Minnesota AG compares Clarence Thomas to contented slave from ‘Django Unchained’

Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison last week compared Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas to a house slave played by Samuel L. Jackson in the 2012 film “Django Unchained.”

In Quentin Tarantino’s darkly comedic film about slavery in the antebellum South, Jackson portrays a character named Stephen Warren, who is loyal to the white landowner at a Mississippi plantation despite the cruelty he inflicts upon the other slaves.

“Well, Clarence Thomas, anybody who’s watched the movie ‘Django,’ just watch Stephen and you see Clarence Thomas,” Ellison said in an interview last Thursday with the Detroit-based Michigan Chronicle.

“Clarence Thomas has decided that his best personal interest is siding with the powerful and the special interests irregardless of who they’re gonna hurt.”

Thomas grew up in Georgia during the Jim Crow-era and went on to attend Yale Law School, work at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and serve on the DC Circuit Court of Appeals and eventually the Supreme Court.

Reports this year have highlighted that Thomas took trips with a billionaire Republican donor but did not disclose the visits on financial forms.

“Early in my tenure at the Court, I sought guidance from my colleagues and others in the judiciary, and was advised that this sort of personal hospitality from close personal friends, who did not have business before the Court, was not reportable,” Thomas said in an April statement about the trips.

“I have endeavored to follow that counsel throughout my tenure, and have always sought to comply with the disclosure guidelines,” he also said. “These guidelines are now being changed, as the committee of the Judicial Conference responsible for financial disclosure for the entire federal judiciary just this past month announced new guidance. And, it is, of course, my intent to follow this guidance in the future.”

“He’s abdicating his responsibility,” Ellison said in an apparent reference to the reports, before calling for the impeachment of the Court’s second-ever black justice. “Clarence Thomas is illegitimate and has no basis in the job that he’s in. And it’s a lesson to us as African Americans.”

“What is the lesson?” he went on. “Well, we all thought ‘Well, he’s a black man raised in the deep south. He knows what racism, segregation is. He knows what affirmative action is. He’s gonna come around one day.’ Understand that it’s not a matter of pigment. It’s not what’s on your skin, it’s what’s in your mind.”

Ellison also advocated for term limits on the high court’s justices during the interview and said its conservatives were “swimming in money by special interests.” 

Thomas was one of six Supreme Court justices who last month overturned affirmative action in public and private college admissions, saying the programs had violated the Fourteenth Amendment and civil rights legislation.

In his concurring opinion with the majority, Thomas accused Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, who is also black, of labeling African-Americans as a “perpetual inferior caste.”

“Such a view is irrational,” he wrote, “it is an insult to individual achievement and cancerous to young minds seeking to push through barriers, rather than consign themselves to permanent victimhood.”

When the Court’s conservative majority overturned Roe v. Wade last year, Samuel L. Jackson also used a racial slur to criticize Thomas for the decision.

“How’s Uncle Clarence feeling about overturning Loving v. Virginia,” the “Pulp Fiction” star tweeted, referring to the landmark 1967 ruling that outlawed bans on interracial marriage. Thomas is married to a white woman.

The slur “Uncle Tom,” taken from Harriet Beecher Stowe’s classic novel “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” is often used against black Americans who are politically conservative.

South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott, the only black Republican in the US Senate and a presidential contender, has endured racist attacks and been called “Uncle Tim” for his views in the past.