A. looks a lot different now — I’ve caught the TV interviews and op-ed opining — but the old self-righteousness is still there.

Image Maureen Dowd Credit... Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times

I have no apologies to make. When you’re born in a backwater shack in Pin Point, Ga.; when you grow up poor, cold and hungry; when you get a bellyful of racial slights and condescension; when you can’t get a job after graduation, even with a degree from Yale, because you’re competing with rich, white, well-connected guys who were legacies at Yale, that’s when the anger boils up in you.

Every Southern black who lived through Jim Crow knows the feeling. From the time I was a kid, when my white classmates made fun of me as “ABC” — “America’s Blackest Child” — the beast of rage against The Man has gnawed at my soul.

Your Yale law degree isn’t worth 15 cents when everyone assumes you got special treatment because of the color of your skin, when, really, it was the witless Wonder Bread elites who got special treatment because of the color of their daddy’s money.

I still have a 15-cent sticker on the frame of my law degree because it’s tainted. I keep it in the basement.

That’s why I refuse, as a justice, to give a helping hand to blacks. I don’t want them to suffer from the advantages I had. Few of them will be able to climb to my heights, of course, but if they do, they will have the satisfaction of knowing that they made it on their own, as individuals.