(CNN) It's the horror movie villain that won't die, the pop song you can't get out of your head, the out-of-town guest that just won't leave.

It's a belief that's stuck like a tick in the collective memory of some white conservatives.

It's not only a myth but a con. Here's why it matters now.

We are about to hear a lot about, and from, the only black member of the US Supreme Court. A new Thomas biography, " The Enigma of Clarence Thomas ," is generating buzz. A new PBS documentary, " Created Equal: Clarence Thomas in His Own Words ," comes out next year. And a Washington Post writer recently dedicated an entire column to Thomas, calling him "an American hero."

It's all adding up to another public reappraisal of arguably the most conservative member of the Supreme Court. He's someone more people would revere if they only knew him better, says columnist Kathleen Parker.

Supreme Court Associate Justice Clarence Thomas in a February 2018 photo.

Here's my question to people who say or imply black people revile Thomas because he's a conservative: If black people are so opposed to conservatives, why have so many accepted black conservatives such as Booker T. Washington, Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice?

If there is going to be a reevaluation of one of the most powerful black figures in the US, it's time we ground it in facts, not myths.

Thomas isn't despised in the black community because he's a conservative. Many dislike him because they see him as a hypocrite and a traitor.

Yet many white conservatives keep recycling the same selective stories about Thomas. These stories don't just distort black culture -- they carry an undercurrent of racism.

He's not the only black leader who talks about self-reliance

Start with the way conservatives celebrate Thomas' upbringing.

They love to tell tales about his rugged self-reliance: growing up in a Georgia shack without plumbing; the stern grandfather who worked him from sunrise to sunset and once told him that "Old Man Can't is dead. I helped bury him."

These are stories worth telling. Thomas deserves credit. Not enough people, frankly, give him credit for something else, his intellect. Some liberal critics flirt with racism in the way they describe Thomas as an intellectual lightweight.

But the way some white conservatives tell the story of Thomas' rise from poverty also perpetuates racist stereotypes. They imply that Thomas and his hard working, no excuses grandfather are unusual characters in the black community. They depict Thomas as this lonely apostle of self-reliance, as if most black people prefer sitting on the couch drinking Kool-Aid while waiting for the government to send them a check.

Thomas speaks during the funeral mass for Associate Justice Antonin Scalia on February 20, 2016, in Washington.

One journalist praised Thomas in 2017 for being the product of a "caring, supervised, value-laden upbringing, compared with a more usual poor, fatherless black childhood" marked by "victimhood."

Even Thomas has reinforced this notion of pervasive black dependency. He gave a speech in the 1980s before a group of black conservatives where he said of his sister : "She gets mad when the mailman is late with her welfare check. That`s how dependent she is. What`s worse is that now her kids feel entitled to the check too. They have no motivation for doing better or getting out of that situation.''

His entire career is a result of thrusts for diversity that he would deny in others. Lawrence Goldstone, author

Here's some news: Black people have been practicing self-reliance for centuries. We've had to, for survival. We know through bitter experience that white America's investment in racial equality is sporadic. Racial progress has always been followed by a " whitelash ."

Thomas' stern grandfather is a familiar figure in the black community. Plenty of black people can tell you stories of grandparents, pastors, teachers, and coaches who all preached the same message: Rely on yourself, because you can't rely on white people.

It's almost impossible to find a revered black leader who didn't preach some form of this message.

Thomas and his fellow Supreme Court justices at the inauguration of President Trump in January 2017.

It was Obama who chided black parents for allegedly feeding their children "cold Popeye's" chicken for breakfast and black boys for wearing a "eight-pound chain around your neck." He once told a group of black college students , "Nobody cares how tough your upbringing was. Nobody cares if you suffered some discrimination. And moreover, you have to remember that whatever you've gone through, it pales in comparison to the hardships previous generations endured."

Obama lectured black people so much about not using racism as a crutch that some commentators criticized him for it.

But you rarely, if ever, hear white conservatives acknowledge this history. They're still stuck on the Ronald Reagan " Welfare Queen " narrative about black dependency.

He cast an 'atrocious' vote against black America

There's something else many white conservatives miss: The contradiction between Thomas' words and actions.

But when his nomination to the Supreme Court was threatened by Anita Hill's allegations of sexual harassment, he played the race card by saying he was the victim of a "high-tech lynching."

To some critics, Thomas is tainted by the 1991 sexual harassment allegations by Anita Hill at his confirmation hearings.

