Clarence Thomas And The Tough Love Crowd

Download or read book Clarence Thomas and the Tough Love Crowd written by Ronald Suresh Roberts and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 1996-10 with total page 235 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In recent years, black neoconservatism has captured the national imagination. Clarence Thomas sits on the Supreme Court. Stephen Carter's opinions on topics ranging from religion to the confirmation process are widely quoted. The New Republic has written that black neoconservative Thomas Sowell was having a greater influence on the discussion of matters of race and ethnicity than any other writer of the past ten years. In this compelling and vividly argued book, Ronald Roberts reveals how this attention has turned an eccentricity into a movement. Black neoconservatives, Roberts believes, have no real constituency but, as was the case with Clarence Thomas, are held up—and proclaim themselves—as simply and ruthlessly honest, as above mere self-interest and crude political loyalties. They profess a concern for those they criticize, claiming to possess an objective truth which sets them apart from their critics in the establishment Left. They claim to be outsiders even while sustained by the culture's most powerful institutions. As they level attacks at the activist organizations they perceive as moribund, every significant argument they advance rests on fervent mantras of harsh truths and simple realities. Enlisting the ideal of impartiality as a partisan weapon, this Tough Love Crowd has elevated the familiar wisdom of Spare the rod and spoil the child to the arena of national politics. Turning to their own writings and proclamations, Roberts here serves up a devastating critique of such figures as Clarence Thomas, Shelby Steele, Stephen Carter, and V. S. Naipaul (Tough Love International). Clarence Thomas and the Tough Love Crowd marks the emergence of a provocative and powerful voice on our cultural and political landscape, a voice which holds those who subscribe to this polemically powerful ideology accountable for their opinions and actions.

Download or read book Justices, Presidents, and Senators written by Henry Julian Abraham and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2008 with total page 492 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Explains how United States presidents select justices for the Supreme Court, evaluates the performance of each justice, and examines the influence of politics on their selection.

Download or read book Critical Companion to Toni Morrison written by Carmen Gillespie and published by Infobase Publishing. This book was released on 2007 with total page 497 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Toni Morrison, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993, is perhaps the most important living American author. This work examines Morrison's life and writing, featuring critical analyses of her work and themes, as well as entries on related topics and relevant people, places, and influences.

Download or read book First Principles written by Scott Douglas Gerber and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 1999 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Clarence Thomas is one of the most vilified public figures of our day. To date, however, his legal philosophy has received only cursory treatment. First Principles provides a portrait of Thomas based not on the justice's caricatured reputation, but on his judicial opinions and votes, his scholarly writings, and his public speeches. The paperback edition includes a provocative new Afterword by the author bringing the book up to date by assessing Justice Thomas's performance, and the reaction to his decisions, during the last five years.

Download or read book Black Trials written by Mark S. Weiner and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2007-12-18 with total page 450 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From a brilliant young legal scholar comes this sweeping history of American ideas of belonging and citizenship, told through the stories of fourteen legal cases that helped to shape our nation. Spanning three centuries, Black Trials details the legal challenges and struggles that helped define the ever-shifting identity of blacks in America. From the well-known cases of Plessy v. Ferguson and the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings to the more obscure trial of Joseph Hanno, an eighteenth-century free black man accused of murdering his wife and bringing smallpox to Boston, Weiner recounts the essential dramas of American identity—illuminating where our conception of minority rights has come from and where it might go. Significant and enthralling, these are the cases that forced the courts and the country to reconsider what it means to be black in America, and Mark Weiner demonstrates their lasting importance for our society.

Download or read book Black Conservative Intellectuals in Modern America written by Michael L. Ondaatje and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2011-11-29 with total page 227 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the last three decades, a brand of black conservatism espoused by a controversial group of African American intellectuals has become a fixture in the nation's political landscape, its proponents having shaped policy debates over some of the most pressing matters that confront contemporary American society. Their ideas, though, have been neglected by scholars of the African American experience—and much of the responsibility for explaining black conservatism's historical and contemporary significance has fallen to highly partisan journalists. Typically, those pundits have addressed black conservatives as an undifferentiated mass, proclaiming them good or bad, right or wrong, color-blind visionaries or Uncle Toms. In Black Conservative Intellectuals in Modern America, Michael L. Ondaatje delves deeply into the historical archive to chronicle the origins of black conservatism in the United States from the early 1980s to the present. Focusing on three significant policy issues—affirmative action, welfare, and education—Ondaatje critically engages with the ideas of nine of the most influential black conservatives. He further documents how their ideas were received, both by white conservatives eager to capitalize on black support for their ideas and by activists on the left who too often sought to impugn the motives of black conservatives instead of challenging the merits of their claims. While Ondaatje's investigation uncovers the themes and issues that link these voices together, he debunks the myth of a monolithic black conservatism. Figures such as Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, the Hoover Institution's Thomas Sowell and Shelby Steele, and cultural theorist John McWhorter emerge as individuals with their own distinct understandings of and relationships to the conservative political tradition.

Download or read book Supreme Court Justices written by Timothy L. Hall and published by Infobase Publishing. This book was released on 2001 with total page 577 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Presents an alphabetical listing of Supreme Court justices with a short biography on each person.