I just finished watching Clarence and Ginni Thomas: Politics, Power and the Supreme Court (full documentary) | FRONTLINE.
A few insights I gained from watching this documentary was that both Clarence Thomas and Ginni started their lives in very extreme circumstances. Ginni was steeped in the earliest phases of the John Birch Society and an acolyte of Phyllis Schlafly, and Clarence in the worst conditions of apartheid United States, besides being abused by his grandfather meting out what was learned in enslavement as too many Black parents do.
The biggest insight that I gained from the documentary is what was explicitly said, they both seemed to become who they are, betrayers of the liberation of people like them, because they didn’t want to seem to be beneficiaries of a hand up by the attempts to level the playing fields through the Equal Rights Amendment, Affirmative Action, and any of those programs.
I have observed that there are many choices one makes when faced with such gaslighting. One can choose to do as Elie Mystal, I and many others have, reject the gaslighting of this narcissistic system, or do everything one can do to disprove the radioactive gaslighting like Clarence, Ginni, Candace Owens, Glen Loury and others must become the pets of this narcissistic system.
There is too much scholarship available on the internet that disputes all this gaslighting about the need to level this system, so I won’t address that here, but I will address a couple of things here. One, Affirmative Action requires one to be qualified. It does not alleviate the aggressions that one endures when one is one of a few in an environment of intellectually astute, but socially ignorant people. One still must endure what some people call “microaggressions”, that I call “aggressions”, multiple times a day. They are only “micro” to those who do not look like me and do not have to ever endure and rarely encounter those aggressions. They barely recognize them when they are happening in their face when they are with a Black “friend.”
And two, I recently told someone that people think we accomplished something by integration. What I have learned about that is that white people feel really good about themselves that they deign to share space with Black people, but still seem to expect us to be comfortable as token, mascots and pets in a second-class position. It is like what I heard Fani Willis discuss about her dating woes in her recent testimony in a hearing.
Men that she has attempted to date refuse to see her as an equal as she seeks companionship. Men have taught me that their basic needs from a relationship with a woman are to “feed him, f- and leave him the f- alone.” Some women consent to that behavior and some Black people consent to be pets of people who have no regard for their true equality or humanity.
For a palate cleanser, watch Elie Mystal discuss, Allow Me to Retort: A Black Guy’s Guide to the Constitution here:
Racism, caste, hegemony, or -isms, whatever one wants to call it, is persisting until permanently interrupted.
Comments