At one point in the interview, Justice Thomas held back tears as he remembered the warnings his grandfather gave him about showing his sexual feelings: "As we entered puberty, it was constant, and I remember the day he said, ‘Boy, you up in age now. Don't you ever look a white woman in the eye.'"Read the whole interview here.
Justice Thomas said he had hoped to become a Catholic priest but left the seminary when, on the day Martin Luther King Jr. was shot dead, he was confronted with racist beliefs that changed his views forever. A fellow student said: "‘Well, that's good. I hope the S.O.B. dies.' And that was it. That was the end of seminary. That was the end of the vocation. That was the end of, for all practical purposes, my Catholic faith."
His response was intense anger, which almost led him to join the Black Panther movement. "I was angry at the church because the church wasn't aggressively pointing out how immoral racism was," he said. "I was upset with my grandfather because he didn't understand what I was going through. I was upset with the country because of the bigotry. … I was upset at the — probably the submissiveness of blacks in putting up with bigotry. This was the era when you had the black power movement and that was enticing, it was liberating."
Justice Thomas described the process of disillusionment that led him to conclude that affirmative action, though introduced through good intentions, was a sham. Having been granted a place at Yale University, notwithstanding his lack of resources and the color of his skin, he ultimately felt his degree to have been instantly devalued.
"It was converted to, ‘Well, you're here because you're black.' … That degree meant one thing for whites and another thing for blacks," he said. He said he does not display his degree proudly; it is kept in the basement of his house, where it gathers dust, discarded.
Justice Thomas race affirmative action
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