PERSPECTIVE ON THE SUPREME COURT : Thomas Refuses Victim’s Mantle : The liberal policy of redress may have aided his development. But self-help put him in the position to benefit.

I think most Americans sense that Judge Clarence Thomas is enduring a different sort of scrutiny than is normal for a Supreme Court nominee. A difference more in kind than in degree. He is black, but a different sort of black than we are used to seeing in public life. Born poor in the Jim Crow South, he is today a conservative and a Republican to boot. One recent cartoon caption read: “Black conservative? Is that legal?” I think Americans are not only curious about who he is, but also about the meaning of his seeming incongruity.

This, I believe, is one reason why he is often referred to in the press as a “mystery man,” an “enigma.” Over the past few years, I have had warm conversations with Thomas over the phone. He is an utterly likable and extremely intelligent man. But I never came away feeling that he is mysterious or enigmatic. These labels are more a comment on America, on the narrowness and obsolescence of our terms of racial discourse, than on Thomas. America has not until now paid much attention to people like him, and so it projects its surprise as his “mystery.”

In the American imagination, blacks are the purest carriers of suffering, and conservatism is thought to protect the status quo in which they suffer. By this construct Judge Thomas can only be a sell-out, an Uncle Tom, a man compensating for the privations of his background by identifying with his oppressor. The image is of a compassionless, self-hating black whose personal achievements only justify his harsh judgments of his own people.

Yet I suspect that Thomas knows what I have come to know--that this construct is a crucible for blacks. It says: Not only have you suffered, but now you must wear the mantle of suffering. If your color is no longer always a mark of inferiority, it will now be a mark of suffering and victimization. This is a crucible for blacks because--as well intended as it might be--it only reassigns us from one form of weakness to another, from inferiority to suffering. And it is easier to fight inferiority than suffering because as one denounces the sufferer’s role, it will look as if one is “blaming the victim.” It will look as if one is compassionless when in fact one is only resisting the weakness--the dependency and lack of self-determination--inherent in the role of sufferer.

But I must be careful here, because blacks have clearly suffered greatly in America. So an important hair must be split: There is a crucial difference between the experience of suffering and an identity focused on that suffering. The crucible I am talking about is debilitating to blacks because it makes our suffering and victimization into an identity, so that we are encouraged to think of ourselves as victims. Once this identity is in place we are weakened, since we assume that we must be repaid for our historic suffering and that these reparations will be the power that delivers us. No worse illusions can afflict a people struggling to overcome the scars of oppression, since they throw us back into the same dependency on the whim of others that made us suffer in the first place. In this way, today’s black suffering only reenacts yesterday’s black inferiority. The irony is that once we identify with our suffering, we lose the power to end it.

And this brings us to the matter of Thomas’ conservatism. I believe that at least on one level, it amounts to an affirmation and assertion of black strength. He told the black graduates of Savannah State College in 1985 that they would have a tougher road than the one he had followed. “Not only do you have to contend with ever-present bigotry, you must do so with a recent tradition that almost requires you to wallow in excuses. . . . You have twice the job I had.” The implied “second job” here is to resist the weakening identity of victim that so many are willing to offer such students today. As an antidote to the dependency of this identity, he routinely advocates the classic values of hard work, individual initiative and self-reliance--even as bigotry is continually resisted. To the modern, and often cynical, ear this sounds embarrassingly naive and extremely conservative. But his approach is pragmatic. He thinks these values are the best chance for black advancement. I believe most Americans think he is right.

Though Thomas in no way denies his own suffering from poverty and discrimination, his entire life has been a struggle not to identify with it--and, therefore, not to be defeated by it. I believe his “conservatism” in racial matters is only realism, common sense. More than this, it is a profound form of compassion, because it rises from a conviction of the strength of his race rather than anguish at its suffering.

But then why is this man despised and condemned by so many of his brothers and sisters in and around the civil-rights organizations and by many white liberals? I think one reason is that they have fallen into what might be called a liberalism of redress. Here the focus is so singularly on the redress due the sufferer that he is all but absolved of obligations to himself and society. To talk of these obligations is to seem to devalue his suffering and victimization. And those who talk of such obligations seem to be against his best interest. They seem to be anti-black.

I think the NAACP came out against Thomas’ nomination because his commitment to self-help seemed to violate their singular devotion to redress as the greatest source of black power. In the liberalism of redress, power is imagined to be outside the victim’s sphere of life. Suffering entitles the victim to demand redress from a society that he then believes will empower him. He banks on it, and he waits for it. And, of course, it rarely comes in sufficient degree to do much good. Yet the small redresses that do come, like the quarters the slot machine drops to keep you playing, keep his eyes on redress so completely that he ignores the best wisdom of his own culture--”God bless the child who’s got his own.”

This is the wisdom that was ignored in the NAACP staff report that led the organization to oppose Thomas’ nomination. At the end of this report, the esteemed black historian, John Hope Franklin, says, “Self-help is admirable so long as it encourages initiative and achievement in a society that gives all its members an opportunity to develop in the manner best suited to their talents.” In this seemingly reasonable statement is the great flaw of contemporary liberalism. The troublesome words here are “so long as” that qualify self-help with redress--self-help can only work after redress.

Like Prof. Franklin, all people of good will want the redress that would truly bring more equality of opportunity, and our society should only redouble its efforts in this direction. But Franklin, who lived most of his life in a segregated America, did not wait for a perfect equality before he made himself into one of our most accomplished historians. He did not let society’s redress of his victimization be a condition of his self-help. Nor did Thomas. The individual initiative of both men came before, and was not contingent on, the social reforms of society, though both ultimately benefited from those reforms. The weakness of contemporary liberalism is not in its pursuit of redress, but in the way it makes self-help into a bargaining chip by holding it back and calling it a “myth” until society delivers complete redress.

And, thus, the NAACP and other liberal groups make Judge Thomas into a bargaining chip. He, too, must be held back until complete redress is achieved. In the liberal cosmos, self-help threatens redress, so Thomas must be rejected precisely because he did help himself. This is a formula by which liberalism shackles the initiative of the very people it seeks to help.

It fascinates me to hear black and white liberals rush to say that Thomas was helped in his career by affirmative action (though this will be said of any high-achieving black today). Here they are using the very redress they call for to put him in his place. “You’re not so hot,” they imply. “You couldn’t have made it on your own.” Now redress is a liberal weapon against the maverick, self-helping victim. Now liberals join league with the likes of Jesse Helms and use affirmative action as an accusation and a slur. If we can grant that affirmative action may have helped Thomas, why can’t it be granted that it was determined self-help that put him in the position to benefit. After all, there was no affirmative action back in segregated Pin Point, Ga. The liberal flaw is to make redress and self-help mutually exclusive, to devalue the latter in the name of the former.

Common sense tells us we need both. If society opens the door, the individual must have the initiative to cross the threshold. Isn’t Thomas the best advertisement of both liberals and conservatives, a success story of redress and initiative? Aren’t all Americans flattered by his example?