Obama and Clarence Thomas: More Alike Than You Think?

When a high-profile panel of professors, journalists and civil rights leaders gathered in Louisville, Ky., recently to discuss the Obama presidency and race, one of the academics, law professor James Chen, offered a unique perspective on the subject. Chen, dean of the University of Louisville Brandeis School of Law, has worked for both Barack Obama and U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, though not at the same time.

What's surprising, Chen said, given conventional thought about both men's politics, is that they have one important thing in common -- they are deeply religious. Chen, who has shared pizza and casual conversation with Obama and Thomas, was a featured speaker at the conference, called, "The Obama Presidency: What's Race Got to Do With It?" The public session was held on the University of Louisville campus, as part of the Trotter Group of columnists' annual meeting.

Chen, who served on the Harvard Law Review when Obama was its first black president and then went on to clerk for Thomas, said of the two men, "if you had to say which person's life story is closer to the absolute center of the African American experience, hands down, it's Clarence Thomas." The only black Supreme Court justice now on the court, he noted, was a product of the deep, rural South, speaks Gullah and is "descended of the longest line of the darkest-skinned, least-regarded members of that community."

When you look at the profile of the first African American president of the United States, Chen said, you see he's the son of a temporary resident, was born in Hawaii, the least demographically typical of American states, and has lived abroad.

"It's just weird; I think we ought to acknowledge that."

Chen said, however, "that both of them are vastly more complex than their political caricatures would suggest." The defining trait for both would not be race, but religion. Chen said he does not know two more "profoundly religious people" than Barack Obama, a Protestant, and Clarence Thomas, a Catholic.

And religion, Chen said, is "dead center" in the African American experience.

It was also worth talking about "blackness," he went on, referencing "Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson," the Geoffrey C. Ward book and Ken Burns documentary on the hostility facing the first black heavyweight champion of the world. While he sees "paranoia" in the lingering belief by some that Obama is not an American citizen, Chen – who grew up in Georgia -- said he doesn't think there is "an American experience more profound than the African-American experience."

Of course, that theory rests on the notion that there is a particularly authentic African-American experience, defined by everything from skin color and geography to class and economic privilege. That's an idea that not only Obama but many other black people in America have challenged.

When talking about whether the election of Obama was a movement or a moment, Mary Frances Berry, a University of Pennsylvania professor of social thought and history, said that instead of doing what other groups have done with other presidents, blacks have not asked the White House for targeted solutions, for fear that "might upset people."

The symbolism of Obama in the White House is important, she said. But by way of example, in terms of policy, it's unlikely that the black unemployment gap will close. "When we get over the love affair, then we'll be able to think a little more clearly about things," she said.

"The danger in that is that when he's no longer president, when you go to the White House and start asking the next president to do this and that, she's going to say, 'I thought you all had stopped asking the president for things,' " said Berry, who served as chairwoman of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights

Ricky Jones, author and Pan-African studies professor at the University of Louisville, agreed with the sentiment, saying the black middle class can't abandon the black poor, not when almost a quarter of blacks and a third of black children live in poverty. Jones, who talked about the maternal grandmother who raised him in the Atlanta projects, said African Americans are still disproportionally tracked into developmentally disadvantaged programs and are subjected to sentencing disparities in the criminal justice system. "If you have specialized problems, then you need specialized solutions."

Wade Henderson, president of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, acknowledged that structural inequalities exist, but said there is "romanticism about the role of the president in American life." Conditions that existed before the Obama presidency will exist long after his term in office, he said, and it's "naive" to think otherwise.

A presidency does not a movement make, Henderson said, but it is a moment to be celebrated.