Commentary: Clarence Thomas has a right to be angry

SAN DIEGO, California (CNN) -- Many Americans have a blind spot when it comes to black conservatives. They don't have the foggiest idea what makes these people tick.

And they blew their chance to learn more during the October 1991 confirmation hearing for Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. Instead, there were those who tried to destroy someone who dared to think for himself.

For instance, Thomas opposes affirmative action, the very program that his critics insist was solely responsible for his admission into Yale Law School.

White liberals frown on independent thinking by minorities. Some of them claimed that Thomas was pulling up the ladder behind him and so they pulled the rug out from under him. These are the folks who claim credit for the success of those minorities they agree with while trying to discredit those with whom they disagree.

That reminds me. One popular misconception is that African-Americans who gravitate toward the Republican Party do so because they agree with the GOP on the issues, perhaps in support of tax cuts or in opposition to same-sex marriage. But, from my dealings with black conservatives, I can tell you that -- for many of them -- their rightward drift began as a reaction to the condescension on the left.

You saw some of that during Thomas' confirmation hearing. And you're seeing more of it now in the reaction to his searing memoir, "My Grandfather's Son." The book gives Thomas' side of the story about his confirmation and the woman, Anita Hill, who almost derailed it with accusations of sexual harassment.

But it also gives his liberal critics more ammunition. Their rap against the guy used to be that he wasn't angry enough over centuries of injustice against African-Americans. Now, they're insisting that he's too angry: at them and at the way he was treated.

Left-of-center Washington Post columnist Ruth Marcus writes that the book seems to "pulsate with Thomas' rage." The liberal Frank Rich of The New York Times judges Thomas to be "full of unreconstructed racial bitterness."

That is an improvement on what some white liberals used to say about Thomas, even before the confirmation hearing.

As Thomas recalls in his book, he felt compelled in 1986 to take issue with an article by the journalist Hodding Carter that accused President Reagan of reviving racism in America. Carter responded by comparing Thomas, a Southerner, to "those chicken-eating preachers who gladly parroted the segregationists line in exchange for a few crumbs from the white man's table" and said Thomas was "one of the few left in captivity."

Thomas correctly described that language as "nakedly racist." It was also awfully presumptuous for a white man to lecture a black man about racism, just because one is a liberal and the other a conservative. And yet, Thomas laments, not a single civil rights leader rose to say anything about it.

So is Clarence Thomas angry? You bet he is. And does he have the right to be? You bet he does.

Ruben Navarrette Jr. is a member of the editorial board of the San Diego Union-Tribune and a nationally syndicated columnist. You can read his column here.

The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of the writer. E-mail to a friend