He did not turn to the papers until after the man had left the room. Then he spread out the Tribune and saw: NEGRO RAPIST FAINTS AT INQUEST. He understood now; it was the inquest he had been taken to. He had fainted as they had brought him here. He read:
Overwhelmed by the sight of his accusers, Bigger Thomas, Negro sex-slayer, fainted dramatically this morning at the inquest of Mary Dalton, millionaire Chicago heiress.
Emerging from a stupor for the first time since his capture last Monday night, the black killer sat cowed and fearful as hundreds sought to get a glimpse of him.
"He looks exactly like an ape!" exclaimed a terrified young white girl....
The moment the killer made his appearance at the inquest, there were shouts of "Lynch ‘im! Kill ‘im!"
But the brutish Negro seemed indifferent to his fate....He acted like an earlier missing link in the human species. He seemed out of place in a white man’s civilization.
***
One of these paragraphs above all contains Clarence Thomas’ limits -- the charge, the very intimation of a charge, that he could not, would not be able to permit:
"He paused and reread the line AUTHORITIES HINT SEX CRIME. These words excluded him utterly from the world. To hint he had committed a sex crime was to pronounce a death sentence....It meant death before death came, for the white men who read these words would at once kill him in their hearts."
The men on the Judiciary Committee, and their staffers, had not read this. Or if a few of the oldest ones had ever read the book, they had long since forgotten it. By climaxing the hearings with an 11th-hour charge of a "sex crime," the ingenious staffers were only seeking to disseminate what they conceived of as "dirt." They did not know that to Clarence Thomas, given his background, his roots, and his intellectual history, such a charge meant: Death.
Rarely has there been so poignant an example of life imitating art. But the senators and their "researchers" were not imitating art; there was no one on the Judiciary Committee or its staff with the literary imagination, let alone the vicious literary imagination, to do so. They were simplehearted souls, party hacks, whose only aspiration was to disgrace a political enemy. They didn’t understand this political enemy. They didn’t know that Thomas carried Richard Wright engraved upon his heart, that he had carried Richard Wright right into that hearing room.
"THE SEX CRIMES"
When Clarence Thomas learned he was going to be charged with a pack of "sex crimes," lumped together under the heading of "sexual harassment," and that they were to be discussed at a mock trial, he reacted with the swiftness of lightning. He fired his Republican handlers, who had not only dressed him in a dumb clown suit but had not known how to protect him from being portrayed as a criminal taking the Fifth and as a would-be butcher of women. If he had once believed that the men at the peak of the power establishment knew what they were doing, he believed it no more. He took his life out of their hands and back into his own.
Certainly, no one knew better than Thomas what "sexual harassment" had become over the years -- a cultural phenomenon beyond his or, apparently, anyone’s control. Once an objective description of the use of male employers’ power to subjugate and exploit female subordinates, this new and ever-expanding legal offense, first defined in 1986, had turned into pure feminist dementia. Now "sexual harassment" meant anything or everything said or not said, done or not done, to a woman by a male superior, by a male co-worker, by any male in the vicinity, which upset, angered, or offended her -- in the woman’s judgment. Men’s judgments had become legally irrelevant. The subjectivity and dubious First Amendment implications of the New Harassment are well-known. Thomas was charged by Anita Hill with crimes of "verbal conduct" -- "speech crimes," which, of course, implies thought crimes.
Thomas’ legal analysis of his alleged speech crimes was that of a trained Yale lawyer, a judge of a Court of Appeals, and the former head of the EEOC. But his decisions about what to do and say were pure Richard Wright. The two roles were different, but both were functions of the "evidence."
Editor's Note: We invite comments and request that they be civil and on-topic. We do not moderate or assume any responsibility for comments, which are owned by the readers who post them. Comments do not represent the views of Reason.com or Reason Foundation. We reserve the right to delete any comment for any reason at any time.
Pingback| 4.30.10 @ 5:58PM
Fit to Judge | Bastiat Institute links to this page. Here’s an excerpt:
canada gooses parka|5.9.10 @ 11:28PM|#
These are the kind of products, where you see that Supreme always does go a step further than everybody else. They have created two earflap caps this season. One checkered together with New Era, that comes in 3 colorways and one in their classic colors with fur inside. Both very unique pieces and they dropped now, just on time for the cold season. Make sure to get yours quickly, as these will of course sell out in no time.
Essence has them in stock now.
nfl jerseys|11.26.10 @ 8:26PM|#
hs
قبلة الوداع|9.12.11 @ 7:39AM|#
thanks