All black people are leftists.
Clarence Thomas is not a leftist.
Therefore, Clarence Thomas is not black.
So goes the logic at the new Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture Museum. According to The Weekly Standard, Thomas is nowhere to be found in the museum. One of only two black Supreme Court justices in American history, and perhaps the court’s finest modern thinker – yes, even better than Justice Antonin Scalia, whose insistence on stare decisis marred the consistency of his originalism. Thomas is a major judicial figure in the history of the United States.
There’s only one reason he’s missing.
He’s conservative.
That’s the reason that HBO made a full-scale documentary about the discredited Anita Hill charges. It’s why the left gets to constantly insist that Thomas is some sort of idiot for not asking questions during oral argument (a useless procedure, given that the justices have generally made up their minds already). Even the museum includes items from the Anita Hill debacle:
Inside the museum, Hill and her supporters receive significant attention, with photos and quotations. And on the museum’s web site, you can see a button that reads, “I believe Anita Hill.” Museum officials conceded to Circa reporter Raffi Williams that Justice Thomas’s own story has “very little presence” in any of the exhibitions. That’s putting it rather generously.
This is the sick double standard of the left. If you’re a leftist black person, you can commit any sin and withstand it; if you’re a prominent conservative black person, you must be memory-holed. That’s because the left identifies people by group characteristic, and insists that it is the great protector of victimized groups. If certain members of those supposed victim groups refuse to see themselves as victims and instead insist on thinking along conservative lines, they must be cast out, lest they represent a living testament to the falsity of leftist thought.
And so Thomas disappears.
And the same Democratic Party that reams Donald Trump for doubting Barack Obama’s point of origin has no problem disappearing Thomas. After all, it’s racist to pretend that President Obama isn’t authentically African-American; it’s perfectly acceptable to do so to a man born in segregated Georgia on a farm, speaking Gullah as his native tongue, the descendant of American slaves, abandoned by his father, left homeless by a fire, raised by his maternal grandparents. He doesn’t think like Obama does, and so he must be excised.