And when he was asked about the Reagan administration, which he joined in 1981, and about the racism of the Reagan administration, he said they don't lie to you and also they don't smile at you. And for older people of color that's an insult, it's an added injury because they grew up with terror. We do believe in memorials. FEMALE CORRESPONDENT: As he swung, his fingers were amputated and passed around as souvenirs while he screamed in pain. BROOKE GLADSTONE: George, thank you very much.
And I think when Thomas begins with these very deep beliefs and racial pessimism, the fact that black people cannot be accommodated by a white society. BROOKE GLADSTONE: Let’s move quickly onto your third category, the trial balloon?
I do think there is something about sites of conscience, about places where horrific things happen. That's why I took a picture of that poem, for sure, we don't need to relive it. And if you read that speech in 1987, the redistribution of money as speech is his grandfather. Right now, I'm from Georgia.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: So she used a particular simple grammar and thereby created a precedent for us to discount all hotel usages from there on out.
He was a student at Holy Cross and then at Yale Law School beginning in 1971, and he discovered what he felt was a more insidious kind of racism than what he had known in the South.
Micah Loewinger, Leah Feder, Jon Hanrahan, Xandra Ellon and Eloise Blondiau with more help from Eleanor Nash.
And this is a very deliberate decision and nomenclature they choose. Thomas does not believe affirmative action created that stigma, but that affirmative action reinforces that stigma. The second conclusion is that capitalism, the marketplace, while it tends to be geared towards white interests, nevertheless offers niches where black people can achieve some kind of measure of autonomy. I got to do that at least because it said something about, 'oh the injustice and the lynchings that happened after the abolition of slavery.' Author and educator Corey Robin, whose latest book is The Enigma of Clarence Thomas, explains. GEORGE LAKOFF: Exactly. And to convey the humanity of the slave, the anguish you'd think anyone could imagine. Either the dependance upon the welfare state, which is how he dismissed his sister, that she's so dependent upon welfare, she gets mad at the mailman when he's late with her check. It's evident in everything the judge writes in every public pronouncement. We first aired this interview in November.
All countries like they're monsters.
That was one of the largest mass migrations in world history and we haven't talked about that. And for me that's the narrative that we haven't actually come to grips with. FEMALE CORRESPONDENT: That's where I was born. The memorial is the experience I'll take home with me, the one I'll never forget. --Georgia.
BROOKE GLADSTONE It makes them look better. BROOKE GLADSTONE: How many counties across the nation? Associated Justice Clarence Thomas speaks during an event at the Library of Congress in Washington, Thursday, Feb. 15, 2018. People weren't lynched just because they were accused of some violent crime, they were lynched because they were successful in business. But actually, I think I came away more horrified in a way, by Clarence Thomas. FEMALE CORRESPONDENT: Look at the feet.
This family was exterminated. FEMALE CORRESPONDENT: You see a White on there? Montgomery marks its history and though most of the signage and granite is devoted to the Confederacy, more recent events increasingly intrude. Look at the hands. To introduce the federal courts, to oversee the practice of punishment and imprisonment.
Thomas derives this in part from his reading of Malcolm X. I should say a selective reading, because Malcolm X had a complicated view on this. You see a mother holding a baby--. That reflects the two million kidnapped people who died during that a slave trade. Languages are learned by children, and little children learning languages don’t know about systemic causation. I got to do that at least because it said something about, 'oh the injustice and the lynchings that happened after the abolition of slavery.'
BROOKE GLADSTONE: So this sort of extrapolation from one example is the salient exemplar.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Putting out the entire dossier is arguably premature.
I think that tells you as much a story stories as anything here.
One woman says 'selling is worse than flogging.' I'm a skeptical person that feels I can't believe everything that I read, see, hear, but, you know, you can hear it at least.
But, but what he also presents with these figures that are streaked, the copper streaks down them, you see their anguish and pain but you also see their humanity, their dignity. Slave owners didn't want to be caught owning property that they could not get a return on and so they wanted to trade that to a region where there were people still willing to buy.
A million enslaved people were moved from the north to the south, where enslaved people were losing their value with increasing calls for abolition.
