Clarence Thomas

Thomas topped this list, not because he married a white woman after divorcing his Black wife, or because he had an affair with another Black woman. He isn’t here because of his one-time heavy drinking and addiction to porn. I consider those personal liabilities and not a betrayal of “his people,” though he may no longer recognize them as such. Early in his life, Thomas idolized the Black Panthers and had a poster of Malcolm X in his bedroom. He was accepted into Holy Cross and later attended Yale Law School, in part due to affirmative action. Because discrimination kept him from receiving the prestigious job offers he desired, he’s spent the rest of his life closing the door on others, effectively ending affirmative action and tearing apart civil rights laws. Thomas’ career has been about payback. He claims it’s against liberals, but his self-hate has been taken out against Black people.

Rachel Dolezal

A lot of people associate with people of other races, but few have gone as far as Rachel Dolezal in denying her past and pretending to be something she wasn’t. Dolezal can’t be lumped in with light-skinned Black people who passed for white for safety reasons or to have a better lifestyle. Some of them risked their lives if they were found out. There was danger in their subterfuge; Dolezal only risked embarrassment.

Rachel styled herself a Black civil rights activist and complained to police she’d been the victim of race-related hate crimes. The police investigation didn’t support her allegations, and her parents revealed that Rachel, the president of the Spokane, WA, branch of the NAACP, was actually white.

Dolezal has adopted Black siblings. Her Black brother, Ezra, says she began changing her appearance as early as 2009, when she started using hair products that she had seen her biological sister use. She began darkening her skin and perming her hair sometime around 2011. When Ezra moved in with Rachel in 2012, she told him that Spokane-area residents knew her as black and said, “Don’t blow my cover.” Dolezal betrayed her self-proclaimed people by making it easier to dismiss hate crimes and her real people by her complete denial of whiteness.

Marco Rubio

Defining Marco Rubio’s people requires some specificity. His parents were born in Cuba, and Marco was born in Miami. Marco’s ties to Cuba don’t necessarily extend to other Hispanics, and he may have been able to convince himself that the immigration policy he heralds as Secretary of State isn’t harming his people, only those from El Salvador, Venezuela, Panama, Mexico, and elsewhere. The problem is that Rubio’s boss is also targeting Cubans.

Cubans have enjoyed a fast track to American citizenship since 1966 and have been exempt from other immigration and naturalization laws. The Cuban Adjustment Act allowed Cubans to seek citizenship after one year, but Trump canceled the parole program, putting anyone here less than a year in limbo. Sixty-Eight percent of Cubans voted for Trump and now Rubio is leading the way screwing them. In recent weeks, several Cuban Americans have spoken out and protested the Trump immigration policies. How long before they turn on one of their own who implements them?

Elias Boudinot

There’s an Elias Boudinot, who was a Founding Father, abolitionist, and women’s rights advocate. He is not the Elias Boudinot of whom I speak. The person I mean was a member of the Cherokee Nation called Gallegina. Gallegina met the original Boudinot and adopted his name as a form of tribute. At age 16, he converted to Christianity, and at 20, he became engaged to a white woman, which triggered a great uproar. That should have been his first hint that his idea that white people should assimilate the Cherokee had flaws. He was obviously unfamiliar with the Borg from Star Trek: The Next Generation.

Elias went on to marry the white woman and went on a nationwide speaking tour in favor of Native American assimilation. He began publishing tips for Native Americans to fit in and helped lay the groundwork for the forced removal of Native Americans during the Trail of Tears, which he supported. Without authority, he signed the New Echota Treaty (1835), which required the Cherokees to relinquish all remaining land east of the Mississippi River, ultimately leading to their forced removal to a territory in present-day Oklahoma. The real Chief, John Ross, ultimately led a party that killed Boudinot and two of his uncles who participated in the betrayal. Those deaths led to the Cherokee Civil War.

J. Edgar Hoover

It’s hard to think of J. Edgar Hoover as having people. He seemingly made enemies across the spectrum, blackmailing Presidents and citizens alike and spying on a range of Americans through the COINTELPRO program. A group he should have had empathy for is gays and lesbians, as he himself was homosexual. Instead, Hoover, along with Attorney Roy Cohn, targeted gays and lesbians in the Lavender Scare. Hoover is a perfect example of a homophobe who is a secret homosexual.

Roy Cohn

Roy Cohn is Donald Trump’s favorite attorney—an attack dog who stopped at nothing to accomplish his goals. Cohn led Trump’s defense against charges that Trump violated the Fair Housing Act in 39 of his properties, refusing to rent to Black people. Far too often, it meant going after homosexuals like himself as he led the Lavender Scare, taking time away from the 2nd Red Scare he also led.

Cohn never acknowledged being gay. After contracting AIDS, he described his illness as liver cancer, even on his deathbed. The IRS seized most of his assets, leaving behind a pair of diamond earlinks given to him by Donald Trump that proved to be fake.

Candace Owens

Some people don’t betray their people; they choose different people, which is their right to do. Many of us have entirely different sets of friends than we did when we were in grade school, high school, or college. We found our people, which in part may be true of Candace Owens. She has a right to put behind her the days she was receiving racist threats when she was in high school.

