In an echo of the party's racist past, prominent Democrats are demanding the Supreme Court's lone black justice, Clarence Thomas, be fired from his job. The racially charged attacks are made all the more sinister by the fact that Thomas is married to a white woman, Virginia, who has also come under assault as a result of their interracial love.
"Clarence Thomas needs to be impeached," Rep. Ilhan Omar (D., Minn.) wrote Thursday in response to revelations about the justice's white wife. In an op-ed titled, "Why Democrats should impeach Justice Clarence Thomas," MSNBC host Mehdi Hasan cited Thomas's relationship with his wife as one of the main reasons why the black man should lose his job. The Women's March, a Democratic-aligned activist group plagued by allegations of anti-Semitism, also called for Thomas to be impeached. The group's executive director, Rachel O'Leary Carmona, said Thomas was "hopelessly compromised" as a result of his interracial marriage.
Of course, Democrats would argue the substance of their attack on the interracial couple—something about text messages—is a relevant factor in determining whether or not they are being racist. This is blatantly false. Some might even call it gaslighting.
Given the party's ugly history of supporting slavery and Jim Crow laws, these Democratic demands for Thomas's impeachment are tantamount to committing physical violence against the 73-year-old justice. By suggesting Thomas should be fired over his relationship with a white woman, Democrats are demanding a return to the institutionalized racial segregation the esteemed justice was forced to overcome as a child growing up in Georgia in the 1950s.
It is not the first time Democrats have physically assaulted (with their words) a prominent black figure. The Washington Post, a Democratic-aligned publication owned by Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos, ran an extensive "investigation" into the family history of Sen. Tim Scott (R., S.C.), the first black senator to represent a Southern state since Reconstruction. Based on information provided by so-called historians who happened to be Democratic donors, the Post implied that Scott's black grandfather, who grew up in South Carolina during the Great Depression, might have benefited from white privilege or something.
Democrats and their allies lashed out at Scott in a racially charged tornado of outrage after the senator gave the GOP response to President Joe Biden's congressional address in April 2021. Democratic analyst Jason Nichols called Scott a "clown" whose "ancestors are ashamed of him." At least one left-wing pundit was forced to apologize after using the racist "Uncle Tom" trope to describe Scott's speech.
The Democratic Party has a long history of disrespecting black and brown bodies, especially in the context of the Supreme Court. In 2003, for example, Sen. Dick Durbin (D., Ill.) and his fellow Democrats violently filibustered Miguel Estrada's nomination to the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals because liberal activists had expressed concern that Estrada was "especially dangerous" because "he is Latino, and the White House seems to be grooming him for a Supreme Court appointment." Talking points prepared for the late senator and sexual predator Ted Kennedy included a line about how Democrats must oppose Estrada's historic nomination because "we can't repeat the mistake we made with Clarence Thomas."