Where people are armed to the teeth, where white racism seems almost worse than ever, where wealth is accumulated in even more obscene ways. Montgomery marks its history and though most of the signage and granite is devoted to the Confederacy, more recent events increasingly intrude.
[END CLIP]. But that's not the case.
And he is that brooding omnipresence. Which communities have claimed their history and which ones haven't.
BROOKE GLADSTONE So, the third part of your disquisition on Thomas is titled The Constitution. family. And that terror can't be understood without replicating those dynamics.
No education, no father, raised in part by freed slaves in Jim Crow South.
He’s come up with a few categories for thinking about Trump tweets, and the first is preemptive framing. BROOKE GLADSTONE: I was surprised by her skepticism about the persistence of lynching since photographs are easily found and the one of Emmett Till's body in 1955 is historic, having galvanized the civil rights movement.
Even if and sometimes it seems, particularly if that state is racist.
That they are simply not capable is the belief among white people of any kind of achievement or advancement on their own. I can't say anything else. He shot …
FEMALE CORRESPONDENT: Oh, there is Caddo Parish.
Our country has been largely silent, and so it hangs over us. They certainly don't understand that the great evil of American slavery wasn't involuntary servitude and forced labor, it was this ideology of white supremacy. COREY ROBIN He is, in fact, the book opens with an epigraph, the famous line from the opening of Invisible Man. Are we living in Nazi Germany?”. Which communities have claimed their history and which ones haven't.
COREY ROBIN And it's how we mostly remember Clarence Thomas in this country. GEORGE LAKOFF: And the idea of preemptive framing is to frame an issue before other people get a chance to, to put the idea out there first, for example, quote, “The only reason the hacking of the poorly defended DNC is discussed is that the loss by the Dems was so big, they were totally embarrassed.”. The differential treatment of white and black students becomes very apparent.
She fell at his feet, clung to his knees. When they asked for better conditions as coal miners they would be lynched. In the 1850s, able field hands brought $1,500. She is a Hillary flunky who lost big. Accuracy and availability may vary.
- should immediately apologize to Mike Pence for their terrible behavior.” BROOKE GLADSTONE: I think at that time the big issue was his $25 million settlement over the Trump University case.
And that's why we have that slavery sculpture by Kwame Akoto-Bamfo. This is very much like the memorial in Berlin.
BRYAN STEVENSON: And we want them to have a first person narrative.
That's how silent we have been. MALCOLM X It is better for us to go to our own schools and after we have a thorough knowledge of ourselves, of our own kind, and racial dignity has been instilled within us, then we can go to any one school and we'll still retain our race pride and we will be able to avoid the subservient inferiority complex that is instilled within most Negroes who receive this sort of integrated education.
And our complete absence of awareness contributes to this false narrative, this false understanding of who we are. BROOKE GLADSTONE And are better off if unboundedly repressed. In treating him to provide for her babies as well as for herself.
So lately we've had a rare chance to see how justice can play out in the streets. And so yes, I think the monuments create an opportunity for communities to begin a process of recovery, of reconciliation, of restoration. And they haven't got a clue.
conservatives on the court who emphasized this vision of colorblindness, that all people are equal and ought to be treated equally. BROOKE GLADSTONE: Henry Smith, 17, in Paris , Texas.
And that's what affirmative action is for him in the very last piece of this, that this is all part of white elites self conception. BROOKE GLADSTONE Is this when he first encounters or first makes use of the ideas of Malcolm X. COREY ROBIN Yes, he reads the autobiography of Malcolm X in 1968, starts listening to the records of Malcolm X's speeches. MALE CORRESPONDENT: She fell at his feet, clung to his knees. That's the hope and that there'll be information about every county in this country that did something in response to that sense of dread and menace that people experience when they walk through the memorial.
On the Media is produced by Alana Casanova-Burgess.
And so more near the hand that you are part of the right wing extreme group.
And that’s another thing that I should add to this list of the things he does, is to take a specific case and say that it's the general case. And one of the features of that constitution were harsh conditions of punishment. And we try to make that tangible when you go into our museum you see jars of soil that community groups have gone to lynching sites and collected soil and put it in jars with the names and places of these lynchings.
[END CLIP]. I mean it's different because it, looks like in Berlin, a bunch of tombstones tall and short and short and tall on the hill and down that seemed to represent men, women and children.