Race The Pain Of Being Black

By Jack E. White

I have a lot in common with Clarence Thomas. Like his grandfather, mine was a hero.

Born a slave in 1856, my grandfather was a farmer who loved learning. Despite poverty and racial oppression so harsh it seems almost unimaginable today, he found a way for his 16 children to get an education. After he died in 1933, my grandmother and the older children worked together to send the younger ones to college and professional schools. My dad, the baby of the family, graduated from Howard University's medical school. He went on to found the country's first black-run cancer-research center and publish ground- breaking studies about the disease's impact on black Americans. He died three years ago, leaving my mother, my three sisters (an interior designer, a veterinarian, a physician), my brother (a teacher) and me, the first black senior editor at TIME.

As proud as I am of my family's achievements, I know there is nothing unique -- or even uncommon -- about the strides we've made. You don't have to delve far into the history of any successful black American to find someone like my grandfather. Someone, that is, like Clarence Thomas' grandfather, Myers Anderson, who raised him from the age of seven, sent him to Catholic school and taught him that hard work and self-reliance could overcome any obstacle discrimination might put in his way -- if he was willing to pay the price.

This week the Senate will start hearings on Thomas' nomination to fill Thurgood Marshall's seat on the Supreme Court. Inside and outside the hearing room, Thomas' life story and its meaning will emerge as major themes of the debate. Civil rights groups and Democratic liberals are sharply divided over the nomination. Some organizations, like the National Urban League, that would fiercely oppose a white appointee who shared Thomas' harsh opposition to affirmative action and skepticism about racial integration have declined to join a campaign to defeat his elevation to the high court.

Thomas' biography -- he pulled himself up by his bootstraps from dirt-poor Pin Point, Ga., to Yale Law School and the federal bench -- has inoculated him against criticism of his record: it would seem churlish and hypocritical to attack this black Horatio Alger figure for being insufficiently sensitive to the plight of impoverished blacks. Though he may endure some tough questioning about his two terms as chairman of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission under Ronald Reagan -- and some name calling from blacks who consider him an Uncle Tom because of his conservative views -- Thomas is all but certain to be approved.

But while there may be little doubt about the outcome of the hearings, probing Thomas' life will serve a useful purpose by shedding light on a little-examined phenomenon: the high psychological price some blacks have paid for the progress they have made over the past two generations. Thomas' rise is an inspiring example of the way many blacks have improved their lot. But that is the only part of his story that his backers care to talk about. They downplay the possibility that Thomas' life may be a case study of the wrenching impact of "integration shock" -- author Shelby Steele's name for the intense feelings of racial inferiority and self-doubt that can assault and sometimes overwhelm blacks who, like Thomas, were suddenly taken from their familiar surroundings and plunged into a previously all-white and not always welcoming world.

Psychiatrists have identified a variety of disorientations blacks can suffer as a result of such immersions. Depending on the individual, the symptoms can range from an angry repudiation of whites to an emotional identification with whites so complete that victims undergo what University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire professor Ronald Hall describes as a "bleaching syndrome," in which they deny any connection with blacks.

One increasingly common disorder is known as the Token Black Syndrome. According to Price Cobbs, co-author of Black Rage, TBS often afflicts blacks who were the first of their families to graduate from college or land a high- paying job. TBS has become more widespread in recent years, as a white backlash against affirmative action has swept across the nation. On campuses and in the workplace, the prevailing view is that blacks are not required -- and are unable -- to meet the same standards for admission and promotion as whites.

In the face of such assaults, says psychiatrist Alvin Poussaint, vulnerable blacks can unconsciously accept the negative images attributed to their race, then scurry to distance themselves from those images by words or deeds. Denying that luck, family support and other factors, including affirmative action, may have helped them, TBS victims con themselves into believing they have made it solely because they are exceptionally gifted individuals who are innately superior to less fortunate members of their race. They often exhibit disdain for poor blacks, especially those who are on welfare or have given birth to a child out of wedlock. They believe if more blacks were "like me" -- intelligent instead of stupid, hard working instead of lazy, educated instead of ignorant, morally upright instead of slatternly -- racial progress would be assured.

Denigrating the people they left behind is not exceptional among high achievers from any ethnic group. But for blacks the problem is compounded because they belong to what Steele calls "the most despised race in the human community of races." Bombarded from infancy with signals of their inferiority from both whites and blacks, black children all too often incorporate negative racial stereotypes into their own self-images. The result can be crippling self-hatred.

Recent research confirms that anti-black stereotypes remain pervasive among African Americans. In a 1990 survey of racial attitudes by the National Opinion Research Center, for example, 30% of the blacks questioned agreed that members of their race were less intelligent than whites; 57% of whites held the same view.

Racially disparaging attitudes remain endemic, even among highly educated and successful African Americans. Gloria Johnson-Powell, a black psychiatrist at Harvard, cites a study from the early 1980s of psychiatrists, psychologists and social workers that found that in several areas, including sexuality, black professionals held more stereotypical negative views of black behavior than their white counterparts. "Some African American professionals look down their nose at another African American who is a 'shame to the race,' " says Johnson-Powell. "They swallow the stereotypes and often will be harder on African Americans than whites will be."

I know from personal experience how difficult it can be for a black in a predominantly white environment to keep things in perspective. Even the most self-confident blacks cannot escape the fear that their work is being evaluated by a different yardstick than the one used to measure work done by whites. Worst of all is the feeling that you are participating in an unfair experiment, in which the reputation of the entire race is riding on your performance: if you succeed, you are judged an exception; if you fail, well, what did anyone expect from a black?

