The justice run amok

The Boston Globe
By Derrick Z. Jackson, Globe Columnist October 9, 2007

THE BITTERNESS in Clarence Thomas makes you wonder if he ever can realize that he won. It is 16 years since he was confirmed to the Supreme Court despite charges of sexual harassment by Anita Hill. For a decade and a half, in one of the most unassailable seats in the world, he has exercised power that affects millions of Americans.
That appears not to be enough for him. In his new memoir, Thomas fights the Hill accusations like a punch-drunk boxer. It did not matter that, as he himself wrote, the opinion polls immediately after the extraordinary Thomas-Hill hearings "tilted decisively - even lopsidedly - in my favor."
Despite being comfortably entrenched in a conservative wing of the court that is doing a good deal of what it was appointed to do in turning back the clock on the legal rights of millions of disadvantaged Americans, Thomas writes as if time stood still. Though most Americans who opposed his nomination have long been forced into a resigned shrug over his votes, Thomas spends a curious amount of time throwing dirt on Hill's professional reputation.
Going back to 1982, Thomas called Hill, today a Brandeis University professor, a "growing nuisance" when she worked for him at the Equal Employment Opportunities Commission. He said a staffer "told me that Anita wasn't performing up to expectations and failed to finish her assignments on time. I hadn't realized her work was so deficient." He said, "I'd also noticed Anita's rude attitude toward other members of my staff - and it had been bothering me as well that she seemed far too interested in my social calendar."
Thomas said when he passed over Hill for a promotion, she "stormed into my office" and accused Thomas of favoring light-skinned black women. Thomas said he helped Hill get a faculty position at Oral Roberts Law School partially because he saw it as a chance "to solve a problem of my own."
When Thomas was first told by the FBI about Hill's accusations during his confirmation process, he said he told the agents "her work at EEOC had been mediocre." Thomas wrote that when he wondered to himself why Hill was making these charges, he said, "I also knew from working with Anita that she was touchy and apt to overreact. If I or anyone else had done the slightest thing to offend her, she would have complained loudly and instantly, not waited for a decade to make her displeasure known."
Thomas even threw in a dig at Hill's politics. "I remembered how she'd said at our first meeting that she 'detested' Ronald Reagan - and I'd found her political views to be both stereotypically left of center and uninformed."
Why Thomas felt compelled to go over this again is anyone's guess. What is known is that the charges made him run to the very closet of victimhood that he famously accused black civil rights leaders of hiding in. His stunning, nationally televised response to Hill's charges was a declaration that he was the victim of a "high-tech lynching."
In "Supreme Discomfort: The Divided Soul of Clarence Thomas," a biography also published this year, Kevin Merida and Michael Fletcher of the Washington Post concluded, "Thomas wears his blackness like a heavy robe that both enobles and burdens him. The problem of color is a mantle he yearns to shed, even as he clings to it."

[To read the rest of the opinion editorial, go to: http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2007/10/09/the_justice_run_amok/ ]