media circus, Justice Thomas strongly asserted that he was the victim of “a high-tech lynching for uppity blacks who in any way deign to think for themselves, to do for themselves, to have different ideas, and it is a message that unless you kowtow to an old order, this is what will happen to you.”

His use of this “lynching” verbiage painfully served for some as a reminder of America’s sobering history of race relations in America. But Thomas’ larger point was that any Black person who has the audacity to deviate from the official script of how Black folks are supposed to act and behave, will face severe condemnation and backlash. This has certainly been the case over the years as the Democratic leadership has been unrelenting in their crusade to diminish and destroy Justice Thomas. 

The attacks on him for daring to think differently — for his refusal to kowtow to liberal views could fill a book. because of his conservative and at times polarizing viewpoints, Justice Thomas was even excluded from the National Museum of African American History and Culture when it was first opened in 2016. Moreover, the NAACP, a famed civil rights organization vociferously opposed Thomas’ Supreme Court nomination. In recent years, particularly in light of Roe v Wade being overturned, Justice Clarence Thomas has been a target of even more venomous attacks from those on the left. 

Those, however, who choose to read his book will gain a more informed context around Thomas’ thinking, and at times, odd proclivities. He was born into severe poverty in Pinpoint, Georgia, in the Deep South under state-enforced segregation. His father abandoned the family when he was a mere 2 years old and the home he was raised in burned to the ground five years later.

In subsequent years, Justice Thomas was taken in by his maternal grandparents who raised him to live a life of moral integrity, hard work and determination. He graduated from Holy Cross College before moving on to complete his law degree at Yale Law School. After working for Missouri Senator John Danforth and then later a corporate stint with Monsanto, he was appointed the Reagan administration as headed of EEOC. This set the stage for his nomination to the Supreme Court by then President George H.W. Bush.

Below are some brief excerpts from his book “My Grandfather’s Son: A Memoir” that offer some poignant perspectives and context regarding his life journey:

On Persevering Through Strife and Ridicule  

All you can do is put one foot in front of the other and “play the hand that you’re dealt,” as my grandfather so often said. That’s what I did: I did my best and hoped for the best, too often fearing that I was getting the worst. In fact, though, I got everything I needed. Much of it came from two people, my grandfather and grandmother, who gave me what I needed to endure and, eventually, to prosper. They are the glue that held together the disparate pieces of my life, and holds them together to this day.

On His Family Descendants

I am descended from the West African slaves who lived on the barrier islands and in the low country of Georgia, South Carolina, and coastal northern Florida. In Georgia my people were called Geechees; in South Carolina, Gullahs.

On His Early Experiences With Poverty

The house in which I was born was a shanty with no bathroom and no electricity except for a single light in the living room. Kerosene lamps lit the rest of the house. In the wintertime we plugged up the cracks and holes in the walls with old newspapers. Water came from a nearby faucet, and we carried it through the woods in old lard buckets.

On Reading Ayn Rand at Holy Cross College

It was around this time that I read Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead. Rand preached a philosophy of radical individualism that she called Objectivism. While I didn’t fully accept its tenets, her vision of the world made more sense to me than that of my left-wing friends. “Do your own thing” was their motto, but now I saw that the individualism implicit in that phrase was both superficial and strictly limited.

On His Black Radicalism Days

…..I was (once) accused of being anti-Semitic because I’d praised Louis Farrakhan, the leader of the Nation of Islam, almost a decade earlier. Once again the truth was infinitely less shocking: I’d been attracted to the Black Muslim philosophy of self-reliance ever since my radical days in college, and I’d made my favorable comments about Minister Farrakhan in the early eighties, at a time when I was under the mistaken impression that he’d abandoned his anti-white, anti-Semitic rhetoric in favor of a positive self-help philosophy.

On His Early Views of Southerners

At least southerners were up front about their bigotry: you knew exactly where they were coming from, just like the Georgia rattlesnakes that always let you know when they were ready to strike. Not so the paternalistic big-city whites who offered you a helping hand so long as you were careful to agree with them, but slapped you down if you started acting as if you didn’t know your place.

On Affirmative-Action and Race-Based Set Asides

I thought that preferential policies should be reserved for the poorer blacks whose plight was used to justify them, not the comfortable middle-class blacks who were better prepared to take advantage of them—and I also thought the same policies should be applied to similarly disadvantaged whites. On the other hand, I didn’t think it was a good idea to make poor blacks, or anyone else, more dependent on government. That would amount to a new kind of enslavement, one which ultimately relied on the generosity—and the ever-changing self-interests—of politicians and activists.

On Other Black Conservatives

Walter Williams, Thomas Sowell, and Jay Parker were all smart, courageous, independent-minded men who came from modest backgrounds. Politics meant nothing to them. All they cared about was truthfully describing urgent social problems, then finding ways to solve them.

On Fears Around His Nomination To The Supreme Court

I recalled the ants I had watched as a child on the farm, building their hills one grain of sand at a time, only to have them senselessly destroyed in an instant by a passing foot.

On Becoming a Republican

Daddy had once asked me why I’d become a Republican, to which I replied that the Democrats no longer represented the things he’d taught me. But I never asked my mother how she voted, nor did she ask me why I’d chosen to ally myself with a party that so many blacks regarded as racist and evil. Now she could see for herself. Patrick Leahy, Howard Metzenbaum, Joe Biden, Paul Simon, even Teddy Kennedy: all of them were arrayed against me. How dare they treat her son that way. 

Never before had I seen her as angry as she was in the fall of 1991. All her life she’d assumed that Democrats in Washington were sensible leaders—but now she saw these men as single-issue zealots who were unwilling to treat her son fairly. “I ain’t never votin’ fo’ another Democrat long as I can draw breath,” she told me as we walked out of the Senate building on what should have been my final day of testimony. “I’d vote for a dog first.”

Shelby Steele, author, columnist, documentary filmmaker and Senior Fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution once noted about Thomas’ book while writing for the National Review: 

“A lesson on how to live in freedom—a lesson that begins with a description of poverty on a par with Richard Wright’s portrait of poverty in Black Boy. . . . Thomas is now an archetype that will inspire others. I can think of no greater achievement.” 

OK, I’m now on to my next read “Believing: Our Thirty-Year Journey to End Gender Violence” by Anita Hill.

So stay tuned.