When the much-acclaimed “60 Minutes” airs on television tonight, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas will play “the race card,” just like ousted Ball State basketball coach Ronny Thompson used it in Thursday’s editions of USA Today.

It is as mighty as an ace in a Saturday night poker game. The trouble is where they are only four aces in a regular deck, there appears to be a limitless supply of “race cards” and they are now being played with an intensity I can hardly remember.

I grew up in the 1960s, but I was taught, from the earliest moment on, a person’s color or origin had absolutely nothing to do with the type of person they were. My fondest memories include a jillion folks and I am blessed in that I was raised in a way ethnicity has nothing to do with it.

But I was a student at Ole Miss the day Dr. Martin Luther King was killed 60 miles away in Memphis and I remember being the first “white” sports writer to cover games at Chattanooga’s “Negro” schools.

Oh, I could go on and on, but let me just say the one photograph I hate worse than all the pictures I have even seen in my entire life is of a police dog biting a man in Birmingham and, while this may sound strange, I kept a copy for a long time to remind myself of two words: “Never again.”

So, tonight on “60 Minutes,” when Justice Thomas consents to a rare interview because his new book “My Grandfather’s Son,” is being released tomorrow, he’ll talk about his tumultuous ascent to the bench of the Supreme Court. In doing so, he’ll lash out at the liberals and the media.

That’s what he did in his book because an “early leak” contains a paragraph where he likens the concerted efforts to block his nomination to a civil rights clash, “…but it was a mob all the same and its purpose – to keep the black man in his place – was unchanged.”

Like I say, the “race card” has an edge to it that is hard to ignore.

This week Ronny Thompson, who resigned at Ball State back in July, got big play in USA Today because he now claims there were racial undertones, never mind the NCAA rules violations, the 9-22 record or the fact his daddy, John, was the first black man to ever coach national champions at Georgetown.

Ronny got huge coverage on the sports pages in the middle of football season because he played the “race card.” That’s the way it works.

Closer to home, the home address of City Councilwoman Marti Rutherford was brought about when they changed the boundary lines for District 5 and District 6. They say this was racially motivated.

Finally, there is “The Jena Six” and I have been fascinated by the feeding frenzy that has been “created” by the national media after a crowd of predominately 20,000 marched in a civil-rights way to the tiny Louisiana town last week.

As the facts have been brought into bright focus, they reveal a white kid was cold-cocked in the hallway of school by a back kid. The white kid was walking through a doorway and never saw the blow coming. There was never any kind of fight at all.

The blow immediately knocked him unconscious and then the black kid and five of his black buddies began kicking and stomping on the white kid in a way that could have killed him.

The black kid, Mychal Bell, has been in jail since December and was released this Thursday when a “stranger,” a doctor from another part of Louisiana, came up with his bail.

It was also announced this week that Bell will be tried as a juvenile, despite the fact this was his third arrest on assault charges in the past two years and that he was already serving a probationary sentence at the time of the latest incident.

Rev. Jesse Jackson, maybe the best dealer of “race cards” in the world, said he was “very disappointed” after he and leaders of other civil rights groups met with the Justice Department on Friday. Jesse had flown back to Washington from Jena because the black guys wanted some white guys arrested, too.

From where I stand, and according to a brilliant Op-Ed piece in the NY Times this week that was written by Reed Walters, the district attorney in Jena, you can’t arrest somebody unless they break a law.

So I wish we’d create a law that would, in essence, outlaw the use of a “race card” in the way we deal with people. I know that is far-fetched, but give it pause.

I was reading a statement by presidential candidate Barack Obama the other day and he was saying he wants to reduce drug sentences because black people aren’t treated the same as whites when they are caught with cocaine.

Please! It ain’t about the sentence, it’s about the cocaine. And that’s the problem with the “race card.” It forces you to focus on the color instead of the person.

How great would it be, where announcing a new book or springing a kid from jail, if we focused on the person, just the person.

royexum@aol.com