Clarence Thomas has moved from Black nationalism to the right. But his beliefs about racism, and our ability to solve it, remain the same.
Clarence Thomas is the longest-serving Justice on the Supreme Court. When he joined the bench, on October 19, 1991, the Soviet Union was a country, Hillary Clinton was Arkansas’s First Lady, and Donald Trump had recently declared the first of his businesses’ six bankruptcies. Since then, Thomas has written more than seven hundred opinions, staking out controversial positions on gun rights and campaign finance that have come to command Supreme Court majorities.
Savannah was also where Thomas claims he had his first experience of race—at the hands not of whites but of blacks. Though Thomas began elementary school in 1954, four months after the Supreme Court declared segregation unconstitutional, he grew up, by his own report, in an “entirely black environment.” His nickname in the schoolyard and the streets was “ABC”—“America’s Blackest Child.” “If he were any blacker,” his classmates jeered, “he’d be blue.” Color was code for class.
Within months of their arrival at Holy Cross, Thomas and his friends organized themselves into the Black Student Union, where they tempered their aspirations for inclusion with their demands for separation. The B.S.U.’s founding statement called for the admission of more black students, the hiring of black faculty, courses in black literature and history, and campus events to showcase black artists.
In 1971, Thomas entered Yale Law School. One of twelve black students, he was the beneficiary of an affirmative-action program—Yale had decreed that ten per cent of the incoming class would be students of color—of the sort he would later come to revile. Thomas had long experience of proving himself before a hostile audience, but now the competition was stiffer and the stakes were higher. The scrutiny was coming not just from fellow-students but from liberal whites who were acting as his patrons.
Thomas came to believe that, for the white liberal, offering help to black people was a way to express the combined privileges of race and class. This is a running theme of Wright’s “,” in which Bigger Thomas, a poor black man from the slums of Chicago, is given an opportunity to rise when a wealthy white family hires him as a chauffeur.
This concern runs throughout Thomas’s jurisprudence. “Some people think that the solution to all the problems of black people is integration,” he said, in 1997. By his own admission, he is not one of them. In a lengthy 1982 research article , Thomas notes pointedly that “it must be decided . . . whether integration per se should be a primary goal.
His argument is rooted in two beliefs, each informed by his time spent on the left. The first is that affirmative action reinforces the stigma that shadows African-Americans. Among many whites, blackness signals a deficit of intellect, talent, and skill. Even Supreme Court Justices, Thomas wrote in one opinion, “assume that anything that is predominantly black must be inferior.
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