On the issue of whether Thomas qualifies as a sellout, Kennedy is surprisingly generous:
Those who prosecute Thomas for racial betrayal assert that he is guilty of more than being wrong. They imply or assert that he deliberately harms Black America, or knows that he does so without a justification or excuse, or pursues a dangerous course of action without heed of consequences ... It is one thing to charge someone with hurting the cause of African Americans. It is another to charge someone with knowingly or willfully hurting the cause. It is the knowingness and willfulness that makes "selling out" so reprehensible.
By narrowing his definition of who qualifies as a betrayer of the race to extreme cases --for example, "an African American member of a black uplift organization who reveals its secrets to anti-black adversaries out of malevolence" -- Kennedy allows "Uncle Thomas Reptilious," as one reporter called the justice, to squeak under the gate.
As an elegant and open-minded exercise in argument, one has to admire Kennedy's defense -- judging by Kennedy's examples, nearly all of Thomas' critics eventually get around to calling for his death. Kennedy is right to advocate for more nuance in the definition of the party faithful and the race traitor -- he even makes a solid argument for those who exposed planned insurrections as a strategy to avoid violence -- but he couldn't have made it harder to swallow than requiring his audience to redeem Clarence Thomas in the process.
Even so, I agree with Kennedy that the sullen justice has the right to criticize affirmative action programs despite having used them to get a leg up. In fact, his firsthand experience might have had the potential to make him a better judge of its strengths and weaknesses. But Thomas, armed with that silly idea, wishes to abolish these programs wholesale, not modify or improve them. He may be responding to the blowback of insecurity that affirmative action kids sometimes suffer, the nagging suspicion that one can't truly compete without that leg up. Thomas may even be expressing that anxiety in his zeal to annihilate race-based institutional decision making. However, I've often suspected that Americans who wish to abolish affirmative action also find these programs embarrassing because they make certain uncomfortable truths about our country and white privilege visible. Within legal bounds, most U.S. citizens, regardless of color, find it perfectly acceptable to use whatever unfair advantage they have to get ahead --longtime friends on search committees, uncles with hiring ability, puffed-up résumés, glamorous Internet profile pictures. Mild corruption's fine as long as it remains hidden and doesn't interfere with the perception that our country is a meritocracy. Playing dirty is part of our national heritage; we began this country by all but evicting its Native American leaseholders. White people have affirmative action, too -- and predictably, it works a lot better than the black version.
Though Kennedy doesn't touch on this aspect of Thomas' opinions about affirmative action, "Sellout" does a great deal to complicate the politics of racial betrayal and opens up a space between dissent and disloyalty, where a critical consideration of that set of beliefs we think of as tenets of black American identity doesn't have to make anybody the next William O'Neal, paid by the FBI to deliberately disrupt the activities of the Chicago Black Panthers. Or even the next Charles "Rat Killer" Barnett, who informed on Alabama civil rights leaders to Birmingham police chief Bull Connor, a Ku Klux Klan member notorious for breaking up protests with fire hoses and attack dogs. (Somebody needs to make a calendar out of that rogues' gallery.) While Kennedy won't foment anything on the scale of black perestroika, "Sellout" does a provocative job of nudging us toward a little more glasnost.
About the writer
James Hannaham is a staff writer at Salon.
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