Footnote 1:
The president of the College of the Holy Cross, from which Justice Clarence Thomas graduated, wrote an op-ed last month defending affirmative action and decrying the fact (as he correctly predicted it would be) that “Thomas, once the beneficiary of the most overt example of race-based admissions I can imagine, will probably be among the Supreme Court’s majority in the next few weeks when it is expected to strike down the use of affirmative action in college admissions.”
And what was that “most overt example of race-based admissions”? President Rougeau continues:
During the height of the civil rights movement, at a time when racial integration was sparking controversy on many campuses, College of the Holy Cross [future] President the Rev. John Brooks drove around the country to personally recruit Black high school students to the college’s all-male, primarily white campus in Worcester. The 20 young men he recruited have become an illustrious group, including business leaders, a Pulitzer Prize winner, a Super Bowl champion, and Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, class of 1971.
In other words, Fr. Brooks, believing that talented black students had no interest in applying to Holy Cross, made strenuous efforts to find and recruit a group who could meet the college’s standards. He was clearly successful.
Among the 20 students he had a hand in recruiting that year were Clarence Thomas ‘71, the future Supreme Court justice; Edward P. Jones ‘72, who would go on to win a Pulitzer Prize for literature; Theodore Wells ‘72, who would become one of the nation’s most successful defense attorneys; Stanley Grayson ‘72, future New York City deputy mayor who would break the color bar on Wall Street; and Eddie Jenkins ‘72, who would play for the Miami Dolphins during their 1972 perfect season.
That was what affirmative action was originally supposed to be: outreach to individuals who would do well at a school but didn’t know that the opportunity existed. It wasn’t what it has become: fiddling with the admissions process to meet arbitrary “diversity” goals.
Footnote 2:
Dan McLaughlin of National Review, to whom I tip my hat for the preceding footnote, also brought to my attention this remarkable admission against ideological interest by Nation columnist Elie Mystal, a black leftist who supports affirmative action but has, in the midst of a farrago of racialist rhetoric, inadvertently highlighted one of its flaws:
People have often expressed surprise that Thomas is so stridently against the policy, but I am here to tell you that of all of Thomas’s treacherous attempts to set Black folks back to second-class status, this one is the easiest to trace. Thomas considers himself a victim of affirmative action. In his autobiography, My Grandfather’s Son, Thomas says his degree from Yale Law School (Thomas graduated in 1974) was never taken seriously because of affirmative action. He recounts, painfully, how white employers didn’t believe that he could be as smart as his grades indicated, because they believed that he was only there as an affirmative action admit.
Frankly, I know the feeling. I think that any successful Black person in this country, especially one who went to a traditionally elite university, knows the feeling. I’m a well-respected legal columnist and best-selling author, and I can’t go a week without some simpleton who paid eight bucks for Twitter suggesting that I didn’t “earn” my place at Harvard Law School, an institution I graduated from 20 freaking years ago. It’s maddening – both in the sense that it makes me violently angry and that it interrupts the normal functioning of my brain. If you haven’t walked a mile in my shoes, or Thomas’s shoes, or the shoes of any other Black person who had the temerity to be excellent while Black, you really don’t know what it’s like to have white people who have the intellectual firepower of a wet cigarette question your credentials.
Unsurprisingly, Mr. Mystal blames white simpletons for inferring that beneficiaries of favoritism couldn’t have succeeded without the favors. That inference is sometimes wrong, as it is with Justice Thomas and (I will stipulate, though I know almost nothing about him) Elie Mystal, but it is inevitable. I have little doubt that Mr. Mystal believes that students admitted to Ivy League schools as “legacies” didn’t “earn” their places.
Denigrating the intelligence of affirmative action critics isn’t likely to remove the stigma that Justice Thomas and Mr. Mystal feel. What would put an end to it would be doing what the Rev. Martin Luther King advocated and the Supreme Court today ordered: Judge men not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.
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