WASHINGTON - Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas famously opposes affirmative action, and clearly feels slandered by the suggestion he ever benefited from such a thing.
So, if we no longer need such programs, how's that working out in Thomas's own office?
Not well, as it turns out: "Mine happen to be all white males," Thomas said of his current crop of clerks. "I don't have quotas."
When Rep. Jose Serrano, a Democrat from New York, asked about diversity today at a Congressional hearing on the Supreme Court's budget, it was Justice Anthony Kennedy who answered first: "We've made strides," he said, but there is just tremendous competition for qualified minority law students. "The profession as a whole is very conscious of it, very conscious."
"Conscious," Serrano persisted, "but, have we made progress?"
Of the most recent class of 57 clerks, Kennedy answered, only 7 were minority. And the number of women in the group has fallen dramatically, from more than a third to only 17 percent this year.
In a rare interview last week, Thomas told a writer for Business Week that the notion he was recruited to attend the College of Holy Cross because he is black was "a lie. I don't mean a mistake. It's a lie."
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http://www.huffingtonpost.com/melinda-henneberger/clarence-thomas-affirmat_b_42953.html