Americans too sensitive about race (etc) sez Supreme Court justice

In her extended rant against reverse racism, Mugged -- reviewed here a few days ago -- Ann Coulter makes mention (several times) of US Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas.

Ms Coulter implies that Justice Thomas is a credit to his race. (He is black.) She didn't actually use that "racist" cliché, but does point out that the judge didn't get his position on the highest court in America because of some affirmative action programme.

Justice Thomas himself had something to say on Tuesday about America's preoccupation with race. He told a gathering of students at Palm Beach Atlantic University in Florida that Americans today are too sensitive about race. Justice Thomas, the second "person of colour" to serve on the Supreme Court bench, lamented what he considers a society that is more conscious of racial differences than it was when he grew up in segregated Georgia in the days before and during the civil rights era.

"My sadness is that we are probably today more race and difference-conscious than I was in the 1960s when I went to school. To my knowledge, I was the first black kid in Savannah, Georgia, to go to a white school. Rarely did the issue of race come up," said the judge. "Now, name a day it doesn’t come up. Differences in race, differences in sex, somebody doesn’t look at you right, somebody says something. Everybody is sensitive. If I had been as sensitive as that in the 1960s, I’d still be in Savannah. Every person in this room has endured a slight. Every person. Somebody has said something that has hurt their feelings or did something to them — left them out."

In his autobiography, My Granfather's Son: A Memoir, Justice Thomas recalled his rocky confirmation being worse than his childhood growing up under segregation, writing, "my worst fears had come to pass not in Georgia, but in Washington, D.C., where I was being pursued not by bigots in white robes but by left-wing zealots draped in flowing sanctimony."

Click here to read "Clarence Thomas: Society is overly sensitive about race", from Yahoo! News.