NEWS ANALYSIS : Thomas Seen Shifting Focus to Race Issue

In his efforts to depict himself as the victim of “a high-tech lynching,” Judge Clarence Thomas appears to be using racial issues to rally the Senate and the black community to support his troubled Supreme Court nomination.

Thomas’ comments Saturday before the Senate Judiciary Committee grew increasingly angry and confrontational as he employed emotion-laden language to startle a packed Senate conference room.

”. . . Language about the sexual prowess of black men, language about the sex organs of black men and the sizes, et cetera, that kind of language has been used about black men as long as I’ve been on the face of the earth, and these are the charges that play into racist, bigoted, stereotypes . . . that are impossible to wash off,” said Thomas, in response to allegations that he had sexually harassed a former employee.

That Thomas, who has avoided making race an issue in his long career of public service, would so boldly interject the issue into the hearings seemed an ironic twist.

His strong statements seem to redirect the focus of the hearings away from the issue of sexual harassment and toward racism. And, it could place an already defensive Senate, which is scheduled to vote Tuesday on Thomas’ confirmation, in an awkward position: If senators vote against him, they are racists; if they vote for him, they are sexists.

Thomas has avoided making his accuser, University of Oklahoma law professor Anita Faye Hill, a black woman, the villain. Rather, in a dramatic statement Friday night, he portrayed himself as the victim of feminist rights groups, civil rights activists and staff members on Senate committees who consider Thomas an “uppity black who in any way deign(s) to think” for himself and disagree with their views.

Robert Woodson, a Thomas supporter with close ties to the Bush Administration, said that the lynching metaphor is an accurate way to describe what has happened to Thomas.

He said that Hill--who has charged that Thomas suggested she view pornographic films and bragged about the size of his penis--was “being used by white feminists who have conjured up all these Mandingo (African tribal) images” to prevent Thomas from sitting on the Supreme Court.

“The civil rights community, which has opposed him from the start, has given white feminist groups the license to lynch him,” said Woodson, who heads the conservative National Center for Neighborhood Enterprise, a black self-help organization in Washington.

Such an explanation seems plausible to Reginald Grant, 49, director of radiology at Pacifica Hospital in Sun Valley.

“My first thought was that he did it,” Grant said, reflecting on Hill’s dramatic testimony Friday. “I know that from time to time most men do make a pass on a woman and I just thought he’d gotten caught. But as this thing has progressed it just didn’t make sense.”

Grant, who is black, said that he had not been a Thomas supporter but that he has become one after hearing the nominee argue that racism is holding him back. “He’s on his own out there without the support of his own people and he’s fighting for his life,” he said. “That really impresses me.”

However, Thomas’ critics countered that the nominee has no right to raise race as an issue, because he has refused to acknowledge it as a factor during his career.

“The chickens are coming home to roost,” said Alvin Thornton, a political scientist at Howard University in Washington. “Judge Thomas can’t claim any legacy to lynching because he’s distanced himself from that for all of the past 10 years he’s been in public life.”

Thornton, who is black, said that he was so angered by Thomas’ attempt to cast himself as the victim of a racist political process that he came down to the Senate hearing room to join others who were opposing his nomination.

“His comments about being lynched is an outrageous and unjustified use of a historical concept of oppression of black men,” he said, noting that it does not apply in this politically charged setting. “I think he was only defending himself as any politician would who wants to be on the Supreme Court.”

That view was shared by Emma C. Jordan, a Washington attorney representing Hill during the hearings. In an impromptu news conference Saturday, she said that Thomas’ talk about race and “lynchings” is an attempt by the White House and Republican senators “to confuse the issues.”

“They aren’t addressing the issue the hearing was called for,” she said. “Rather, they want to shift the focus to something else.”

Andy Kohut, director of surveys for the Times Mirror Center for the People and the Press in Princeton, said that there is a danger Thomas’ apparent strategy to pit racial issues against gender issues could backfire because “gender is a more salient issue for (senators) than race because more than half of their constituents are women.”

“I think the feminist appeal is a more powerful argument in this case because his accuser is black, as he is,” Kohut said.

But Kohut said that, if Thomas and his supporters believe the nomination is in deep trouble, it would make sense to try to redirect the focus toward racism because he might be able to win more male support.

However, Kate Michelman, head of the National Abortion Rights Action League, a group that has opposed the Thomas nomination, said in an interview outside the hearing room that, if the Thomas nomination becomes a Senate referendum on race versus gender, women are likely to lose.

“When you pit racism against sexism, sexism falls short of having the same kind of intensive political legitimacy as racism seems to have,” she said.