When Clarence Thomas started his first semester of law school during the summer of 1971, a familiar fear set over him: He knew he could succeed academically, but he was intimidated by his new surroundings on Yale’s tree-lined urban campus — and also terrified to fail.
During his first week of classes, he wondered how his peers were already comfortably decoding legal doctrine and whether he’d ever be able to catch up, he would later recount in his memoir My Grandfather’s Son. Thomas spent part of his childhood in a rural Georgia community, where he lived in a shack, fetched water from the woods in lard buckets, and slept in a chair for a year when he was 6 years old. He questioned his abilities not because he was Black, but because he had grown up poor.
In New Haven, he was “among the elite,” he wrote, and “no amount of striving” would make him one of them. Though he was eager to prove that he could achieve against the odds, just as he had done in the seminary and at College of the Holy Cross, he soon came to believe that his academic accomplishments were clouded by something beyond his control: racial preference, or, as we know it today, affirmative action.
By the time Thomas set foot on Yale’s Gothic-inspired grounds, affirmative action was “a fact of life at American colleges and universities,” he wrote, filling institutions with marginalized students and faculty in part to correct historical exclusionary practices in education and employment. Though it is unknown how many institutions used affirmative action in admissions at the time, Yale Law School certainly did. It began using race-based preference in admissions in 1971, setting aside up to 10 percent of seats in each class for students of color. When this produced what the former dean of the law school called “remarkably weak” students, the university devised standards on which to judge the pool of students of color separately, while taking into account typical benchmarks…
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