A white person is free to think whatever they want to think, but a black person has to think a certain way. Why do you think I get in so much controv… - Clarence Thomas

As for the matter of my judicial philosophy, I didn't have one- and didn't want one. A philosophy that is imposed from without instead of arising organically from day-to-day engagement with the law isn't worth having. Such a philosophy runs the risk of becoming an ideology, and I'd spent much of my adult life shying away from abstract ideological theories that served only to obscure the reality of life as it's lived.

"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."

Any effort, policy or program that has as a prerequisite the acceptance of the notion that blacks are inferior is a non-starter with me. I do not believe that kneeling is a position of strength. Nor do I believe that begging is an effective tactic. I am confident that the individual approach, not the group approach, is the better, more acceptable, more supportable and less dangerous one. This approach is also consistent with the underlying principles of this country and the guarantees of freedom through government by consent. I, like Frederick Douglass, believe that whites and blacks can live together and be blended into a common nationality.