The Atlantic Has Laid Clarence Thomas's Lunacy And Self-Loathing... Bare.

Several others have as well -- but this is especially well-articulated by Adam Serwer, for The Atlantic. The purported "originalist" here ignores crystal clear -- and ample -- original records, faithfully preserved, from the 1860s, to this very morning. He does so, because he claims the Fourteenth Amendment was not designed primarily to protect people of color. Damn.

Do go read it all -- but here dies his absurd version of "originalism". The only original documents he wants to read. . . were written, and saved. . . by Klansmen:

. . .Midway through his concurrence with the Supreme Court’s decision to strike down affirmative action, Justice Clarence Thomas deploys one of the most absurd and baffling arguments ever put to paper by a justice.

In order to argue that the Framers of the Fourteenth Amendment did not intend to authorize racially specific efforts to alleviate inequality, Thomas finds himself forced to explain the existence of the Freedmen’s Bureau, which was reauthorized in 1866 by the same Congress that approved the Fourteenth Amendment. To square this circle, Thomas insists that the term freedmen was a “formally race-neutral category” and a “decidedly underinclusive proxy for race. . . .”

“Freedmen” cannot be a “formally race-neutral category,” because American slavery was not a formally race-neutral institution. Moreover, an extensive historical record illuminates the intentions of the lawmakers who passed the Freedmen’s Bureau Acts. They certainly did not see the term freedmen as racially neutral, and they intended the bureau to protect the rights of Black people in the South, whether formerly enslaved or not. We know this because they said so; the insistence to the contrary is the result of conservatives projecting their version of “color blindness” backwards through time. . . .

Now you know -- this is why I say the Notorious KBJ had the better of the argument -- by far. Onward.

नमस्ते