Clarence Thomas is one of the least likely people you’d expect to teach civil rights.
For decades, he has used his Supreme Court weight to oppose affirmative action, challenge federal voting rights protections and reject certain legal resolutions designed to address racial discrimination.
Yet the University of Texas School of Civic Leadership has tapped the U.S. Supreme Court justice to help teach a course on civil rights and the meaning of equality next spring. The university’s recent announcement raises the obvious question: Just what civil rights story will the students be getting?
Thomas will teach a seminar called “Equality and the New Birth of Freedom.” It will focus on the work of civil rights activists including Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, W.E.B. Du Bois, Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X. He will be on campus for two hours every morning for one week in February.
Clarence Thomas is a Peter-Principled mediocrity who convinced himself that going to Yale somehow closed more doors than it opened for him, and ironically he let that bitterness turn him from a promising, if rigid, attorney into the exact kind of token he feared people saw him as. We are therefore subject to a naive and inflexible judicial philosophy that somehow always breaks in favor of whatever nonsense the Republican party wants, and he’s so scarred by his own self-defeating choices that he sees no issue in running a grift to get the money he thinks he deserves.
He wasn’t born to be a monster, but he sure made himself one. He’d be a tragic figure if he weren’t fucking over the entire country in real life.
Well said.