Clarence Thomas

Bill Kauffman from the November 1987 issue

(Page 6 of 6)

Reason: The monkey on your back, is it?

Thomas: I'll be honest with you. When I was asked to go to the Department of Education as well as come here you're dang right I was insulted. What other reason besides the fact that I was black? But then I had to ask myself, if you don't do it, what are you going to say about these issues in the future? If you had an opportunity to get in there and you didn't do it, what standing do you have to complain? As one friend put it to me, "Clarence put up or shut up." And I wasn't going to shut up. [Laughter] There is no way anybody was going to shut me up.

And since I've been here, I've thought a lot about the rights of the individual. If the things that are being done to the individual in this city were being done by one person, we'd all think that we were living under a dictatorship. We'd all be thinking in a rebellious way about how we were going to get out from under this dictatorship. The erosion of freedoms is incredible.

Reason: Should we be thinking about rebellion'

Thomas: Well, I'm not an anarchist. But I tell you what--we should all be thinking about going to Sears and getting ourselves a tent and a survival kit! [Laughter]

I do think that our freedoms are at risk. There are very few people in the private sector and the public sector who are talking about freedoms. We're talking about interest groups, we're talking about issues, we're talking about our piece of the action, my project, this building, that building. What about freedom? What about the system or the environment that allows us to mind our own business? To liv e our lives, raise our families? There isn't a whole lot of talk about that.

Reason: This isn't really a big-picture city, is it?

Thomas: Ultimately somebody has to think about that. What is there about this country that will lead people to crawl through sewers, get on innertubes and float across miles of water, to sneak out in the middle of the night, to cram in under trucks and buses and other things, risk their lives going across mountains, etc.--what is it about this country that people will do all those things to come in, and what is it about the Soviet Union or Cuba or the Eastern Bloc countries that would force people to do those same things to get out?

It's not so much that we're not asking ourselves the big-picture questions --we're not asking ourselves the simple questions about what is good about our society. And whether or not we are preserving the health of our society. Are we going to wait until we lose that health to be concerned about it?