Dear Uncle Thomas,
Despite Harriet Beecher Stowe’s best intentions, her character Uncle Tom has become a pejorative term aimed at black American’s accused of selling out to white folks. In the novel, he was supposed to be a good man, a Christian man, but it was Christianity that led him to, even under questionable conditions (say slavery), continue to believe in the white man. I can kinda get with what Harriet was aiming for and would even argue that Uncle Tom’s consistency made him admirable even if his belief in the white man didn’t. You Clarence Thomas are the true Uncle Tom, a shifty Negro, a turncoat.
For all your racialized experiences, that is, things that happen to you because you are black, you continue to argue against wearing your color lenses. You are, in a sense, legally color-blind. You dissent like someone suffering from a rare case of Monochromacy, forget saturated colors like blue and green, you can’t even see black and white. No to affirmative action, yet you somehow got into Yale after going to Holy Cross. No to segregation. No to black women, yet we all know Anita Hill was telling the truth. You are a freak. You married that white woman to prove you are a noble man, despite your tendencies towards stereotypical black male hypersexuality. I know you are a brother, and occasionally you do….httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=egTyaIAaqz8 ….but not when it matters to other black folks. Of course, when someone asks or maybe even needs you to be the black man on the bench with a personal history rooted in racism, you deign ask, “who me?” As you said in the 2007 BusinessWeek interview, “The assumption is that since you are all black, you have something in common.” Of course, Clarence! That is a fair assumption. Let’s not get particular here. Perhaps you like coffee and oh, hmmm, let’s say Scalia likes it too, since you two have tons in common. Yet, it wasn’t Scalia being grilled by the committee before his confirmation. It wasn’t Scalia who got into the Supreme Court on the narrowest margin of the last Century. And lastly, it wasn’t Scalia who could actually make a reference to slave time tree hangings and actually have the point stick. It was you. Errr. Black people have that reference in common. That kinda trumps coffee and jogging any day. What’cha say?
Perhaps you are wounded beyond belief, you know, actually a part of that collective black post-traumatic psyche, the kinda thing that continues to show up in the ancient ass doll test, and you are trying so hard to disconnect from “these people”, you refuse to see the similarities. Thus when you were punished back in the day for protesting (along with other black students), while white students committing the same offense walked free, you continue to approach the bench with race-blind rhetoric. Do you really believe all the “criminals” getting exorbitant sentences for non-violent crimes have arrived at the courts under equal circumstances and that they will receive equal punishment? Unlike Alito and Sotomayor, you run the bench without empathy. You are a racialist when your ass is on the line and then a textualist when it is someone else’s ass on the line. And for this you are a hypocrite and that is the true definition of an Uncle Tom.
In the end, I think you are an example of the intense self-hatred that can come from having your accomplishments overlooked, from having your individuality stripped, and from getting turned down by a sista. You are a walking billboard for the wide-ranging side effects of living, working, and breathing in a race-based society. All your text-based dissensions do little to hide that fact.
xx.
alex.
director of development.
high tech lynching programs.