MBD and Isaac have both noted the Washington Post’s grotesque — and now removed — description of Clarence Thomas as “a Black justice whose rulings often resemble the thinking of White conservatives.” I would add to their comments only that this sort of ugliness is often addressed by Thomas himself, who has said:
People who will get very upset if someone said all blacks look alike are really comfortable saying all blacks ought to think alike. If you said that blacks should not be allowed to go a library, you’d be against that. If you said that blacks couldn’t read certain books in the library, you would say that’s wrong. But now we are so comfortable saying that blacks can’t hold some of the ideas in some of the books in the library. That’s absurd.
Absurd, yes. But common.