Fact Check: Media's Comparisons of Clarence Thomas and Ketanji Brown Jackson Don't Match Reality

The corporate legacy press is hard at work trying to portray Supreme Court nominee Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, a hard-left progressive who would be the first black woman justice if confirmed, as well within the mainstream. In fact, news reports are contrasting her views with those of the other black justice she would join on the Court, Justice Clarence Thomas, the court’s longest-serving Justice.  The corporate media continue a false narrative that it is Thomas’s views that are out of step with black Americans’ views.

In driving this narrative,  a recent ABC story began by claiming, “Thomas’ background and upbringing bears similarities to the one that molded Jackson. Both were raised in middle- or working-class Black families in the South and attended predominantly white institutions.” This is false and quite a whopper.

Let’s compare:  Thomas was born in 1948 in Pin Point, Georgia, and raised under state-enforced segregation laws in the Deep South. Thomas was born into abject poverty, first lived in a shanty with no electricity except one light bulb, and no indoor bathroom.  His father left the family when Thomas was two. His mother did not finish high school, and was picking crabs and shucking oysters at age 9, earning 5 cents a pound. As an adult, his mother was a maid.

Thomas then went to live with his grandparents at age seven.  His grandmother had a sixth-grade education; his grandfather went to the third grade, with a total of nine months of education. He built a small business hauling coal and fuel oil.

Thomas went to segregated schools until his sophomore year in high school, attending St. Benedict’s, an all-black Catholic school in Savannah until eighth grade, and then all-black St. Pius X High School until his sophomore year.

In stark contrast, Jackson was born in Washington, D.C. in 1970 and raised in Miami, Florida, and never under state-enforced segregation laws.

Jackson’s parents were college-educated.  Her father was a teacher, and then earned his law degree and became the chief attorney for a school board. Her mother was a teacher and school principal.

Do those sound like similar backgrounds? Thomas came from much more challenging and different circumstances than Jackson, both in terms of living under segregation until he was 16 and growing up in a family of adults with very limited education.

Thomas has always been fiercely independent in his views, something that is made clear in his moving memoir, My Grandfather’s Son, and the fantastic documentary, Created Equal: Clarence Thomas in his own words. Thomas has never bowed to attacks from the leftist “civil rights” groups, such as the NAACP. And this is what enrages them.

ABC then drives the false narrative that Thomas’ views are anathema to black Americans. ABC recounts a lunch in 2000 at which “a young Ketanji Brown Jackson sat across from Justice Clarence Thomas, reportedly perplexed by how someone of his background – not so different from her own – could have developed such a conservative bent.” ABC includes a passage from an  interview Jackson gave for a 2007 biography on Justice Thomas about what she was thinking as she was having lunch with Thomas: “‘I don’t understand you. You sound like my parents. You sound like the people I grew up with,’ [she thought to herself]. But the lessons he tended to draw from the experiences of the segregated South seemed to be different than those of everybody I know.”

In this same piece comparing Judge Jackson and Justice Thomas, ABC writes, “Some Black legal scholars ABC News spoke to noted why Jackson and other Black Americans who share in her cultural experience might be puzzled by Thomas’ conservative judicial philosophy, which critics say has encouraged policies that have disenfranchised minority communities.” This is false. Thomas’s views are actually more aligned with rank-and-file black Americans.

Before he was a judge, Thomas was opposed to racial preferences/affirmative action as a policy matter. As a Justice, he has objected to it on constitutional grounds. According to a 2019 Pew poll,  62 percent of black Americans are against race factoring into college admissions.

On abortion, Justice Thomas has written that there is no constitutional right to abortion. Only a small percentage of black Americans believe abortion should be legal under all circumstances. According to a 2020 Gallup article, from 2001-2007,  only 24 percent of black Americans believed abortion should be legal in all circumstances. From 2017-2020, only 32 percent did.

On the morality of abortion? The same Gallup article shows that from 2001-2007, only 31 percent of black Americans believed abortion was morally acceptable; from 2017-2020, only 46 percent did.

On other issues where Thomas may not have spoken but are generally considered the “conservative” view, let’s see what the black community supports.

81 percent of black parents support school choice, but according to columnist Jason Riley, “groups like the NAACP, which claim to speak in the interest of the black poor, oppose vouchers and want a moratorium on public charter schools.”

Sixty-nine percent of black Americans support Voter ID laws. (Rasmussen poll 2021)

Only 28 percent of black Americans support Defund the Police. (USA Today poll 2021)

According to a 2020 Pew poll, only 21 percent of black Americans supported same-sex marriage in 2004, only 30 percent in 2010, and 51 percent in 2019.

In stark contrast, Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson filed a brief on behalf of an extremely pro-abortion group. She worked on behalf of accused terrorists held in Guantanamo Bay.

Judge Jackson claims that she does not understand Justice Thomas’s views, but perhaps that is because her views are more aligned with those of the progressive scholars and “civil rights” leadership, which clearly do not represent the views of the majority of black Americans. These “leaders” are engaged in commercializing civil rights for their own economic benefit, not in advancing civil rights.

The corporate media and hard left groups demonize Justice Thomas because he has his own views and has never crumbled in face of these attacks. These smears will continue as the media covers the confirmation process of Judge Jackson.

Mark Paoletta served as a lawyer in the George H.W. Bush White House Counsel’s office and worked on the confirmation of Justice Thomas, and is currently a senior fellow at the Center for Renewing America and a partner at Schaerr Jaffe LLP.

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