Thomas has lectured blacks about the evils of affirmative action. Yet he made it into Yale Law School because of an affirmative action program

"His entire career is a result of thrusts for diversity that he would deny in others," Lawrence Goldstone, author of "On Account of Race: The Supreme Court, White Supremacy, and the Ravaging of African American Voting Rights," told me.

"How many highly talented black or Hispanic kids are out there who could really make a difference if only the starting line was staggered to take into account how much baggage they're carrying."

Then there was Thomas' public confrontation in 1991 with Anita Hill, the black woman who accused of him of sexual harassment. Many black women, in particular, still believe that he lied when he denied sexually harassing Hill. Thomas vigorously denied that he did anything wrong.

"A large portion, if not the majority, of black women over time began to think that Clarence Thomas may have in fact lied and that he almost certainly did," says Ravi Perry, chair of the political science department at Howard University.

Thomas is sworn in on September 10, 1991, during his confirmation hearings.

But it's Thomas' voting record that has cemented the cynicism many blacks feel toward him.

And he joined a 2013 high court decision -- Shelby County v. Holder -- that eviscerated the Voting Rights Act, the crown jewel of the civil rights movement.

Here is Thomas providing a crucial vote to cripple legislation for which the proponents of racial justice marched, bled, and in some instances died. Randall Kennedy, author and law professor

His vote on Shelby contributed to "the most unjustifiable and hurtful decision imposed on black America in the past half century," Randall Kennedy, an author and professor at Harvard Law School, wrote in a recent article on Thomas.

"It is atrocious, right alongside such judicial delinquencies as Plessy v. Ferguson, Giles v. Harris, and Korematsu v. United States," Kennedy wrote. "Yet here is Thomas providing a crucial vote to cripple legislation for which the proponents of racial justice marched, bled, and in some instances died.''

He has a bleak vision of integration

You won't hear many white conservatives address these deeper questions that many black people have about Thomas. Why is that?

I have a theory. It's part of what I call the Clarence Thomas con -- a way to divert people's attention away from the more unpleasant aspects of Thomas' legacy.

It's far easier to mislead the public about the true nature of Thomas' isolation in the black community than to defend accusations that his judicial decisions harm black people and other marginalized groups. Or to deny charges that his opposition to affirmative action is "at war with his own biography."

Focusing on Thomas' biography also takes away attention from his pessimistic views about integration and some white Americans.

There is nothing you can do to get past black skin. I don't care how educated you are, how good you are at what you do -- you'll never ... be seen as equal to whites. Clarence Thomas

One of the reasons why The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech still captivates people is because he portrayed a future America where whites and blacks would "be able to sit down at a table of brotherhood."

It's a beautiful vision of an integrated America for which countless people literally died. But I wonder if many people understand Thomas' bleak view of racial progress.

Justice Clarence Thomas sits for an official photo in 2017 with other members of the US Supreme Court.

He is a persistent critic of integration. He once said, "The whole push to assimilate simply does not make sense to me."

He's also skeptical about white America's ability to see past skin color.

He once told a black reporter: "There is nothing you can do to get past black skin. I don't care how educated you are, how good you are at what you do -- you'll never have the same contacts or opportunities, you'll never be seen as equal to whites."

Thomas believes that "white supremacy is ineradicable in America," says Corey Robin, author of "The Enigma of Clarence Thomas," a new biography that has earned widespread praise. "Thomas does not believe that politics in any sense of that term — electoral politics, social movements, state action and regulation, organizing, even more radical notions of transformative change — can positively affect black people; he thinks politics mostly hurts black people."

Thomas and other Supreme Court justices await the arrival of the casket of former President George H.W. Bush in the Capitol Rotunda on December 3, 2018.

Thomas was even unimpressed when the US elected Obama, the first black president. He said that a black person could only become president if the "elites" and "the media" picked him or her

Thomas' skepticism about integration, though, is not rare in the black community. It's not uncommon to hear black people say in private that integration hurt them in some ways because their children were put into schools with white teachers who didn't believe in them, and their institutions were weakened.

Thomas alluded to this belief while talking about one of his heroes, Malcolm X, in a 1987 interview.

"I don't see how the civil-rights people today can claim Malcolm X as one of their own. Where does he say black people should go begging the Labor Department for jobs? He was hell on integrationists. Where does he say you should sacrifice your institutions to be next to white people?

He forgets his history

Here is where Thomas loses many black people.

He laments what black people lost due to integration. He praises black individuals like his grandfather who were able to build their own businesses and live with dignity despite segregation. Individual excellence seems to be his solution for racism.

