Justice & Law Quote by Clarence Thomas

Clarence Thomas’s line lands like a provocation disguised as a history lesson: the most “progress” we’ve made since 1964, he implies, is in talking. The Civil Rights Act becomes both a watershed and an alibi. By framing post-1964 America as more obsessed with civil rights than pre-1964 America, Thomas invites a skeptical read of the modern civil-rights project: maybe the law solved the central problem, and what followed is a self-perpetuating industry of grievance, bureaucracy, and moral performance.

The move is rhetorically clever because it compresses a complex transformation into a simple contrast. Before 1964, civil rights was less “talked about” because it was contested in streets, workplaces, schools, and courts under openly segregationist rules. After 1964, the battle migrates into institutions: compliance regimes, litigation, affirmative action, and the politics of disparate impact. Thomas’s subtext is that this institutionalization can harden racial categories rather than dissolve them, and that the constant invocation of “civil rights” may function less as liberation rhetoric than as a justification for ongoing state sorting.

Context matters: Thomas is a Black conservative jurist whose opinions often argue that certain remedial policies risk replicating the logic of segregation under a friendlier banner. Coming from him, the claim is not neutral nostalgia; it’s an indictment of liberal self-congratulation and a warning about permanence. The sting is that “talking” can be a sign of unfinished work - but in Thomas’s framing, it’s evidence of a problem being kept alive, rhetorically and administratively, long after its legal demolition.