The voicemails were left by four boys riding in a car. One of the boys was the son of then-Mayor Daniel P. Malloy. Malloy became Connecticut’s Governor for two terms and is now the Chancellor at the University of Maine. Owens contacted the NAACP, which helped her family sue the Stamford Board of Education for “failing to protect her.” She won a $37,500 settlement, and one of the boys in the car (not the Mayor’s son) was arrested. Candace knew where her Black Card was then.

“They started off by telling me that they were going to kill me ‘just because’ I was black. They warned me that if they found me at home, they were going to unload a bullet into the back of my head.”

Candace claims she was changed by that experience, hating how it made her feel. Instead of blaming the white perpetrators, she sided with them, claiming she was not a victim. She started an anti-cyberbullying campaign, funded by Kickstarter, which was met with a flood of criticism. Owens concluded the bullies were liberals posing as Trump supporters because they didn’t want her to “unmask them.”

Candace dropped out of the University of Rhode Island in her Junior year, dissatisfied with what she was taught. She re-educated herself, reading works by Ann Coulter, Milo Yiannopoulos, Ben Carson, and Thomas Sowell. In 2017, she came out on YouTube, announcing that she was a conservative.

Candace went full in, making videos like “I don’t care about Charlottesville, the KKK or White Supremacy,” and others supporting her white supremacist friends. Scot Esdaile, the President of the local NAACP Chapter that helped Owens while in high school, had this to say.

“It’s the same type of thing Clarence Thomas did, Thomas reaped all the benefits of affirmative action and then tried to roll over on it. It’s that kind of mentality and disrespect.”

Candace Owens married George Farmer, a British supporter of Donald Trump and a donor. They have since moved to Nashville, TN, and have two children. Black Card out of sight. It was okay that Candace chose a new group of friends, not so much that she made herself rich by tearing down Black people.

Ted Cruz

I almost excluded Ted Cruz because he doesn’t really have people. He doesn’t closely identify with the Hispanics in Texas, where he has lived since 1974. Cruz was born in Canada; his father is Cuban, and his mother is three-quarters Irish and one-quarter Italian. Hispanics in Texas are mostly from Mexico and Central America. One might say Cruz has distanced himself from his Latin roots, choosing to go by Ted instead of his birth name, Rafael.

Ted didn’t have the common man’s education, attending ritzy private schools since junior high, then Princeton undergraduate, and Harvard Law School. Ted has an impressive resume’, having clerked for Chief Justice William Rehnquist and stints in the Bush administration and private law practices. Ted was appointed Texas Solicitor General, where he successfully argued cases before the Supreme Court. He was elected to the U.S. Senate in 2012, riding the wave of the Tea Party movement. Ted Cruz wants to become President, having run unsuccessfully in the 2016 election. The problem is that Ted is disliked by those who know him best, fellow Senators and Republican donors. Ted doesn’t have people, but he does have constituents, and it is they whom he has betrayed.

In 2021, after the worst storm in most Texans' lifetimes. Instead of staying behind and using his office to coordinate federal resources to help Texans, most of whom had no power or water. Cruz boarded a flight to a resort in Cancun with his family. After a picture of him leaving town appeared in the media, Cruz rushed back to Texas to do what he should have been doing all along.

“Look, it was obviously a mistake and in hindsight I wouldn’t have done it,”

Even Cruz’s family couldn’t count on Ted. After Donald Trump insinuated Ted’s wife was ugly, and his father was implicated in the assassination of JFK. Cruz laughed it off and gave his full-throated support to the man who belittled his closest family members.

Stacey Dash

For a few years, Stacey Dash had achieved a level of popularity and notoriety she hadn’t experienced since co-starring in the movie Clueless. Stacey was a regular contributor on Fox News, supporting Donald Trump and denouncing Black causes. She denied the existence of voter suppression, attacked Black Lives Matter, and came out on the wrong side of every issue involving race. She even had a slight revival of her acting career. Stacey was looking good until she got fired from Fox News for cursing on-air while talking about former President Barack Obama.

Stacey went into a downward spiral after that, perhaps hitting bottom when she was arrested in 2019 for domestic assault, physically attacking her fourth husband; this came after a failed 2018 run for Congress, where she withdrew from the race after only a month.

Stacey is currently trying to reinvent herself. In an interview with the Daily Mail, she said she’d had a drug habit costing over $10,000 a month, and she half-apologized for saying some things incorrectly. Perhaps she will reconsider calling for the end of Black History Month and canceling BET.

“There are things that I am sorry for. Things that I did say, that I should not have said them the way I said them. They were very arrogant and prideful, and angry. And that’s who Stacey was, but that’s not who Stacey is now. Stacey’s someone who has compassion, empathy.”

Stacey made her living for a while tearing down Black achievement on Fox News. She says she’s now sober, and I wish her well. She may even get her Black Card back one day.

This post originally appeared on Medium and is edited and republished with author's permission. Read more of William Spivey's work on Medium. And if you dig his words, buy the man a coffee.