Clarence Thomas is currently our only black Supreme Court Justice. And as such, one would think Black History Month would celebrate his accomplishments.
Instead, Amazon removed the documentary chronicling Thomas’ journey from their Prime platform.
Didn’t Amazon boast about “building an inclusive platform?” The other night, I even noticed Amazon’s site included an entire page dedicated to amplifying black voices. Amazon’s own description notes the site “features a curated collection of titles to honor Black History Month across four weekly themes (Black Love, Black Joy, Black History Makers, and Black Girl Magic).”
The collection is vast, and includes four different films on Thurgood Marshall, our nation’s first black Supreme Court Justice. Two are “docudramas,” while two are documentaries. Further, Anita Hill rejuvenated her five minutes of fame. After accusing Thomas of sexually harassing her (a complete fabrication), Hill is represented by one drama and one documentary. Thus, where is Thomas’ homage?
Breitbart weighs in:
Amazon has made a significant effort to celebrate black voices on its site during Black History Month, including films of Thurgood Marshall and even Anita Hill. But [they] can’t find any space for a documentary on our only sitting black Supreme Court justice? This makes no sense at all, other than Amazon made a decision to not show this film. Because Justice Thomas is a black justice who has conservative views.
The Created Equal DVD is still available for purchase on Amazon, and it is in fact number 38 of all documentaries on that site. In contrast, the RBG documentary on liberal Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is not even in the top 100 but is still streaming on Amazon Prime.
Created Equal was nationally broadcast on PBS last April and has a 99 percent audience approval rating on the popular movie rating website Rotten Tomatoes. Kathleen Parker, a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for The Washington Post, wrote, “It is a marvel of filmmaking that two hours pass so quickly. At the end of a screening I recently attended, there weren’t many dry eyes in the room.” She added, “Thomas is an American hero.” On the Amazon website, the film has received a spectacular 4.9 star rating (out of 5 stars) from customer reviews, with 1,243 ratings.
As Hillary Clinton would say, what happened?
Some say Amazon spontaneously removes various documentaries with little or no warning. But considering the timing, this just smells a little fishy. Thomas is the only black conservative on the court. Meanwhile, plenty of liberal voices have been maintained on the streaming service, even if they are far less popular. Thus, it’s hard to deny the reasoning that Amazon is stomping out conservatives. In fact, they’re as fast, or faster than their friends at Facebook and Twitter.
Unfortunately, this cheats America in the end. Because Thomas’ story is actually pretty incredible. It’s not just a set of facts all black Americans should understand. It is an unbelievable tale of triumph EVERY AMERICAN should study.
Breitbart explains:
[Thomas] was born in 1948 in deep poverty in the Deep South of segregated Georgia. From birth, he lived under Jim Crow laws. His parents had almost no education, and his father left the family before he was two. Thomas’s life changed when he was 7 years old, when he and his younger brother went to live with his grandparents.
Despite being uneducated, his grandfather built a small business delivering oil, coal, firewood, and ice in Savannah. His grandfather was tough on Thomas and his younger brother, but they learned the values of hard work and perseverance. Thomas’s grandfather always said, “Old Man Can’t is dead. I helped bury him.”
After being taught by Irish nuns in a segregated Catholic school and attending seminary for high school, Thomas broke away from the values his grandfather and the nuns instilled in him and rejected his Catholic faith, embracing the idea of the Black Panthers and radical left in the late 1960s. As Thomas wrote in his must-read and gripping memoirs My Grandfather’s Son, “[T]he more I read about the black power movement, the more I wanted to be part of it. What was the point of working within the system? Segregation, lynchings, black codes, slavery… Surely the time for politeness and nonviolent protest was over.”
Thomas came to reject that path, embracing a view that believed in individual rights, not group rights. Thomas believes that our most important principle is found in the Declaration of Independence: “All Men are Created Equal.”
Fundamental Wisdom
One might think that’s a pretty simple idea. Equality. However, Americans truly struggle to put equal into action. Again and again racism, classism, elitism, and all the other isms manifest in ways the court is forced to litigate. As such, Thomas proves over and over his contributions to instilling equality.
In his nearly 30 years on the Supreme Court, Thomas has developed the most comprehensive and consistent originalist jurisprudence of any justice to serve on the Court. Leftwing legal writer Ian Millhouse wrote in 2018 that Thomas is “the most important legal thinker of his generation and the most significant appointment of the last forty years.” One well-regarded Supreme Court practitioner who founded the prominent SCOTUS blog noted that Thomas is “our greatest Justice.” CBS Supreme Court reporter Jan Crawford proved, based on internal Court documents, that Thomas was a force from the very first day he sat on the Court, pulling the Court in his direction.
And yet Thomas rejects the ideas promoted by BLM, Al Sharpton, and other elite leftists. As he doesn’t subscribe to the idea that America is built around systemic racism.
This groupthink also led the African American History Museum in 2016 to exclude any exhibit on Justice Thomas in its first year of existence, despite Thomas being the second and longest-serving black Supreme Court justice in history, only begrudgingly adding a section that still is unfair to the justice.
Now, tragically, Amazon Prime decided black people can be honored, as long as they aren’t conservatives. As Thomas once pointed out “that if a black man were barred from entering a library because of the color of his skin, that would universally and rightly be regarded as racist. But the left is fine with telling that same black man he can enter that library but he can never be allowed to agree with the content of certain books because of the color of his skin.”
As usual, leftism defies logic. And Amazon promotes their ignorance.
