Why do some blacks continue to find the victim’s pose so irresistible? One good reason is that it shuts people up-at least in the short run. As soon as Thomas began using words like “lynching,” Senate Democrats backed off, many African-Americans closed ranks and millions of whites felt sorry for him. Even Senate Republicans and conservative commentators, who usually rail against “victim’s rights,” felt a righteous thrill in lashing out at Thomas’s critics. Remember when it was only Democrats and guilty liberals like the Manhattanites in Tom Wolfe’s “Radical Chic” who patronized blacks by treating them as though their skin color and roots made them morally superior-and denounced anyone who said otherwise as racists? Now Orrin Hatch and The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page have discovered the joys of Mau Mauing.
The trouble with the victim game is that, in the long run, it’s self-defeating. Playing the race card may make whites squirm, but it also leaves a bad taste in their mouths. It cheapens the currency of words like lynching and racism and undercuts their historical significance. (The main flaw in Steele’s book, in fact, is that he skates over the depth of black victimization in America’s past and the lingering wounds it still inflicts.) The hot rhetoric can drown out honest talk about other problems people face that go beyond color. Despite all the attempts to turn it into a racial issue, many Americans sensed after listening to Thomas and Anita Hill, to Ellen Wells and J. C. Alvarez and the rest of the witnesses that this boiled down to a complicated story about men and women, bosses and employees and the changing world of the office.
For Thomas, playing the victim also helped distract attention from the ticklish issue of his qualifications. Largely lost in all the melodrama was the nagging question: is he ready to sit on the Supreme Court? For years, Thomas and other black conservatives have argued that affirmative action does African-Americans little good if it can be achieved only by lowering standards. Yet that’s exactly what George Bush did when he filled the black quota on the Supreme Court with such a green legal talent. There’s no question Thomas is an affirmative-action case. The issue now is whether he’ll be an advertisement for it or against it. If he can learn from his ordeal and grow into a justice of wisdom and compassion, people will forget that he was chosen only because he is black, and may even forget the ugliness of his clash with Anita Hill. If he can’t, many Americans will always remember him as the black justice who cried racism to save his neck.