"I am confident that the individual approach, not the group approach, is the better, more acceptable, more supportable and less dangerous" approach to dealing with racism, Thomas once told a meeting of black lawyers

But here's the not-so-big secret of segregation that people like Thomas never mention: "Separate but equal" never gave blacks anything that was actually equal. They could never get the same economic resources or political power under the "separate but equal" world of Jim Crow.

Justices of the US Supreme Court pose for their official photo in Washington on November 30, 2018. Standing from left: Associate Justice Neil Gorsuch, Associate Justice Sonia Sotomayor, Associate Justice Elena Kagan and Associate Justice Brett Kavanaugh.Seated from left to right, bottom row: Associate Justice Stephen Breyer, Associate Justice Clarence Thomas, Chief Justice John Roberts, Associate Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Associate Justice Samuel Alito.

His grandfather might have lived a blameless life and become a millionaire. But he still could have been denied the right to vote, banned from entering white colleges or strung up by a lynch mob for something as absurd as " reckless eyeballing " during segregation.

Individual black excellence was never enough. Black people had to mobilize as a group to demand political power before life got better.

"You can't individually achieve your way out of racism. The remedy is collective," The New York Times columnist Charles Blow once wrote about Thomas.

If other black leaders had adopted Thomas' belief that they could never get past their dark skin, or that the individual approach was better, there would have been no "Brown vs. Board of Education," no "I Have a Dream," and no Obama.

There would have been no Thomas on the Supreme Court.

He tells powerful white people what they want to hear

Then there is another part of Thomas' persona that alienates some black people. White conservatives often portray him as a courageous truth-teller because he tells black people what they don't want to hear.

Here's another truth they ignore: It doesn't take a lot of courage for a black person to tell powerful white people want they want to hear. In fact, they get plenty of rewards for doing so.

I know this from a personal experience.

I was a rookie reporter at a Southern newspaper when Thomas was nominated to the US Supreme Court in 1991. I was criticized by several black journalists after I wrote an essay defending Thomas. One famous black journalist called me a "house n*****."

I said then what I believe now: There is no one way to be black any more than there is one way to be white. Respect Thomas' decision to be an independent thinker.

Clarence Thomas testifies during a hearing before the House Appropriations Committee on April 15, 2010 on Capitol Hill.

After my essay was published, a new world opened before me. A conservative white editor at the paper took me out to lunch and invited me to become an editorial columnist even though I was barely out of college. Interview requests poured in. I was invited to speak on national television. People thought I was a black conservative.

I've seen this pattern over and over: If you're a black journalist who wants to lecture black people about not whining about racism and playing the victim, your career will blossom. Conservative institutions it seems will always find a place for black-on-black critics.

CNN legal contributor Jeffrey Toobin touched on this part of Thomas' courageous truth-teller persona in a New Yorker profile of the Supreme Court justice. Toobin recounted a memorable speech by Thomas at a conservative, black-tie affair led by then Vice-President Dick Cheney. Thomas told the crowd that although he had suffered for speaking out, "Be not afraid."

Toobin caps the story by saying:

"On this night, in other words, Thomas, while celebrating the courage to speak unpopular truths, was telling some of the most powerful people in the worlds of government, business, and finance precisely what they wanted to hear—that affirmative action was bad, that black people didn't want or need their help, that government did more harm than good."

Clarence Thomas is now the most senior associate justice on the Supreme Court.

Thomas has employed his powerful position not to speak truth to power, but to tell power what it wants to hear, according to many black people. That's why Thomas has been called the " anti-Thurgood Marshall ," or the antithesis of the Supreme Court's first black justice.

"If you're a black person who rises to a high level in politics or law, many folks in the black community expect you to use that position to better the living conditions of people who look like you or at the very least speak truth to power," says Perry of Howard University. "Clarence Thomas has done neither."

But unlike Marshall, Thomas won't be widely celebrated in the black community. There likely won't be any movement to build schools, erect statues or name roads after him. His name was barely mentioned in the National Museum of African American History and Culture when it opened in 2016 (the museum said it couldn't tell "every story" of black America).

Yet his stature will probably grow as the Supreme Court's new conservative majority asserts itself. We will continue to hear stories about Thomas' work ethic, his stern grandfather, the price he paid for telling black people to stand on their own.

These stories, though, are decoys that lead people away from a richer discussion of Thomas' legacy -- his impressive rise from poverty, yes, but also his contradictions, his scorn for integration, his belief that "There is nothing you can do to get past black skin."

Don't fall for the Clarence Thomas con.