The freest black man in America: Clarence Thomas, associate justice from Pin Point, Ga

National Review, Oct 22, 2007 by Shelby Steele

TO be born into a minority group is, among other things, to be born into a collective experience of insecurity. Put differently, it is to be born into a group of nervous people. If you are born black in America, as has been my own fate, then you are born into a particularly intense insecurity. Your people have known almost nothing but insecurity and impotence for centuries--this as opposed to the majority culture's experience of itself as heroic and world-beating; ingenious in peace, dominant in war.

One thing this means for minorities is that their group identity will often be the enemy of their individuality. In its insecurity, the group is naturally threatened by the impulse in some of its members to think for themselves. Individuals like this seem to put the group at risk. What will we do if the majority culture thinks you speak for us? Your indulgence in individuality jeopardizes the carefully constructed mask we present to the powerful majority. Your individuality collaborates with them. So knock it off. Get in line, or we will shun you to the point of extinction.

Moreover, only blacks who wear the group's mask can pronounce on the innocence of whites. Thus Don Imus, longing for absolution, sought an audience with Al Sharpton. Ward Connerly or Colin Powell or Condoleezza Rice--individuals all--would never do. People who veer from the group mask--who evolve by their own lights--start to lose their moral authority as blacks. This is why President Bush got no credit for having two black secretaries of state. Naively he selected two black individuals.

Still, the black individual is now emerging as something of a new archetype in American life--not someone who disowns his group but someone who rejects it as a master. Today there is no more quintessential embodiment of this new archetype than Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas. And now--in his new memoir, My Grandfather's Son--Justice Thomas offers up the rich details of his remarkable and often heroic struggle to become a man who simply thinks for himself. He says, "The question was how much courage I could muster up to express my individuality. What I wanted was for everyone--the government, the racists, the activists, the students, even Daddy--to leave me alone so that I could finally start thinking for myself."

This memoir is really two books in one. The first chronicles his struggle to become his own man; the second describes the persecution this achievement elicits. A line he quotes from Ralph Ellison points to the cause-and-effect connection between these two books: "I was never more hated than when I tried to be honest."

Because this first book is a story of overcoming it calls to mind those great inspiring autobiographies of Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Richard Wright. But Thomas's overcoming is a more existential struggle than the struggles of these other men. Like them he contends with racism, especially in his early life, but unlike them he wants something more than just a victory over racism. There are other forces--benign and malign--that threaten to take him over, and he struggles mightily to ward them off.

There was the radical black-power politics he encountered in college. There were the dreams that his powerful and controlling grandfather had for him (to be the first black priest in Savannah). There was the stigma that affirmative action left on his achievements at Yale Law School and the relentless paternalism of post-'60s liberalism that would have allowed him to lower his standards. And there was even the allure of money and security--"golden handcuffs"--when he worked briefly as a corporate lawyer.

So My Grandfather's Son is a more radical memoir than its forebears, because it envisions an almost heroic individualism--an individualism that is quite beyond the old framework of race. Thomas mentions in passing that he listens to country music. "Merely because I was black, it seemed, I was supposed to listen to Hugh Masekela instead of Carole King, just as I was expected to be a radical, not a conservative." This book stands for what might be called a non-binding racial identity--an open-minded black identity that informs but never constrains. This is what Thomas demands for himself and holds out for other blacks--this in an age of identity politics when the black identity is so closed-minded and narrowly defined that it requires a reflexive devotion to the Democratic party.

A DIFFERENT PRESUMPTION

The racial thinking that undergirds My Grandfather's Son makes it an original addition to those great black autobiographies of the past. It updates the black American experience by presuming freedom and opportunity more than racism. And, in the end, it is a lesson on how to live in freedom--a lesson that begins with a description of poverty on a par with Richard Wright's portrait of poverty in Black Boy.

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However, Thomas first describes his very earliest years in Pin Point, Ga., as something of an idyll. The reader is made to understand that when poverty is rural and close to the ground--close to land and water--it can have a certain bountifulness and peace. But when Thomas is six, he and his younger brother are taken to Savannah to live in a broken-down tenement building with their overwhelmed young mother who has been abandoned by her husband. Here, all of a sudden, is rank urban poverty--despair, hunger, and abandonment. Thomas describes his hunger as a second-grader: "Never before had I known the nagging, chronic hunger that plagued me in Savannah. Hunger without the prospect of eating and cold without the prospect of warmth--that's how I remember the winter of 1955." The nadir of this period in his life comes when he stumbles while carrying a chamber pot down stairs--there are no inside bathrooms--and finds himself drenched by its contents.