In 1991, when Anita Hill testified in Justice Clarence Thomas's confirmation hearings, the country had never seen a high stakes confrontation between a black man and a black woman over illegal workplace sexual misconduct.  Now, sixteen years later, its fair to ask whether anything has changed in the climate for women of color in the workplace. 

Now, in the Knicks lawsuit we have a different set of allegations from a poised, well-educated black woman, Anucha Browne Sanders, a Princeton graduate and former Northwestern basketball star who told a Manhattan jury that Isiah Thomas, the coach for the Knicks basketball team, called her a "bitch" and a "ho" and other  profanities.  Browne Sanders, the Senior Vice President for Marketing for the Knicks, also charged that she was fired in retaliation for her complaints to management.  She testified that Thomas's  abusive language then turned to ardor, including unwanted "kissing" and invitations to "go off-site" with him.

Both women were greeted with character attacks and retaliation.  Browne Sanders was fired. Anita Hill was vilified first by Senators on the Judiciary Committee and then by conservative writer, David Brock in his book "The Real Anita Hill", filled with personal attacks, that he later recanted. 

 Some things have changed and some have not. One thing that has surely changed is that ordinary citizens, members of a Manhattan jury are prepared to sort through the "he said", "she said", the smiles, the dimples, or the righteous indignation about high-tech lynching, to award, not just compensatory damages, but a jaw-dropping amount of punitive damages. 

The trial testimony and verdict for punitive damages against the Knicks shows that some powerful black men still choose to concoct a toxic brew of sexually degrading images of black women in the workplace. Anita Hill testified about Thomas's references to a series of the pornographic movies featuring black women with oversized breasts. 

 Browne Sanders testified that she was called a "bitch" and a "ho" and hugged without her consent.  One witness, himself an employment discrimination lawyer, told the jury that he saw Thomas drape his arm over Browne Sander shoulder and say that it was distracting to work next to someone "so easy on the eyes", but that when she recoiled from him Thomas said,  "can't I get any love today" . It took Anita Hill almost ten years to come forth, reluctantly, to tell about her experiences.  Browne Sanders filed, well within the statute of limitations. 

 As Professor Tanya Hernandez has written here on Blackprof and in law review articles, her empirical research shows that black women are "overrepresented" among those who file sexual harassment claims with the EEOC.  Does this mean that black women are more often the target of sexual harassment, or are they just less willing to rely on internal company procedures to protect their rights?

In the lawsuit against the Knicks we see that some white men can also foster a hostile workplace for black women. Selena Roberts opinion piece for the NYT today identifies James L. Dolan, the owner of the Knicks, as a person who cultivated an atmosphere of sexual hostility and male power trips. The Garden Needs a Warning Label .

Is there a cultural defense to sexual harassment by black men against black women?  In 1991, immediately after the hearings ended, Distinguished Harvard Sociologist, Orlando Patterson argued in a NYT op-ed that even if Thomas had said what he was accused of saying, it would have been harmless "down home style of courting" that southern black men used to woo black women, and that Hill would have been very well acquainted with this style.  To be fair, Patterson retreated from this untenable position in a book of essays that Professor Hill and I co-edited: Race, Gender and Power in America, and in his book Rituals of Blood. 

 The Knicks trial featured an embarrassing video deposition in which Isiah Thomas says that it would violate his code of conduct for a white male Knicks executive to call a black woman a "bitch", but that it would be o.k. for a black man to use the same word in talking to a black woman.

Trashing the accuser's professional competence continues to be a favored defense.  Although ironically, both Thomases initially praised their accusers.  Thomas told the Senate Judiciary committee under oath:  "Senator, ...she repeatedly received promotions, as scheduled...In fact she may have been promoted on an accelerated basis.  Her assignments, for her age and experience at that time, I think were fairly aggressive".   Yet, sixteen years later in his new book, My Grandfather's Son and in a Sixty Minutes interview last Sunday, he referred to Professor Hill as a "mediocre employee".

Isiah Thomas and the Knicks, reading from the same playbook, gave Browne Sanders bonuses that totaled $217,500 between 2002 and 2005, before she accused them of sexual harassment and retaliatory firing.  Once the law suit was filed, they told a Manhattan jury that she was fired for flagging competence.

This morning I chatted with Michel McQueen Martin, on her terrific new show on NPR, Tell Me More about what had changed and what remained the same in the sixteen years since Charles Ogletree, and I were on the legal team that represented Professor Hill during her testimony in the Thomas confirmation hearings.

