As columnist Jeff Jacoby put it, why not just call Clarence Thomas an Uncle Tom? This bon mot in a reported analysis about Rep. James Clyburn’s credibility doesn’t even qualify as a dog whistle. It’s as subtle as an air horn.

How did this get past an editor, even at the Washington Post?

Rep. Bennie G. Thompson (D-Miss.), a friend and ally of Clyburn’s for over 30 years, said even Clyburn’s critics respect his political instincts and his connection with a valuable but often disappointed subset of Democratic voters.

“Nobody that I’m aware of feels that opposing Clyburn’s nomination would be the wise thing to do,” he said. “If you know that a person has been vetted by Jim Clyburn, you know that person won’t go to the court and end up being a Clarence Thomas,” referring to the Black justice whose rulings often resemble the thinking of White conservatives.

Emphasis mine. Note that this is the only reference to Justice Thomas in the entire piece. Neither Cleve Wootson nor Marianna Sotomayor provide any context at all for their suggestion that Thomas’ opinions are not his own or that he thinks like “a White conservative.” Why not just a conservative in general? There are black conservatives, perhaps a point that the Washington Post has missed in all its reporting over the decades.

In fact, this does an injustice to Rep. Bennie Thompson, in whose mouth Wootson and Sotomayor try to stuff these words by implication. I read Thompson’s comments in the same way I read comments about the capacity of potential George W. Bush and Donald Trump candidates to the Supreme Court of becoming “another David Souter.” It’s the concern from both parties that a president will pick an obscure candidate to avoid a political fight and end up with a justice who ends up being the opposite of what was sought. That makes sense when discussing Judge Michelle Childs, Clyburn’s choice for the Supreme Court nominee, whose judicial temperament and philosophy may not have been fully fleshed out in her work on a district court and in private practice.

I don’t think Thomas is the best choice for this analogy — everyone knew he was conservative when nominated — but that’s clearly what Thompson was saying in that quote before Wootson and Sotomayor appended this slur.

Thomas’ opinions are his own. One can disagree with him, but do so on the merits, not with a thinly-veiled attempt to cast him as someone who’s trying to sound white. The fact that this made it through all of the editorial reviews in the news section speaks volumes about the political environment at the Washington Post. This paper owes Clarence Thomas and Bennie Thompson an apology.