"You're black."
"Do you think of yourself as a black man?"
"You've been successful. You moved on. You don't care about people and your race."
These were a few of the questions posed to Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas on "60 Minutes" this week by reporter Steve Kroft.
You can and should watch it for yourself, or, at least, read CBS News' own version of the interview in a story headlined: "Clarence Thomas: The Justice Nobody Knows."
You might learn something about Clarence Thomas, but you will certainly learn more about the mindset at CBS News and Big Media.
Had the interview been conducted by David Duke or some Aryan Brotherhood skinhead, it could not have focused more on race.
Apparently the folks at CBS are obsessed by race. It's all they think about. To them, it is what defines the differences between people.
Many of the questions were insulting – though I suspect Steve Kroft and company learned Clarence Thomas does not fulfill their own stereotypical assessments of the man.
Those assessments are summarized in the following nut paragraph of the CBS News story: "He is often dismissed as a man of little accomplishment, an opportunistic black conservative who sold out his race, joined the Republican Party and was ultimately rewarded with an affirmative action appointment to the nation's highest court, a sullen intellectual lightweight so insecure he rarely opens his mouth in oral arguments."
It's certainly not accurate to say Clarence Thomas is the justice nobody knows.
What I saw in that "60 Minutes" interview is exactly the man I knew – even though I have never had the honor of meeting Justice Thomas.
But it was not the man Steve Kroft and "60 Minutes" were prepared to meet.
As the story goes on to say, "The problem with the characterization is that it's unfair and untrue."
Imagine that! It only took 16 years for CBS News to conclude what many of us knew all along, from the time of his nomination and bloody confirmation battle in the Senate.
The reason it took so long is because Clarence Thomas is a living personification of the lie that black people in America cannot achieve greatness playing by the same rules as others.
When that myth is shattered, all of the phony paternalism of the Democratic Party and media elite is exposed for what it is – raw-boned racism of the most despicable and destructive kind.
All of the government programs supposedly designed to uplift blacks from victimization, oppression and the legacy of slavery have collectively done more harm to African-Americans than forced segregation and the Ku Klux Klan ever achieved.
Black Americans resiliently overcame those wrongs. The black family was still, amazingly, intact in the first half of the 20th century.
It took the false "compassion" of 50 years of government plantation programs to create the kind of dependency no people could endure without dire consequences.
That's what many of us recognized about Clarence Thomas and his ideas from the start.
Clarence Thomas is a great, great man. He is a personal hero to me – and millions of other Americans – black, white and every shade between.
That the Big Media have portrayed him for 16 years as a buffoon because he rejects so eloquently their own insidious brand of racism is a self-indictment of black-and-white proportions.
That this same Big Media continue to portray the self-destructive hip-hop "artists" as the real heroes in America's pop culture demonstrates with shocking clarity what their real aims are for blacks – and for all Americans.
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