I want to hear from BlackProf readers. What has changed in sixteen years, and what has not?  Is the Isiah Thomas verdict a wake up call?  Or, can all women, but especially black women, expect more of the same sexual harassment and hostility in the workplace from some of the powerful men and organizations for whom they work?

What do you think?

What this has meant is that state governments have been deprived of the authority to protect low-income communities by overseeing many of the practices that have led to the mortgage crisis that we see currently.  A crisis that affects minority communities disproportionately.  So why the silence from the civil rights community?  Although a lack of resources or a failure to make the connection between the Court's decision and states' abilities to protect low-income communities from predatory lendors may explain some of the silence, my fear is that this is simply one more example of the civil rights community's blind faith in all things national.  Given the national political environment in which we find ourselves -- from Bush v. Gore to global warming to international human rights -- the black community's political leaders must rethink their per se distrust of states' ability to protect the best interests of minority communities.  In light of the Supreme Court's decision in Watters and the Court's decision to block the policies of local communities to ensure racial diversity in public schools, the time is ripe for a conversation about where progressive people should turn for policy innovation.  Trusting states need not lead us down the path of states' rights or the days of racial segregation with which we reflexively associate with states.  Failing to recognize that states may no longer be the bad actors in every instance is exactly what the success of the civil rights revolution meant.  How long will it take before we have this conversation?

it was not the inequality of the facilities but the fact of legally separating children on the basis of race on which the Court relied to find a constitutional violation in 1954.  See Brown, 347 U.S. at 494 ("The impact [of segregation] is greater when it has the sanction of the law.").  Slip Opinion at 39.

I quote not only the plurality's substantive quote but also the cite and parenthetical because this may be one of the most breathtaking perversions and misrepresentations of a precedent I've ever seen in a Supreme Court opinion.  And, though some of you may not believe it, I'm not one for overblown rhetoric, but this use of this portion of Brown is unbefitting the Chief Justice of the United States.  Let me show you why.

The parenthetical quotation, first, is actually from a lower court analysis in one of the Brown cases, so of course the Court should have noted that in its cite.  But, more to the point, the full block quote in Brown to the lower-court case is as follows:

Segregation of white and colored children in public schools has a detrimental effect upon the colored children. The impact is greater when it has the sanction of the law; for the policy of separating the races is usually interpreted as denoting the inferiority of the negro group. A sense of inferiority affects the motivation of a child to learn. Segregation with the sanction of law, therefore, has a tendency to [retard] the educational and mental development of negro children and to deprive them of some of the benefits they would receive in a racial[ly] integrated school system.  Brown, 347 U.S. at 494.

The plurality plucks from the block quote the first clause of the second sentence -- "[t]he impact is greater when it has the sanction of the law" -- and cites it for the broad proposition that Brown formalistically prohibits race-based school assignment regardless of context.  But of course the entire quote is about the impact of segregation on the self-conception of Black children.  The Court could not be more clear: "Segregation of white and colored children in public schools has a detrimental effect upon the colored children."  Even concerning the half-sentence relied upon by the Chief Justice, the clause is explicitly modified -- "for the policy of separating the races is usually interpreted as denoting the inferiority of the negro group."  The block quote ended on the same note, emphasizing that segregation tends to retard the educational development of Black children, precisely because of the racial stigma associated with it.

The block quote, moreover, is introduced by the following two sentences:

To separate [Black children] from others of similar age and qualifications solely because of their race generates a feeling of inferiority as to their status in the community that may affect their hearts and minds in a way unlikely ever to be undone. The effect of this separation on their educational opportunities was well stated by a finding in the Kansas case . . . .  Brown, 347 U.S. at 494.

The classic "generates a feeling of inferiority" finding relies on the well-chronicled social-science work of Kenneth Clark, cited in Brown's famous Footnote 11, which immediately follows the block quote from the Kansas case.  The Clark research of course relies, among other things, on the doll-selection study, which revealed the extent to which segregation had corrupted the self-regard of Black children.

It could not be more clear that this portion of the Brown opinion, which articulates the harms driving the Court's decision to strike down segregated schools, is unambiguously predicated on the harms caused Black children by the stigmatic messages associated with school segregation.  The Court plainly does not articulate a broad rule that race-conscious student assignment, in a vacuum, invariably triggers constitutionally actionable harm.  Rather, the Court, relying on specific empirical work on the actual social implications of segregation, held that segregation implied a desire by Whites to disassociate themselves from Black folk, and that this signal "generate[d] a feeling of inferiority" that encumbered the educational achievement of Black children.

