I could feel the golden handcuffs of a comfortable but unfulfilling life snapping shut on my wrists. - Clarence Thomas

It should be obvious that the criticism of this opinion serves not to present counter-arguments, but to discredit and attack me because I've deviated from the prescribed path. In his intriguing and thoughtful essay on My Race Problem and Ours, Harvard law professor Randall Kennedy, a self-described social Democrat, correctly observes that 'If racial loyalty is deemed essentially and morally virtuous, then a black person's adoption of positions that are deemed racially disloyal will be seen by racial loyalists as a supremely threatening sin, one warranting the harsh punishments that have historically been visited upon alleged traitors.' Perhaps this is the defensive solidarity to which Richard Wright refers. If so, it is a reaction I understand, but resolutely decline to follow.

"Daddy had never been able to understand how I, a college student, could consider myself "oppressed." He didn't think of himself that way and didn't see why I should. My job, he insisted time and again, was to "play the hand you're dealt," the way he'd done his whole life. Besides, I had a better hand than he'd ever held - and we both knew it. My life was full of opportunities of which he had never dared to dream. All I had to do was reach out and take them. What right, then, did I have to whine about "the man" ?... I'd been drunk on revolutionary rhetoric, but now I knew it was nothing more than talk."

I make no apologies for this view now, nor do I intend to do so in the future. I have now been on the court for seven terms. For the most part, it has been much like other endeavors in life. It has its challenges and requires much of the individual to master the workings of the institution. We all know that. It is, I must say, quite different from what I might have anticipated if I had the opportunity to do so.