Clarity (On Clarence Thomas and the Worth of Black Life)

Yesterday, my dad sent me an article from Slate Magazine about a Supreme Court decision written by Clarence Thomas that effectively argued that a black man, John Thompson, does not deserve the $14 million that he was awarded as damages for his unwarranted imprisonment, even by the meager standards of prison justice we deal with in the contemporary United States.  Thompson served 14 years on death row for a crime he did not commit and 18 years in prison, wrongfully convicted because of evidence suppressed by five Louisiana prosecutors. (And yes, it matters to me that John Thompson, like my father and like Clarence Thomas is a black man in the United States.)   I want to be as surprised as I am outraged that out of all the conservative Supreme Court “Justices” it would be Clarence Thomas to write this decision, but that would be ridiculous.

I cannot forget that years ago my father told me that he considered it a “cruel joke” and an “insult” when he first heard the announcement that on the retirement of Thurgood Marshall, genius for justice and civil rights hero, a mediocre sellout Reagan appointee to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission named Clarence Thomas was named by Bush One as the person to succeed Marshall and become the second ever African American supreme court justice. I was only 11 years old when the national government blatantly showed, in hearings (which I was mostly not allowed to watch), that black men who disrespected, lied about and betrayed black women would be rewarded by white men (who could more quietly continue to do the same thing). Meanwhile, Thomas somehow claimed to be lynched by a fellow conservative and black female lawyer Anita Hill who spoke out against his practice of sexual harassment.

It is not a surprise that the Supreme Court would want to invalidate a decision that a black man who is wrongfully convicted in Louisiana deserves 14 million dollars for the cruelty that he has experienced.  Imagine if ALL of the people of color wrongfully convicted with shady evidence received a million dollars for every year they have unjustly spent in prison.  Clarity.  This decision was written and voted on by people who KNOW that Thompson is only one of many many wrongfully convicted people of color who have been imprisoned because of they can be, because the worth of black life is so low that lazy prosecutors will pull in any person supposedly fitting the description of a black man of short to tall height wearing whatever with whatever haircut in order to advance their political agendas, and in a larger sense to maintain the illusion that justice exists in a land where it clearly does not.  And what makes me so angry about the fact that Clarence Thomas allowed himself to be used as the person who would enforce the consensus that a year in a black life is worthless, proving the worthlessness of all the investment his disappointed family and community made in his education and livelihood, is that this ongoing practice of treating black life as an almost worthless commodity, to be used and discarded is only possible because the participants in the justice system believe that black people are not part of a community that will stand up for them, that will come see about them, that will demand justice on each others behalf.  Clarence Thomas is bile in my mouth and a pain in my heart because in his every action, his sexual violence, his disrespect, his hard work to invalidate the claims of someone who has clearly been wronged, Clarence Thomas makes worthlessness look true.