So Brown simply recognizes the undeniable truth of American history: Jim Crow was designed to stigmatize and subordinate Black people, and it was quite effective in accomplishing that design.  Brown simply held that segregation, because it so stigmatized Black children and thus undermined their education, could not be squared with equal protection.  The very portion of the case relied upon by the Chief Justice is unambiguously explicit on this point.  By taking a half-sentence completely out of context, and ignoring the rest of the sentence, the rest of the block quote, and the rest of the pargrapraph in which the half-sentence was contained -- let alone the rest of the opinion -- the plurality manufactured an intepretation of Brown that is irreconcilable with the original. 

I understand the politics of this tactic.  But I would have hoped that the Supreme Court would not have contorted beyond recognition a cherished precedent in the process.

To see the conference, visit

http://www.charleshamiltonhouston.org/Events/Event.aspx?id=100027

Do comments like those of Imus indicate that far too many Americans  today still view African Americans  as Justice Taney and his peers did back then?? 

This brings me to what I think is a more important point: the pragmatics of affirmative action.  The Black community, like all communities, has limited political, economic, and cultural resources.  We currently allocate a disproportionate amount of these resources to affirmative-action battles.  I'm becoming increasingly skeptical that this is a wise use of our resources -- primarily because I find affirmative action to be inevitably incidental.  Affirmative action at elite colleges and universities, for example, presupposes a group of highly accomplished applicants qualified and competent to graduate from these rarefied institutions.  If college admissions is going to be predicated on biased, anti-meritocratic criteria like legacy and alumni preferences (not to mention the attenuated relevance of the SAT), sure I'll fight for affirmative action as a means of evening the playing field.  But can I get apoplectic about it?  Absolutely not.  Not when less than half of Black and Brown students earn a high-school diploma; not when Black men are exponentially more likely to attend the "pen" Upstate than Penn State. 

Similarly, concerning the K-12 cases, I certainly believe that, under the right conditions, integration improves student learning for all students and therefore is a salutary policy aim our country should embrace.  I also find it thoroughly absurd that an Equal Protection Clause enacted to reverse the civic apartheid wrought by slavery could rationally be interpreted to prohibit the kind of modest, voluntary integration efforts implicated by the K-12 cases.  But when the Supreme Court strikes down these programs -- as it will inevitably -- I won't lose too much sleep.  Not only because I don’t expect much from this Supreme Court, but, more importantly, because large majorities of students of color attend school in municipalities simply without enough White students to make voluntary integration plausible; and even in those districts with meaningful intra-district diversity, rarely is there a political will to engage in sustained, systemic efforts to facilitate integrated schools.  And, even then, very little evidence shows specifically that integration, in and of itself, brings about materially improved educational outcomes for Black students.  So would I like the legality of voluntary programs constitutionally sustained?  Of course.  But, ultimately, affirmative action is increasingly irrelevant to the lives of the great majority of people of color, and that should cause those committed to the progress of racial minorities to re-assess the allocation of precious community resources.

In an insightful post earlier this week, Professor Shavar Jeffries discussed the significance of the Parents Involved v. Seattle School District No. 1 and Meredith v. Jefferson County Board of Education, et al. cases being argued before the Supreme Court in December of this year.  In describing these cases as “the last breaths of Brown v. Bd. of Education,” Professor Jeffries made clear that they are best understood as public school desegregation matters.  This move is an important one because, among other things, some court watchers have primarily treated them as affirmative action cases.

Parents Involved and Meredith are not, as others have already noted, affirmative action cases.  They are, in the words of Fordham Visiting Associate Professor Elise Boddie and Anurima Bhargava of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund on a recent American Constitution Society blog, cases that “could have a far-reaching impact on the power of school districts to pursue voluntary measures that preserve integration in elementary and secondary schools in order to avoid the harmful educational effects of racial isolation.” And, yet, it would be a mistake to ignore the extent to which Parents Involved and Meredith may have an impact outside the context of Brown and public elementary and secondary school education.

These cases fundamentally represent the last breaths of Brown v. Board of Education.  In Milliken v. Bradley, a 1974 Supreme Court decision, the Court held that suburban school districts could not be included in desegregation remedies unless the districts themselves were complicit in the underlying segregation.  If outlying suburbs were merely passive recipients of White refugees from multi-racial municipalities, and had no direct, explicit role in segregating adjacent public schools, suburban districts, under Milliken, could not be constitutionally corralled into desegregation remedies.  As White flight — and the flight of the Black middle class, for that matter — accelerated in the 1970s and 1980s, Milliken ensured that our public elementary schools would remain as segregated as our residential neighborhoods (and one could spin off a related tangent about the interlocking roles played by state and federal government, along with banks, insurers, and appraisers in facilitating residential segregation).

