Back in October, I reviewed Justice Clarence Thomas’s autobiography, My Grandfather’s Son 
Clarence Thomas’s story is one that should be an inspiration to all Americans regardless of race, religion, or gender. Here is a man, a black man, who was born in the poorest part of Georgia in an era when Jim Crow still reigned supreme. He was born into a single-parent family — his father having abandoned his mother early on — and lived for a time in some of the most excruciating, heart-wrenching, conditions of poverty conceivable in modern America.
And yet he succeeded. He excelled in high school, graduated college, and graduated from one of the most prominent law schools in the country. Eventually he went on to a well-regarded career in the government and then found himself standing next to the President of the United States on a summer day in 1991 being nominated to the Supreme Court of the United States. That should have been a day to make all Americans proud, instead it was the beginning of one of the most despicable Supreme Court nomination processes in history.
(…)
It’s a story that should be compelling regardless of your political affiliation, and regardless of what you think of Clarence Thomas as a Supreme Court Justice. It’s the story of a man who overcame desperate poverty and racism to achieve something that only 105 Americans before him had done.
The release of the book coincided with an extended interview on 60 Minutes that was, given the media’s reporting on Thomas over the years, surprisingly fair and even complimentary. For once, it seemed like Justice Thomas was going to be treated fairly. As Ohio Northern University Law Professor Scott Douglas Gerber discovered, however, that was far from the case:
[A]lmost all of the reaction to Justice Thomas’s opinions and votes is partisan. As I detailed in First Principles, commentators are either “for” Justice Thomas or “against” him, in the crassest possible sense. The reaction to Justice Thomas’s memoir, My Grandfather’s Son, continues this disturbing trend.
There is, for example, this from the Washington Post’s review:
Washington Post staff writers Michael A. Fletcher and Kevin Merida, co-authors of a recent unauthorized biography about Justice Thomas, didn’t even wait until Justice Thomas’s memoir was released before trashing it. (They claim to have “purchased” a copy of the book from “an area bookstore” three days prior to its October 1 release.) The opening sentence of their September 29th Post article, written with Robert Barnes, reads: “Justice Thomas settles scores in an angry and vivid forthcoming memoir, scathingly condemning the media, the Democratic senators who opposed his nomination to the Supreme Court, and the ‘mob’ of liberal elites and activist groups that he says desecrated him.”
Or this from Jeffrey Toobin’s review in the New Yorker:
Toobin gives Thomas little credit for earning on the merits his appointments as chairman of the E.E.O.C., judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, and justice of the Supreme Court. Instead, Toobin asserts that Thomas was “given” each job “because he was black.” For example, Toobin writes the following in discussing Thomas’s appointment to the D.C. Circuit: “Just forty-one years old, Thomas had never tried a case, or argued an appeal, in any federal court, much less in the high-powered D.C. Circuit; the last time Thomas had appeared in any courtroom was when he was a junior attorney in Missouri; he had never produced any scholarly work; his tenure at the EEOC, although respectable, did not mark him as a notable innovator in the federal bureaucracy. He was, in short, a black conservative in an Administration with very few of them. That’s why he got the job.”
What Toobin fails to mention is that, by 1989, Thomas already had established himself as the leading government authority in the United States on the document that articulates the political philosophy of our nation, the Declaration of Independence. Although Toobin might not characterize Thomas’s speeches and articles on the relationship between the Declaration and the Constitution as “scholarly work”–assuming Toobin bothered to read them at all–the conservative legal movement certainly did. And while Toobin might try to downplay Thomas’s eight-plus years of service at the EEOC –hardly a “modest federal agency,” as Toobin calls it–President George H.W. Bush obviously disagreed. So, too, did the United States Senate, which confirmed, by voice vote, the President’s nomination of Thomas to the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals.
And it goes on from there. Gerber’s point, and it’s hard to disagree with, is that virtually every review of Thomas’s memoir from someone in the media or someone on the left was not only negative, but negative to the point that it continued the same demonization of the man that we saw throughout his confirmation hearings. A trend which Gerber finds problematic:
[T]o me, much of the reaction from the Left to Justice Thomas’s memoir crosses the line of common decency. It’s certainly permissible to disagree with Justice Thomas’s judicial opinions. As I mentioned above, I sometimes do. However, it’s not appropriate to express that disagreement through ad hominem attacks.
My Grandfather’s Son is a moving portrait of a man who has overcome more obstacles than all of his critics combined. Of course, I reserve the right to continue to disagree with some of the opinions Justice Thomas issues on the Supreme Court. What I refuse to do, however, is to try to trivialize the remarkable life he has led.
It’s unfortunate that others don’t share Professor Gerson’s view.
My recommendation: take off the ideological blinders and read the book, you might just learn something.
