Illustration by PAUL SPELLA THE ATLANTIC SEPTEMBER 2019 39BOOKSDeconstructing
Clarence Thomas
The justice’s reactionary legal
philosophy rests on faith in the power
of adversity to fuel black progress.BY MICHAEL O’DONNELLT
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
DIANA WALKER/THE LIFE IMAGES COLLECTION/GETTY; EDDIE ADAMS/AP people, because he views white paternalism and