The pure scumminess of Clarence Thomas: Classic Rock edition
By 
I had forgotten all about this particularly disgusting incident, but given that all sorts of right wingers have been falling all over themselves to defend Clarence Thomas’s apparently endless string of indefensible actions, I thought it would be a good time for a little flashback:
In an often-quoted speech that he delivered to a conference of black conservatives in 1980, Thomas said of his sister, who was then on welfare: “She gets mad when the mailman is late with her welfare check. That’s how dependent she is.
“What’s worse is that now her kids feel entitled to the check too. They have no motivation for doing better or getting out of that situation.’
To hear Thomas tell it, his sister sounded like a classic “welfare queen,’ a painful example of how a well-intended government handout can tie families to a cycle of poverty and dependency. But Thomas’ stunning story wasn’t true. Not quite.
Not quite is an understatement:
When reporters recently tracked down Thomas’ sister, Emma Mae Martin, living in a beat-up frame house in Pin Point, Ga., they didn’t find a story of welfare dependency.
Instead, they found a story of hard work by three generations of a family struggling like most other families do, just to make ends meet.
Martin was deserted by her husband in 1973, just as her father had disappeared 25 years earlier. She worked two minimum-wage jobs while her brother attended law school, but stopped working to take care of an elderly aunt who had suffered a stroke. That led to four or five years on welfare, trying to make it on $169 a month.
That’s over. She now works as a cook at the same hospital where her mother is a nurse’s assistant.
What about her children, who Thomas said were being indoctrinated into welfare dependency?
As it turns out, Mark, 22, works as a carpenter. Christine, 20, recently was laid off from a bakery. Leola, 15, is still a student.
And the eldest, Clarence, served aboard the battleship Wisconsin during Operation Desert Storm.
That was 32 years ago. I wonder if any enterprising reporter is trying to figure out whether any Thomas’s billionaire buddies have done anything to help out Thomas’s sister in the intervening years?
Moving right along:
There may be true stories to be found of welfare cheats. Emma Mae Martin is not one of them. In fact, her story sounds more like the story of a mom who did what you’re supposed to do: Finish school, work hard, take care of your family and raise your kids to do the same. . .
The realities of Thomas’ sister’s life are closer to the realities of most poor people.
It is a story of male abandonment, female sacrifice and a turning to welfare only temporarily and only as a last resort. It also is a story of an inadequate government safety net for those who struggle at the bottom of society – no day care, no health insurance, no subsidy for the “working poor’ whose wages are not enough to lift their families above the federal poverty line. . . .
On the heels of his stunning speech, the Reagan administration, scouting black conservatives at the time, offered him the chairmanship of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which led to his federal judgeship and eventually his nomination to the Supreme Court.
There’s a lesson in this, I suppose. A little scapegoating can take you a long way in politics, even when you use your own sister.
This was in 1991, before welfare “reform” tore up much of the already-inadequate social safety net that a woman like Emma Mae Martin had to depend on for a time when — apparently — she couldn’t get any help from her big shot brother.
It would be bad enough if Thomas was willing to use a true family story to illustrate the supposed cogency of Charles Murray-style racist diatribes. That he used a fake one illustrates what he’s always been willing to do to win the favor of his white masters, which appears to be almost literally anything.