It’s 2006, and the Arizona Cardinals might as well be called the “Arizona Trash Cans,” because their play on the field had been stinking up the place. They were 1-4 and set to face the Chicago Bears, who were the darlings of the league with a 5-0 record on Monday Night Football. Two Black head coaches were facing off against each other, Chicago’s Lovie Smith and Arizona’s Dennis Green, and Smith’s comments about a preseason game in which the Cardinals won was getting under Green’s skin.

Smith called the win a “glorified practice” and said the Cardinals would really see what the Bears were about during this regular season game. What most people don’t remember from that game is that the Cardinals were destroying the Bears in the first three quarters, having built a 23-3 lead going into the fourth. And then the bottom fell out. The Bears came all the way back to win the game.

What’s funny is none of that is even remembered. Nothing about the game or that more than one Black head coach once existed in the NFL.

Everyone only talks about this one point: After the game, despite being asked about the defense, Green shouted out:

“They are who we thought they were!”

This is a story about Clarence Thomas

For forty years Clarence Thomas has been an albatross for Black people, an arbiter of “do as I say, not as I do” politics, a mime whose silence on the bench has been deafening. And, he’s been all the things he claims to hate about Black people: He’s a welfare queen, a duplicitous double agent, a diversity hire, a beneficiary of reparations and a minstrel show.

And Anita Hill tried to warn us.

She tried to tell us that Thomas was inappropriate at best and vile at worst. She tried to tell us that Thomas was not the man he presented himself as. He was not an upstanding man of good moral character.

A Black woman once again tried to save America from itself, but America doesn’t care about Black women.

Having followed the infallible Thurgood Marshall onto the Supreme Court, Thomas had all the intangibles needed to become a freedom fighter. He grew up dirt-poor in South Carolina and initially wanted to become a priest, until he realized the Catholic church was full of racism.

But something happened as Thomas began his climb to the highest court in the land. Instead of making the road easier for Black folks who would come behind him, he resented them for not having to work as hard as he did. He became the uncle who walked uphill forty-six miles both ways in the snow just to get to school, and he hated that we didn’t. Instead of breaking down walls of racism, the same racism that’d held him back, he ensured that hurdle stayed on the track.

It was a strange twist to watch a man who compared his sexual harassment hearing to a “high-tech lynching” by........

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