BOOKS40 SEPTEMBER 2019 THE ATLANTICits attendant stigma as the greatest impediment to
black advance ment. At the heart of Robin’s book
is this extraordinary argument: Thomas “sees
something of value in the social worlds of slavery
and Jim Crow,” not because he endorses bondage
“but because he believes that under those regimes
African Americans developed virtues of indepen-
dence and habits of responsibility, practices of self-
control and institutions of patriarchal self-help, that
enabled them to survive and sometimes flourish.”
On its face, this argument seems almost as
offensive as the “Uncle Tom” slurs that Thomas
regularly faces. Something of value? At a minimum,
Robin’s perspective is vulnerable to the charge of
overstatement. Whatever his views, Thomas has
said that he became a lawyer “to help my people.”
He has fiercely attacked the standing of white pun-
dits who question his commitment to the advance-
ment of African Americans. On the Court, he has
forcefully addressed the topic of America’s racist
past. For instance, in the 2003 case Virginia v. Black,
he wrote a solo dissent to the Court’s decision pro-
tecting cross burning under the First Amendment.
In Thomas’s view, given its racist connotations and
associations with the Ku Klux Klan, cross burning
is a “profane” act of racial terrorism that deserves
no constitutional protection. Many of his judicial
opinions turn on the assertion that his methodology
would produce better results for black people than
the prevailing liberal orthodoxy. Thomas has writ-
ten vividly about “the totalitarianism of segregation”
and “the dark oppressive cloud of governmentally
sanctioned bigotry.” Robin collects and quotes
these lines, but they don’t deter him from painting
their author as an upside-of-slavery kind of judge.
Still, Robin is not hurling insults. He is de con-
structing a sphinx, and his point carries the un-
comfortable ring of truth. If Thomas wants to take
America back to its founding, that project entails
reconciling slavery and the law. Perhaps this sim-
ply cannot be done. For his part, Thomas has not
tried, interpreting the post–Civil War amendments
far more narrowly than other justices. The Enigma
of Clarence Thomas therefore deserves credit for
attempting to understand the worldview of a jurist
who at times can seem almost willfully perverse.
“For every mountain of hardship Thomas cites”
from the Jim Crow past, “he has a matching story
of overcoming,” Robin writes. “Indeed, the entire
point of these mentions of past adversity is to nar-
rate an attendant tale of mastery.” Here Thomas’s
dramatic personal narrative takes on relevance. He
was raised by his harsh and inflex ible grandfather,
Myers Ander son, who maintained a middle-class
life through ownership of a modest fuel-delivery
business. Anderson wouldn’t let Thomas or his
brother wear work gloves on the family farm as they
cut sugar cane or helped butcher livestock. He never
praised the boys or showed them affection. “He
feared the evil consequences of idleness,” Thomas
wrote in My Grandfather’s Son, “and so made sure
that we were too busy to suffer them. In his presence
there was no play, no fun, and little laughter.”
Thomas briefly attended seminary but dropped
out because of what he felt was the Catholic
Church’s indifference to racism. Anderson pro-
ceeded to throw him out of the house. Thomas
recounts the scene in his memoir, writing of his
grandfather: “He’d never accepted any of my
excuses for failure, and he wasn’t going to start
now. ‘You’ve let me down,’ he said.” Their relation-
ship suffered for years; Anderson refused to attend
Thomas’s graduations or wedding. Where others
might never have forgiven such slights, Thomas
went on to adopt this very rigidity as his own watch-
word, praising Anderson as “the greatest man I have
ever known.”
Small wonder that a jurist who learned at the
knee of such a taskmaster would reject leniency
for vagrants, mercy for criminals, and even integra-
tion measures. Nor does it come as a surprise that
Thomas would open a dissenting opinion on affir-
mative action (which he opposes) with these lines
from Frederick Douglass:What I ask for the negro is not benevolence, not
pity, not sympathy, but simply justice. The Amer-
ican people have always been anxious to know
what they shall do with us ... I have had but one
answer from the beginning. Do nothing with us!
Your doing with us has already played the mischief
with us. Do nothing with us!Thomas may not, like his fellow conservatives,
believe that the world, or the Constitution, is color-
blind. But he advocates a similar result, arguing that
the best way forward for African Americans is with
a clean slate, rather than clumsy attempts at redress
that only add more insidious obstacles to progress.
Robin’s book establishes that Thomas has a
serious vision, however quixotic, for the African
American community, and that it deserves to
be taken in good faith—even if progressives can
demol ish it on the merits. Robin proceeds to do
just this, as he paraphrases Thomas’s libertarian
outlook and then pillories it as a fairy tale:In a market freed of government constraints,
extraor dinary black men like Myers Anderson
will emerge. If Myers could succeed in the market
despite Jim Crow, others can do so too. Every bit
of reality would suggest that this is a fantasy on
Thomas’s part, that the odds are overwhelmingly
against African Americans, that the market clearly
privileges whites. But that’s how all romance,
includ ing capitalism, works: One Cinderella will
be chosen, a special someone will succeed, and
that will make all the difference.Thomas
argues that
the best way
forward is
with a clean
slate, rather
than clumsy
attempts
at redress.