I was Catholic. You talk about a minority within a minority within a minority: a black Catholic in Savannah, GA.
Interpretation
Clarence Thomas reflects on his identity as a black Catholic in a culturally complex and challenging environment.
In this quote, Clarence Thomas is highlighting the layered complexities of his identity, being a member of three distinct minority groups—African American, Catholic, and a resident of Savannah, Georgia. This unique positioning shaped his experiences and perspectives, emphasizing how cultural, racial, and religious identities can intersect in profound ways, offering both challenges and insights.
In practice
During a speech on diversity in faith communities, this quote can illustrate the importance of representation.
Even as someone who's labeled a conservative - I'm a Republican I'm black, I'm heading up this organization in the Reagan administration - I can say that conservatives don't exactly break their necks to tell blacks that they're welcome.
We've talked more about civil rights after the Civil Rights Act of 1964 than we talked about it before 1964.
Good manners will open doors that the best education cannot.
When I was a kid, we said that we were precluded from going to certain neighborhoods because of the color of our skin Now the neighborhoods are the neighborhoods of ideas, youre not supposed to be there because of the color of your skin.
The myths that are created about the South, about the way we grew up, about black people, are wrong.
All that happens means something; nothing you do is ever insignificant.
You asked me once,' said O'Brien, 'what was in Room 101. I told you that you knew the answer already. Everyone knows it. The thing that is in Room 101 is the worst thing in the world.
Some go to sleep in an organization and never wake up, and those who do wake up put them selves to sleep again by joining another. This acquisitive movement is called expansion of thought, progress.
I am that prodigal son who wasted all the portion entrusted to me by my father. But I have not yet fallen at my father's knees. I have not yet begun to put away from me the enticements of my former riotous living.
There is a tradition of opposition between adherents of induction and of deduction. In my view it would be just as sensible for the two ends of a worm to quarrel.
Any preoccupation with ideas of what is right or wrong in conduct shows an arrested intellectual development.
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