It turns out he never said affirmative action was of ‘paramount importance to me.’
It turns out he never said affirmative action was of ‘paramount importance to me.’
I t may have started in the New York Times, back in 1991. Within two weeks of Judge Clarence Thomas’s nomination to the Supreme Court, Neil Lewis reported in a front-page story that the nominee had a record of ambivalence about affirmative action. After noting a time Thomas had been critical, Lewis added that:
Yet in a 1983 speech to staff members at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which he then headed, he said that affirmative action laws were of “paramount importance” to him.
“But for them, God only knows where I would be today,” he said. “These laws and their proper application are all that stand between the first 17 years of my life and the second 17 years.”
Two months later, Newsweek repeated the story.
Political opponents of Justice Thomas have been using the quote against him ever since: He benefited greatly from affirmative action, and admits it, yet wants to get rid of it now so nobody else will. Joan Biskupic cited it in a 1996 Washington Post story about why the justice had so many critics among African Americans. The quote made it into an Al Franken book in 1999. Michael Tomasky used it earlier this year in the New Republic to portray Thomas as a “raging hypocrite.”
Sarah Reese Jones ran with it on Twitter today: “As SCOTUS looks to kill affirmative action, recall that Clarence Thomas got into college based on affirmative action. Thomas admitted as much. . . .”
I spent about an hour looking into this quote during lulls in the trick-or-treat traffic to my door, because the story makes no sense.
What “affirmative action laws” was Thomas supposedly discussing? How would these laws have benefited him starting in 1965, when he turned 17? The most relevant law passed by Congress around that time was the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which banned the subjection of any person to discrimination on the ground of race or color “under any program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance.” The law would not be (mis)read to allow racial preferences in college admissions until 1978, when Thomas had just turned 30.
Sure enough, the quote is not right.
Here’s what Thomas actually said in 1983. His speech noted that people used the phrase “affirmative action” to refer to different concepts, and he suggested that it could be implemented in better and worse ways. Coming toward the end of his remarks, he briefly sketched his own thoughts on the matter:
It is my view that too much posturing has taken place on issues such as affirmative action, which are critical to minorities and women in this society. The problems which we face in the area of equal employment opportunity must be solved. For the most part, they must be solved by applying legal principles of paramount importance to me. But for them, God only knows where I would be today.
I abhor any effort to twist, bend, or distort them for any reasons, whether such distortions are said to help or hurt minorities or women. No one should be permitted to turn these laws on their heads just because they have good intentions. These laws and their proper application are all that stand between the first 17 years of my life and the second.
He never said affirmative action was of “paramount importance to me”; the proper application of the laws was. The specific laws he had in mind, the ones that powerfully affected his life starting around 1965, were the landmark civil-rights laws passed by Congress and signed by President Johnson. His point was that he would not tolerate the bending of those laws, even for the supposed benefit of racial minorities and women. If he rules the way most people expect he will in the instant case, he will be staying true to his 1983 remarks rather than going back on them.
I doubt that he is surprised that he has been misunderstood. He has been warning about how much posturing takes place on these issues for a very long time.