Politics: Walked a Black Dog

Washington Post columnist Courtland Milloy, who remains an outstanding reason to open the paper, delivered a brilliant dispatch Sunday, and because of its presence not in the opinion section but on the cover of Metro, I missed it until this very minute. Milloy gets the drop on Clarence Thomas' ingracious quoting of Frederick Douglass in his Affirmative Action dissent. Milloy skewers Thomas for hijacking the words of a great abolitionist leader, and delivers his blows with eloquence, ferocity and not a little sadness. This segment is long, about half the column, but I'm putting it all in, and you should still read the rest:

Efforts by right-wingers to highjack the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr. are bad enough. By conveniently forgetting every word King ever said except "colorblind," they pretend not to see white privilege and accuse blacks of "reverse racism" for daring to point it out.

Now here they go again. The words of Frederick Douglass, the great abolitionist who came to symbolize the necessity of activism and agitation in the quest for justice, are being emptied of all-empowering content and refilled with a watered-down mix of black self-help and fermented self-loathing by U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas.

How low can those bootleggers go?

In his dissenting opinion slamming affirmative action, Thomas quoted from a speech Douglass gave in 1865:

"And if the negro cannot stand on his own legs, let him fall also. All I ask is, give him a chance to stand on his own legs! Let him alone. . . . [Y]our interference is doing him positive injury."

Now, I could understand if Thomas had said all this by way of standing up to Justice Antonin Scalia, the brainy but heartless jurist who appears to have the junior justice under some kind of spell.

But he did no such thing. What's worse, he seems to have deliberately misinterpreted Douglass's words. In fact, Thomas deleted those parts of the Douglass speech that provide historical context for understanding just how entrenched white racism is and why affirmative action is necessary to combat it.

For instance, the speech does not stop with "Let him alone." Douglass continues: "If you see him on his way to school, let him alone -- don't disturb him."

In other words, don't yell racial slurs at him or write racist epithets on classroom walls, as recently happened at several public and private schools -- including some Ivy League universities.

"If you see him going to a ballot-box, let him alone," Douglass said. (Read: Don't send the police to harass him while he's going to vote; or call him a felon as a ruse for striking his name from the voter rolls; or close down the polling place before the deadline; or refuse to count his vote if he gets to cast one, as was the case in Florida during the 2000 presidential election.)

"If you will only untie his hands," Douglass said, "and give him a chance [See Webster's New World Collegiate: chance -- an advantageous or opportune time or occasion; opportunity], I think he will live."

Clearly, Douglass is not saying, "Leave the newly freed slaves alone, and if they rot in hell, so be it." That is, however, what Thomas is saying.