"The myths that are created about the South, about the way we grew up, about black people, are wrong"
About this Quote
Myth is doing double duty here: it flatters and it excuses. When Clarence Thomas says the myths about the South, about "the way we grew up", and about black people "are wrong", he’s not just correcting the record. He’s trying to seize authorship over a story that, in American politics and law, often gets written as morality play: enlightened North versus benighted South, virtuous progress versus backward tradition. The sentence is built to puncture that tidy script.
The phrasing is strategic. "Myths" implies not merely mistakes but convenient fictions sustained by people with cultural power. And by stacking "the South" beside "black people", Thomas links regional caricature to racial stereotyping, suggesting both are produced by the same national appetite for simplification. The "we" matters too: it’s a claim to lived authority, but also a boundary line. Thomas is positioning himself against outsiders - journalists, academics, liberal institutions - who he implies have turned Southern black life into a set of props: either pathology to be managed or nostalgia to be mined.
Context sharpens the intent. Thomas’s public persona has long revolved around resentment toward elite narratives that cast him as an exception, a victim, or a symbol rather than a self-defining actor. This quote fits that project: reclaiming complexity while also undermining the legitimacy of those who deploy race and region as shorthand in policy debates, including in the courtroom. It’s less an invitation to nuance than a warning: stop using our past as your script.
The phrasing is strategic. "Myths" implies not merely mistakes but convenient fictions sustained by people with cultural power. And by stacking "the South" beside "black people", Thomas links regional caricature to racial stereotyping, suggesting both are produced by the same national appetite for simplification. The "we" matters too: it’s a claim to lived authority, but also a boundary line. Thomas is positioning himself against outsiders - journalists, academics, liberal institutions - who he implies have turned Southern black life into a set of props: either pathology to be managed or nostalgia to be mined.
Context sharpens the intent. Thomas’s public persona has long revolved around resentment toward elite narratives that cast him as an exception, a victim, or a symbol rather than a self-defining actor. This quote fits that project: reclaiming complexity while also undermining the legitimacy of those who deploy race and region as shorthand in policy debates, including in the courtroom. It’s less an invitation to nuance than a warning: stop using our past as your script.
Quote Details
| Topic | Equality |
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