In the 1990s, a trilogy of Supreme Court cases — Board of Education v. Dowell, Freeman v. Pitts, and Missouri v. Jenkins — undermined the vitality of Brown in those districts for which Milliken had not already done the job.  The 1990s cases, among other things, provided that formerly segregated districts needed only to redress the effects of its prior practices of racial apartheid to the extent “practicable,” thus permitting contemporary effects of longstanding historical segregation to continue merely if a court deemed further remediation inappropriate. 

Milliken, white flight, and the 1990s cases therefore effectively ended mandatory integration under Brown.  Voluntary efforts essentially are all that remains.  That fact alone signals Brown’s obsolescence: most neighborhoods, in fact, are racially segregated and thus simply do not contain sufficient numbers of White students to permit meaningful integration; and even in those minority of districts with minimal district-wide diversity, it is often difficult to generate the political will to pursue formal, voluntary integration efforts. 

It is thus that, no matter how the Supreme Court decides the voluntary-integration cases, the days of Brown are numbered.  That’s a sad — and even depressing — reality.  Public schools are as segregated now as they were in the aftermath of Brown.  And racial misunderstanding continues to flourish largely because we Americans do not know one another across the color line; we merely know racialized caricatures of one another.  To this extent, the death of Brown may portend greater dangers for the cohesion of our polity.  Our country is increasingly multi-racial, yet increasingly segregated.  Brown offered a singular opportunity to significantly change that dynamic; that opportunity is now lost, and the country is worse for it.

As is often the case with institutional questions concerning the shortage of women and minorities occupying positions of authority in this country, there is insufficient attention to the criteria defining prevailing conceptions of merit, and whether those criteria are best suited to identifying the best candidates.

In the world of Supreme Court clerkships, the role of the feeder judge is paramount.   Supreme Court justices disproportionately hire their clerks from a narrow slice of federal appellate judges.  I’ve not seen any suggestion (from the Justices themselves or others) that these judges are singularly qualified to select high-quality Supreme Court clerks; in any case, I’ve certainly not seen any evidence — empirical or anecdotal — showing these judges possess uniquely prescient predicative abilities concerning law-clerk quality.

Feeder judges, moreover, tend to identify their clerks by referrals from a narrow slice of feeder professors.  These feeder professors tend themselves to be former Supreme Court and appellate clerks, and teach primarily at a few Ivy and quasi-Ivy (e.g. Stanford; NYU; Duke) law schools.  These feeder profs, as former Supreme Court clerks, were of course fed to prior Justices by feeder judges, and fed to prior feeder judges by feeder lawprofs.  These professors leverage their personal relationships with feeder judges to advance the candidacies of favored students.  And they identify candidates largely by the peculiarities of how professors generally come to mentor students — a mélange of factors often turning on the degree of cultural, social, and political identity between teacher and student.

All of these factors exclude law students who attend a school in which a feeder prof teaches, but don’t take courses with the feeder prof or are otherwise unable to build a rapport with a feeder prof.  And of course students at laws schools devoid of feeder profs are left totally in the cold.  One could write further on the cleavages that define eligibility and acceptance at elite law schools.  Empirical work in the Grutter and Gratz cases, for example, revealed that the LSAT is a limited predictor of performance in law school.  The law schools where feeder profs teach largely require applicants to perform extraordinarily well on the LSAT; but because the LSAT itself has limited validity as a predictor of law-school success, it distorts the student pool from which feeder profs select.

In all of these ways, the Supreme Court clerk hiring process is all-too-familiar: it's characterized by an “old boys network” of backroom relationships and artificial criteria that seem better to serve the interests of the status quo than a meaningfully objective standard of merit.  Even more, the defenders of existing practices couch it all in meritocratic rhetoric, concealing the extent to which selection methodologies reflect myopic and ultimately counter-productive visions of qualification.

