RUTHFULLY YOURS

After reading Saturday evening that Amazon had removed this documentary from its rental streaming library, and next from its inventory of DVDs available for purchase, I immediately rented it from Vudu.

By censoring this film, Amazon proved Clarence Thomas correct and, moreover, guaranteed the film’s unrivaled success on other platforms.

I remember the Clarence Thomas hearings. I was then a senior editor at Working Woman.

This is a phenomenal report, regardless of your standing on the political spectrum, and it is a testament to human strength and the true tenor of courage.

Exceedingly well-documented, it tells of Thomas’ rise from an impoverished backwater in rural Georgia, with the help of his loving, wise, no-nonsense grandparents, illiterate though they were.

Through a grueling educational process he learned he had no choice but to achieve 100 percent 100 percent of the time.

Then, when there was discrimination (a virtual certainty), Thomas could expose it for what it is.

And that is what he has done. Thus he has continued to remind us of the importance of the liberties and rights guaranteed by our Constitution.

Thomas was not always what he appears to many today.

He began law school as a liberal Democrat.

He became something of a student radical in fact. Only a violent 1971 Boston night turned him, in shame, away from that radical and violent course.

If G-d would erase anger from his heart, he promised never to hate again.

Thomas knew that discrimination can come from the KKK, crooked rural Georgia sheriffs and the like.

Ultimately, however, Thomas was to discover that the biggest discrimination comes not from those quarters but from white liberals like those Senators who questioned him in 1991, white liberals disapproving of the “wrong kind of black man,” who thinks his own thoughts and arrives at his own conclusions – thoughts and conclusions not expected by white liberals from their black appointees.

The film is a revelation of history.

It also tells the story of an American hero.

Before his appointment to the Supreme Court, Thomas faced a discriminatory gauntlet at the U.S. Senate, where he was falsely and ridiculously accused of sexual harassment by a woman who, after events she alleged to have occurred while at the U.S. Dept. of Education, had eagerly followed Thomas to work with him at the EEOC. Actions that stretched her credulity to breaking.

The charges amounted to a technological lynching, Thomas told the Senate. The FBI had reported the charges baseless.

“I would rather die than withdraw,” Thomas told the Senate. “If they are going to kill me, they are going to kill me. I’d rather die than withdraw from the process.

“Not for the purpose of serving on the Supreme Court but for the purpose of not being driven out of this process.

“I will not be scared. I don’t like bullies. I don’t run from bullies. I never cry uncle and I am not going to cry uncle today, whether I want to be on the Supreme Court or not.”

If society continues to tolerate that sort of procedure, he warns now, “There’s a lot of tar and there’s a lot of feather, and eventually you [too] will be there.” Cast stones, in other words, and you can eventually expect yourself to wind up as the target.

The discrimination Thomas faced in the Senate was clearly racial and fully on display.

Wrote Thomas in an important judicial dissent on that topic, as concerned law school admission policies, “Racial discrimination is not a permissible solution… that can only weaken the principal embodied in the Declaration of Independence and the Equal Protection Clause.”

He says to the camera, “Show me where in this constitution it says you get a right to separate citizens based on race.”

“I think that what we have become comfortable with is in thinking that there is some good discrimination and some bad discrimination. Well, who gets to determine that?

“And if you look in the briefs in the race cases, the segregationists, the people who thought you should have a separate system, they said that they thought it was good for both races. So they thought it was good discrimination.”

No discrimination is good.