None of which means that Thomas or any other black who disagrees with racial preferences and hiring quotas is suffering from a mental disorder. No responsible therapist would make such a diagnosis without extensive personal contact with a patient, and certainly no journalist is qualified to do so. Moreover, many of the nation's leading black thinkers are expressing growing doubts about the ability of affirmative action to help the underclass.

But even if Thomas emerged emotionally unscathed -- or even stronger -- from the experiences, his recollections make clear that he was subjected to an especially searing version of the psychological pressures that have destroyed many other blacks:

-- Growing up in the 1950s, Thomas was dubbed A.B.C. -- short for America's Blackest Child -- by some blacks in Savannah. It was the most disparaging nickname a dark-skinned boy could have had in those days before blacks discovered they were beautiful.

-- As the only black student in his class at Savannah's St. John Vianney Minor Seminary, a Catholic boarding school, Thomas was the subject of cruel racial taunts. "Smile, Clarence, so we can see you," a white classmate yelled after lights out. In a long series of interviews with Washington Post journalist Juan Williams, Thomas acknowledged going through a period of "self-hate," during which he tried to fit in by avoiding every form of stereotypically black behavior. But his effort failed and left him with the conviction there is nothing a black can do to be accepted by whites.

--In 1968 Thomas dropped out of Missouri's Immaculate Conception Seminary after only eight months of studying for the Catholic priesthood. The reason: as word spread that Martin Luther King Jr. had been shot, Thomas overheard a white seminarian say, "Good, I hope the son of a bitch dies."

A remarkably self-contained man, Thomas has rarely spoken publicly about the pain he must have felt during those years or expressed anger at the treatment he received. But his experiences must have been a factor in his well- documented attempts over the years to distance himself from racial issues. At law school, he avoided classes on civil rights, concentrating instead on corporate issues. After graduation, he turned down bids from firms that offered to let him do pro bono work for good causes, accepting a position in the Missouri state attorney general's office, where he handled revenue and tax cases. He initially resisted when the Reagan Administration offered to name him the Department of Education's Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights. And he became more and more critical of blacks who accepted welfare, which he regards as a "sugar-coated" form of slavery.

Thomas' friends insist that he is a well-balanced individual with a lively sense of humor, strong self-esteem and an inquiring mind. Moreover, they say, Thomas does not fall into the category of "OpporTOMist" -- psychiatrist Poussaint's conflation of the terms opportunist and Uncle Tom to describe blacks who donned conservative mantles to get ahead in a right-wing Republican regime. "There is no self-hatred there," says Harry Singleton, a black Washington attorney who has known Thomas since their first day at Yale Law School.

Thomas' conservative views of public policy, friends say, evolved during a long intellectual quest that built upon the self-reliance imparted by his grandfather and a deep streak of independence. His antipathy to welfare, for example, may spring from a childhood trip to visit relatives who lived on welfare in a northern public-housing project. After the visit, his grandfather exclaimed, "Damn that welfare, that relief! Man ain't got no business on relief as long as he can work!"

Even during the racially turbulent 1960s, Thomas was never as much of a radical as some earlier reports suggested. As a student at Holy Cross College, Thomas was the only member of the black-student association to vote against setting up a predominantly black corridor in a dormitory. Later he moved into the corridor -- but with a white roommate.

Until his nomination in July, Thomas was a little-known figure among his fellow blacks. Since then, many have sought reassurance that despite Thomas' loyal service in the Reagan Administration, which most blacks considered reflexively hostile to their interests, he has not turned his back on his race. Thomas' public comments and private talks with civil rights leaders have convinced some of them he is "a brother" who understands the damage racism can do. But for many others, anguished doubts remain.

In 1980, at a meeting of black conservatives in San Francisco, Thomas cited his sister Emma Martin as a prime example of everything that is wrong with liberal welfare programs. "She gets mad when the mailman is late with her welfare check, that's how dependent she is," said Thomas. "What's worse is that now her kids feel entitled to the check too. They have no motivation for doing better or getting out of that situation."

Thomas' version of his sister's plight was seriously distorted. In fact, she was not getting welfare checks when he singled her out but working double shifts at a nursing home for slightly more than $2 an hour. Over the years, she has been forced from time to time to accept public assistance -- once after she walked out of a troubled marriage and most recently to care for an ailing aunt. But even while on welfare, Martin continued to work part time, picking crab meat at a factory near her home. She eventually weaned herself from the dole entirely by taking on two low-paying jobs. When asked how she feels about her brother's attempt to portray her as a welfare queen, Martin replies with a shrug. She comes across as a far too gentle and forgiving person to hold a grudge.

My grandfather would not have understood two aspects of Thomas' conduct during that episode: one is that he publicly humiliated his sister to make a political point; the other is that he never offered to help her during her hard times.

The incident raises questions the Senate should explore as it weighs Thomas' fitness for the nation's highest court: How wide is the gap between what Thomas preaches about self-help and what he practices? Did his encounters with prejudice forge him into a compassionate role model for those striving to overcome their circumstances? Or did those experiences scar him so badly he has nothing left to offer them but empty platitudes? Until we know the answers, the qualms about Thomas will not fade away.

With reporting by Melissa Ludtke/Boston and Don Winbush/Savannah