I have several problems with Chief Justice Roberts's conclusion as well as the reasoning informing it.  First, he offers no specifity on the issue of harm, merely speculating that the institution might be hurt.  Second, he takes a proprietary view of Supreme Court functioning, suggesting the merit of televised proceedings turns primarily on the narrow, instrumental purposes he and his colleagues apparently ascribe to oral arguments.  Whatever the merit of televised proceedings, the question is a public one, involving a range of civic concerns beyond the role argument plays for counsel and courts in deciding cases.  Third, his own stated rationale proves too much: Roberts's claim -- he and his colleagues do not have oral arguments to show people how the Court functions -- applies with equal force to in-person access to oral arguments.  Surely, Roberts wouldn't suggest that the public, as a rule, should be banned from oral argument.  He, then, needs a claim focusing more specifically on the purported harms wrought by television, and he offers none.  

I would very much like to see cameras in the Supreme Court.  I think it would be a good thing for the law and for public understanding of Supreme Court functioning.  But if access is to remain available only to the precious few able to physically attend argument, we're at least owed a more creditable justification than what Chief Justice Roberts offered this week.

  But I've realized that what makes these opinions such hard-slogging is the fact that on this Court, every justice has to get their two licks in.  In Hamdan, Justice Stevens authored the majority opinion, but Justice Kennedy filed a concurring opinion, and separate dissenting opinions were filed by Justices Scalia, Thomas and Alito.  In the LULAC case, Justice Kennedy filed the majority opinion, but Justice Stevens filed a decision concurring in part and dissenting in part, as did Justice Souter and Justices, Breyer, Roberts and Scalia filed dissenting opinions.  And even the justices who comprise the majority only concur with certain parts of the decision.  So just to figure out which part of the opinions is supported by a majority of justices requires lots of page flipping and a calculator.  Is all this chatting really necessary?  Last week in a controversial death penalty case Kansas v. Marsh, Justice Scalia issued a concurring opinion in which he purported to "write separately to clarify the import of my joinder."  Puleeese.  How about some self-restraint?  Supreme Court opinions now read like law journals with articles authored by battling professors.

  There used to be a time when the Court recognized that unanimity was important in cases involving highly divisive issues, especially those involving the balance of power between the Executive and the Congress or Congress and the states.  Chief Justice Earl Warren fought hard for a unanimous opinion in Brown v. Bd. of Ed.  Likewise, Cooper v. Aaron, the Little Rock 9 school integration case and United States v. Nixon, in which the Court held that the President had to turn over the Watergate tapes, were unanimous.  Even the case requiring Clinton to submit to the Paula Jones case, Clinton v. Jones, was unanimous.  Do you think that justices in those cases didn't have cute concurrences or even dissents they could've written?  I'm sure they did. But they recognized that their unanimity set an example for the nation and gave those opinions greater authority.  Engendering respect for the rule of law outweighed the importance of writing a clever rejoinder to something another justice wrote in an opinion.

   But nowadays it's a virtual free-for-all.  Bad enough that the Court took the case of Bush v. Gore and decided a presidential election.  Bad enough that the decision handed the presidency to George W. Bush.  But did we need 4 (or was it 5?) opinions?  Wouldn't one majority and one dissent have done? 

   The court increasingly seems like it's comprised of 9 law professors, not judges.  Yes, yes, I know, a plurality of voices and vigorous debate is a good thing.  Maybe I'm just grumpy, because it's late.  So I'll burn the midnight oil tonight studying the Hamdan decision and  trying to tell the players without a scorecard.  For those who want to read along, go to the Supreme Court's website and click on to Hamdan v. Rumsfeld at http://www.supremecourtus.gov/opinions/05slipopinion.html.

Substantively, the rationale of Grutter seems to apply with almost equivalent force to the K-12 context.  The Court in Grutter found that racial diversity in higher education serves essentially five interests: 1) fostering cross-racial understanding; 2) preparing students for a diverse workforce; 3) promoting learning outcomes; 4) ensuring public universities are open to all; and 5) creating a leadership class reflective of society’s heterogeneity.  While the last two of these interests apply more specifically to universities — and, concerning the creation of a leadership class, to selective graduate and professional schools particularly — the first three interests are served as well, if not better, in the elementary and secondary school environment. 

Racial stereotypes are less likely to develop — and, if they’ve already formed, are more likely to be uprooted — the sooner young people interact and socialize with others on a cross-racial basis.  Similarly, the weakening of stereotypes brought about by cross-racial understanding enables the kind of comfort in multi-racial settings that prepares young people for a racially diverse workforce.  The sooner young people realize such comfort in racially diverse settings, the more likely it is that these Grutter-derived interests will be vindicated.  While, concerning learning outcomes, it may be true that Grutter’s intellectual-diversity strain is somewhat muted in the K-12 context, it nonetheless remains true that in any context in which ideas and individual viewpoint matter, racial diversity — as a uniquely salient dimension of experiential diversity — fosters broader and deeper conversation and thus promotes learning outcomes. 

