http://community.seattletimes.nwsource.com/archive/?date=19950626&slug=2128294 Clarence Thomas: Poster Boy For Affirmative Action By Jeff Cohen, Norman Solomon There is something unseemly about a guy who has just built a house on the beach and is now leading the charge to stop all further beach-front construction. Or a recent immigrant who climbs the soapbox to call for a halt to further immigration. Or a beneficiary of affirmative-action programs who climbs the ladder of success by attacking affirmative action. That kind of unseemliness was demonstrated this month by Justice Clarence Thomas. But few reporters took note - even though it should be the media's job to spotlight hypocrisy. Thomas cast the deciding vote in the Supreme Court's 5-to-4 decision to narrow federal affirmative-action programs. But Thomas went beyond even fellow conservatives on the bench - he argued for an immediate end to affirmative action. There's an obvious contradiction here: Clarence Thomas benefited enormously from the kind of affirmative-action programs he now seeks to kill. Indeed, Thomas' rise from his dirt-poor upbringing in rural Georgia into an elite Ivy League law school is an affirmative-action success story. But don't take our word for it. Take his. In a November 1983 speech to his staff at the federal Equal Employment Opportunities Commission, Thomas called affirmative action "critical to minorities and women in this society." Then, his remarks got personal: "But for them (affirmative-action laws), God only knows where I would be today. These laws and their proper application are all that stand between the first 17 years of my life and the second 17 years." As an undergraduate at Holy Cross College, Thomas received a scholarship set aside for racial minorities. He was admitted to Yale Law School in 1971 as part of an aggressive (and successful) affirmative-action program with a clear goal: 10 percent minority enrollment. Yale offered him generous financial aid. Affirmative action can't guarantee success, but it can open doors previously closed to women and people of color. The rest is up to those who walk through the doors. By all accounts, Thomas was a hard worker who studied long hours. But his place at Yale Law School - his key to later success - was opened by a race-conscious admissions program, the kind he is now intent on outlawing. After this month's Supreme Court decision, few news outlets explored the sharp contrast between Clarence Thomas' obsession with destroying affirmative action and his own personal history. One wonders what Thomas believes about his past. Maybe he prefers the fairy-tale account provided by Rush Limbaugh, whose talk show he listens to each day: "Clarence Thomas escaped the bonds of poverty by methods other than those prescribed by these civil-rights organizations." The truth is that Thomas owes thanks to the civil-rights movement - whose decades of lawsuits, protests and lobbying removed barriers for individuals like Thomas. Yet, he seems to relish his role as one of the movement's main enemies. Since the early 1980s, Thomas' career soared thanks to a perverse form of racial preference. It was his race, as Thomas has admitted, that got him two civil-rights posts in the Reagan White House; the jobs came because he opposed the civil-rights movement. So did his boss, President Ronald Reagan, whose opposition dated back to the years of Martin Luther King Jr. President Bush - who, like Reagan, had opposed the landmark 1964 Civil Rights Act - later chose Thomas to fill the Supreme Court seat of civil-rights legend Thurgood Marshall, the only other African American to sit on the highest court. In his recent Supreme Court opinion blasting affirmative action, Thomas could find no moral difference between "laws designed to subjugate a race" and laws that benefit a race "in order to foster some current notion of equality." Thomas went on to complain that affirmative-action programs stigmatize the beneficiaries - an argument not raised by the plaintiff in the case, a white building contractor who says he unfairly lost federal work to a Latino-owned business. Responding to Thomas, Justice John Paul Stevens pointed out that if beneficiaries of affirmative action feel stigmatized, they can simply "opt out of the program." It's worth considering. If Thomas feels traumatized or stigmatized for having benefited from affirmative action, he could give back his law diploma. Such a move would be absurd - since Thomas earned his degree by studying hard and passing all required exams. Even more absurd, though, is Thomas' current mania for closing doors to others that the civil-rights movement helped open for him.
In a November 1983 speech to his staff at the federal Equal Employment Opportunities Commission, Thomas called affirmative action "critical to minorities and women in this society." Then, his remarks got personal: "But for them (affirmative-action laws), God only knows where I would be today. These laws and their proper application are all that stand between the first 17 years of my life and the second 17 years." As an undergraduate at Holy Cross College, Thomas received a scholarship set aside for racial minorities. He was admitted to Yale Law School in 1971 as part of an aggressive (and successful) affirmative-action program with a clear goal: 10 percent minority enrollment. Yale offered him generous financial aid. By all accounts, Thomas was a hard worker who studied long hours. But his place at Yale Law School - his key to later success - was opened by a race-conscious admissions program, the kind he is now intent on outlawing. --------- https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo...s-court-should-have-gutted-affirmative-action Justice Thomas Says Court Should Have Gutted Affirmative Action https://www.usnews.com/news/article...-suggests-affirmative-action-is-like-jim-crow Clarence Thomas Suggests Affirmative Action is Like Jim Crow Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas compares affirmative action to segregation.
They're blaming their self-imposed extinction on some war on whitey, the poor snowflakes: https://www.newsweek.com/rising-dea...-threat-their-dominant-social-status-1474038? RISING DEATH RATES AMONG WHITE AMERICANS LINKED TO PERCEIVED THREAT TO THEIR DOMINANT SOCIAL STATUS, STUDY SHOWS A new public health study released by University of Toronto researchers found that rising mortality in white Americans is partly due to perceptions that they are losing social status. The paper, titled "Growing sense of social status threat and concomitant deaths of despair among whites," highlights this population health phenomenon that has been unfolding for the past two decades. Mortality rates seldom rise unless a society is subjected to something disastrous, like a major economic crisis, an infectious disease epidemic or war. But there has been an increase in working-age mortality rates for just one group in the United States since 1999, and that's non-Hispanic whites. "This is a startling finding," said Arjumand Siddiqi, lead author of the study. Siddiqi, an associate professor of epidemiology at the Dalla Lana School of Public Health, went on to say this could be the first time that a widespread population health phenomenon cannot be explained by social or economic status disadvantage, and instead has been driven by "a perceived threat to status." "The anxiety of whites is coming from a misperception that their dominant status in society is being threatened, which is manifesting in multiple forms of psychological and physiological stress," said Siddiqi. This stress has resulted in what researchers call "deaths of despair." While mortality rates trend higher for whites, the increased causes of death have been due to alcohol consumption, opioid use, opioid overdose and suicides. According to the study, rising chronic diseases—which includes hypertension and obesity—also contributed to this trend. "Status is a major predictor of health so our team hypothesized that it was a perception among whites that Blacks are economically catching up to them, when, in fact, income inequality and other socioeconomic factors continue to affect Black Americans more unfavorably," said Siddiqi. During the presidential election in 2016, Donald Trump's campaign promoted widespread xenophobia. Survey data later revealed that voting for Trump was connected to the fears of white Americans concerned about increased racial diversity within the country and globalization outside of the country. "With the very real rise in economic instability over the last several decades, we'd expect mortality rates to rise in the most socioeconomically disadvantaged groups of all races," said Siddiqi. "But this is not the case. Instead we're seeing a striking reversal among working-age whites, which seems to be driven principally by anxiety among whites about losing social status to Blacks, even in the absence of evidence, which is a newly identified population health phenomenon that requires further research," she added. While the most negative outcomes in the paper were concentrated in white Americans with high school degrees or less, signs of stress and elevated anxiety leading to a rise in mortality was reported through every level of education.