H@rd Truths By GHK Lall – Justice Clarence Thomas

Jun 17, 2023 Features / Columnists, News, The GHK Lall Column

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Kaieteur News – It is still difficult to absorb, harder to believe.  I observe US Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and his shocking dissent in the Alabama voting case that allegedly discriminated against Black voters by the redrawing of boundaries, and lumping them into a single district.  As asserted, it is a startling dissent, when even two conservative justices, one of whom was Chief Justice John Roberts, voted against Alabama’s gerrymandering.

To think that the descendant of slaves and sharecroppers could turn so decisively against his own people, when they are so strikingly discriminated against, victimized yet again by the power and class structure. A man as learned as Justice Thomas has to be intimately familiar with the post-Civil War and post-Reconstruction periods, when the Plessy decision effectively reduced African Americans to outcasts and second-class citizens; but yet he dissented as he did.  He has to know about the Jim Crow era, and how legislation was used as a weapon to bludgeon Black Americans into a state of distressed nonexistence, no political power; but he voted as he did in Allen v. Milligan.  He has to know of what the spirit of the Voting Rights Act of 1966 intended, and the range of what was to be resolved; yet he went against the majority, which included two of his judicial brethren possessing his ideological streak.

In a case as sensitive as Allen v. Milligan, with so much at stake, with what was gained through so much trial and sacrifice, and with what could signify a major retreat in Black progress and presence in America, Justice Thomas saw matters only through his now rock-hard ideological prism.  I ask myself whether that giant of American jurisprudence, Justice Thurgood Marshall, would have dissented as Justice Clarence Thomas did.  Never! I recall with some distaste what the late archconservative Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia had to say when asked to compare his judicial philosophy to that of Clarence Thomas.  Scalia’s response is scorching: “I’m an originalist, but I’m not a nut.”  As dismissals go, there was none sharper, and what makes it more contemptuous is that Justice Thomas is of the same conservative bent held by Scalia.

Taking where Justice Thomas stands, what he has projected, despite being a beneficiary of the once helpful things he now fiercely condemns, I begin to get a clearer, and greater, understanding of how abandonment of one’s own under inexplicable reasonings, through shallow constructs, can assume ascendancy in the lives and practices of those who should know better.  What is inarguable is that the company of enslavers and those who historically exploited are much preferred over that of one’s own, and their justifiable interests.  It is that old saying coming to life: the converted has to prove himself as being purer and stronger every day, with little room for deviation, abstention, or consideration.

I examine the judicial record of Justice Thomas, particularly as it relates to affirmative action, and all that is encountered is a man, a jurist, who is boiling mad at its existence.  This is what emerges from a man who owes his education, and all the powerful relationships that came about through it, as well as the sponsorships of political godfathers.  I detect a debt of gratitude being paid and repaid over and again.  Or, to present differently, their passions and their visions are adopted by him, become inseparable from him.

I contend that this is what we are seeing, experiencing, and struggling to come to grips with in Guyana.  That is, where one political leader after another in this rich country rushes to stand in cherishing embrace of the priorities that are the most pleasing to those who once held the whip hand.  They still do, but under new guises. The planks in place and the practices in operation that are most profitable are what must remain as they are.  In the grand manner of Justice Clarence Thomas, a man of distinctive color, there are Guyanese men and women of the same distinguishing coloration (in its broadened sense), that sets them apart from the yearnings and dreams of their own.  There are those Guyanese-leaders, ministers, religious worshippers, private sector operators, and civil society schemers- who have made it their mission and mantra to tell the stories, fight the battles, and pauperize their own peoples, on behalf of alien self-enrichers and plunderers.  They do these things, so that their associations and collaborations with the remorseless pillagers will be well recognized and well rewarded.  They have, haven’t they?

Look at what we have in Guyana today from our clever political practitioners and their bands of similarly sick brothers.  There is sifting and parsing, and straining and sanitizing, so that certain narratives, ongoing practices continue untouched and unabated. Clarence Thomas fervently desires for affirmative action to go and the death penalty to stay.  The brown and black and paler Guyanese Clarence Thomas (es) want recent history to remain as it is; and what holds the prospects of giving lowly Guyanese a foot in the door to be banished forever.  Somebody is aiding and abetting, and it is not I.  Some are selling, and I have nothing to sell, none to please.

(The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions and beliefs of this newspaper and its affiliates.)

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• Chief Justice, Clarence Thomas, John Roberts, justice, US Supreme Court

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