The Atlantic – September 2019

Illustration by PAUL SPELLA THE ATLANTIC SEPTEMBER 2019 39

BOOKS

Deconstructing

Clarence Thomas

The justice’s reactionary legal

philosophy rests on faith in the power

of adversity to fuel black progress.

BY MICHAEL O’DONNELL

T

HE FIRST THING to know about Clarence Thomas is that

everybody at the Supreme Court loves him. Surprisingly,

given his uncompromising public persona and his near- total

silence during oral arguments, Thomas cultivates a jovial pres-

ence in the building’s austere marble hallways. Unlike most of

his colleagues, he learns everyone’s name, from the janitors to

each justice’s law clerks. He makes fast friends at work, at ball games, and at car

races, and invites people to his chambers, where the conversations last for hours.

Thomas’s booming laugh fills the corridors. He

passes silly notes on the bench. As the legal analyst

Jeffrey Toobin wrote in 2007, with his “effusive good

nature,” Thomas is “universally adored.”

This buoyancy marks a man whose career as a

judge is a study in brutalism. Thomas is by far the

most conservative justice on a very conservative

Court. He advances a reactionary legal philoso-

phy that would take America back to the 1930s.

That won’t happen: Unwilling to compromise and

often unable to attract the vote of a single colleague,

Thomas frequently writes only for himself. He also

endured the most searing confirmation battle of any

modern American public servant, an ordeal that

put race, sex, and power in the national spotlight.

By all accounts, including his own, the experience

nearly destroyed him—not to mention what it did to

Anita Hill, who accused him of sexual harassment.

Thomas has since nursed a long list of grievances,

vowing to “outlive” his critics and writing in his 2007

memoir, My Grandfather’s Son, about a host of antag-

onists: “posturing zealots,” “sanctimonious whites,”

and—of Hill—“my most traitorous adversary.”

Revanchist politics and a list of enemies to

rival Arya Stark’s: These things do not pair natu-

rally with bonhomie at the office. Yet such are the

contra dictions of Clarence Thomas. He is a baffling

figure. The nation’s second African-American Su-

preme Court justice and the successor to Thurgood

Marshall, Thomas opposes most policies that seek

to combat discrimination or help minorities. He

disfavors integration and even seems to resist de-

segregation. A former black activist and onetime

follower of Malcolm X, he champions a criminal-

justice system suffused with racism, and has

rejected claims of cruel and unusual punishment

made by prisoners. Thomas’s most uncomfortable

contradiction, though, rests on an abstraction. He

is the Supreme Court’s foremost originalist—that

is, he purports to interpret the Constitution as the

Founders understood it in 1789. Yet how can a black

man make such a commitment when the Founders

wrote slavery into the Constitution’s very text?

I

N HIS PROVOCATIVE new book, The
Enigma of Clarence Thomas, Corey Robin, a
political scientist at Brooklyn College and the
Graduate Center at the City University of New York,
seeks to answer this vexing question. Robin’s thesis
is that Thomas’s immersion in black nationalism in
the 1960s and ’70s profoundly shaped his conser-
vatism. Demands for a black state and a unified
black culture don’t figure on his agenda, but he is
staunchly dedicated to a separatist position rooted
in individual attainment, achievement without
assistance from whites, and self- determination
in the tradition of Booker T. Washington. He
rejects laws and programs designed to help black
DI people, because he views white paternalism and

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