While the substantive arguments seem to place on solid footing arguments that racially diverse elementary and secondary schools serve the same kind of compelling interest the Court recognized in Grutter, I would not be at all surprised to see the Court reach a different conclusion.  On all matters of race, the merits of policy questions tend to turn on the endurance of mainstream White society for continued efforts at racial reconciliation.  The Congress and the Courts are predominated by conservative advocates of an arid form of colorblindness, in which the apparent driving principle is that the less one discusses race, the less of a factor it is and will become in daily life.  Since the late 1990s, progressives seem to be losing the politics of affirmative action, and I wonder if it isn’t time to reconsider how we engage this issue.  I’m not suggesting that we give up the fight for diversity-fostering affirmative action programs.  I’m simply suggesting that, in light of the range of problems facing communities of color — most of which operate well beyond the bounds of the affirmative-action debate —we prioritize and allocate our resources in relation to the quality of the problems we face, and the likelihood success will bring about substantial change in the quality of life for large numbers of people.

I also find debilitating that the affirmative-action question ultimately lies in the hands of White folks: From the next fight at the Supreme Court to the battle to fight back state referenda seeking to end affirmative action, supporters of affirmative action seem invariably to be in a posture of asking White America to do what progressives regard as the right thing.  Obviously, some of this is necessary when one is a cultural minority; but I’d recommend such strategies primarily when self-help strategies cannot meaningfully mitigate the problem at issue and when a successful petition to external authorities would mean broadly significant changes in the quality of life of communities of color.  I’m not sure the contemporary affirmative-action debate fits the bill.

I recently learned from a leading scholar of American Indian law that Native American tribes have the sole power to define the criteria for tribal membership (in this instance, varying degrees of blood lineage). In other words, one’s membership to a particular tribe is not automatic. But the assumption among black conservatives and proponents of individualism is that one can espouse rhetoric inimical to blacks, have white people embrace and advance him because he espouses such rhetoric, but still be immune from any critique of his blackness. This proposition may be true as a matter of phenotype—black is black—but it also underscores the irrelevance of color. Black people continue to be victims of an ideological assault on their very humanity, and the fact that the assault can be done in black face—by a Clarence Thomas, a Michael Steele, a Condolezza Rice, or a black academic reaching for the mantle of public intellectual—in no way diminishes or legitimizes the deleterious nature of conservative ideology for most blacks.

One puzzles, then, at the standing ovation that Justice Thomas received at a National Bar Association meeting a few years ago. Why do black people feel they must accord respect to someone whose ideology denigrates them? Thomas opposed affirmative action in higher education even though he is a first-degree example of the practice. He turned the Fourteenth Amendment on its head by striking down majority-black electoral districts as racial gerrymanders, even though the movement that gave birth to such districts is the very raison d’etre for all black political ascendancy—including Thomas’s. These are but a few of the cases that Justice Thomas has donned black face for.

Rather than a standing ovation, black lawyers’ proverbial reception of Thomas ought to have been the equivalent of what happened to United States Senate candidate Michael Steele. Steele, a black Republican handpicked by George Bush to vie for a Maryland senate seat this fall, likes to recall a story of his visiting Morgan State University a few years back when he was running for lieutenant governor. There, he alleges, several students pelted him with Oreo cookies. We should not condone violence against someone for his ideology—Oreos are relatively hard and can put one’s eye out—but these students’ disposition regarding the respect that black conservatives are due from black people is closer to the mark than those who gave Clarence Thomas a standing ovation.

It is not that Steele has chosen to be a Republican rather than a Democrat. Stale arguments about blacks voting uncritically for Democrats demean black people’s intellect. Blacks generally vote their interests. Steele lacks the resume or intellect of, say, a Barack Obama. (He has, for instance, likened embryonic stem cell research to Nazi-era human experimentation.) This is understandable; Republicans have a very shallow bench of prospective black candidates to work with. But the real problem with Steele is that he cannot distinguish himself from the run-of-the-mill white conservative—except for his race. He and the national Republican Party are cynically betting that the miscalculation among black leaders—and a few white senators from the South who depended heavily on black votes—that led to Thomas’s ascension to the Supreme Court will lead to Steele’s election. If they are ultimately correct, it won’t be because blacks have suddenly become politically conservative. It will be because those blacks who apologize for black conservatives in the name of individualism have finally made their complicity count.