I WOULD NOT have picked up a book about Clarence Thomas were it not by Corey Robin, whose The Reactionary Mind impressed me. Enigma? Really? I found Anita Hill credible, for one thing, and for another I had (lazily) assumed that Thomas was just a follower of Scalia's lead. He's famous for not asking questions, after all. Classic sellout, I figured. What's enigmatic about that? But Robin puts Thomas in a whole new light.
According to Robin, Thomas is actually a hard-core black nationalist, perhaps even black separatist, of an unusual conservative kind. Part of Thomas's conservatism (according to Robin) is a conviction that White America is not only racist, it is incorrigibly so, and will never change. No amount of teaching, preaching, or legislation will change that. MLK's dream will never come to pass. The best Black America can hope for is equal protection under the law. All legislative or policy efforts to achieve fairness will fail, breaking on the rock of white resistance.
Robin makes a convincing case that Thomas does not oppose affirmative action for the classic "conservative" reasons, either because (á la DeSouza) racism is over or (á la plenty o' white people) it is unfair to white people. For Thomas, however well-intentioned, affirmative action will always be Something We White People Did For You Black People. Its beneficiaries will be dismissed or condescended to or resented or all three. Their lives will actually be worse, because whites will never see them as having earned their success.
Thomas's pro-corporate rulings (he has a pattern of whittling down the reach of the Commerce Clause) come from his conviction that the free market affords Blacks more opportunity to improve their lives than any laws or policies generated by white people will.
He rules in favor of restricting the vote because he feels America's Blacks should abandon any hope that, as a minority, they can change the country through political impact.
His Second Amendment rulings (Thomas has led the court in defining the right to bear arms as an individual right, not a right that belongs only to a "well regulated Militia") arise from a conviction that America's Blacks should arm, because the state is never going to be interested in protecting them or their property.
Thomas, according to Robin, perhaps even longs for the strengths and virtues that African Americans developed during slavery and Jim Crow--for the self-sufficiency and family loyalty that they developed when they could count only on themselves, before they succumbed to the the belief that laws or policies or court decisions would compel white America to do right.
I don't actually know that Robin is right, because some of this just sounds literally incredible. but he has been through Thomas's decisions with a fine tooth comb, as well as many of his speeches and his autobiography, and his book is not just shoot-from-the-hip hypothesizing. Sixty pages of footnotes.
One of my nieces is a recent graduate of a prestigious law school, and she once surprised the hell out of me in conversation by saying that Thomas's Supreme Court decisions were, in her opinion, actually the most interesting of those by any of the sitting justices. At the time, I was skeptical. But no longer.
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