Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas seems to be under the impression that he achieved his place on the highest judicial body of the United States for reasons having nothing to do with his being black.  Either that or he thinks one set of rules applies to him and another applies to The People, for whom he administers justice.  He has consistently opposed race-based legal remedies—busing, quotas, affirmative action, or racial preferences—even as he has surely benefited from them throughout his life.

Born and raised in Pin Point, Georgia, the quintessential hellish, backwater town of America's rural, segregated South, young Clarence was smart and poor, and apparently motivated to succeed by his proud, hard-driving grandfather.  Soon enough, however, he was taken up by the nuns (“nigger-loving sisters” according to some locals) of a private elementary school and then attended Holy Cross in Massachusetts on a King Scholarship, one of the byproducts of that white college's awakened sense of social conscience following the assassination of Martin Luther King the previous year.  He entered Yale Law School in 1971, the same year it started an ambitious drive to make sure 10 percent of its incoming freshmen was black.[1] Thomas has remained bitter about the “affirmative action baby” label conferred upon him.

After stints working for Missouri's attorney general and as chairman of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, Thomas eventually made his way into consideration for a nomination to a federal judgeship, a direct route to the Supreme Court.  That he led the country's top enforcement agency against workplace discrimination is ironic for a few reasons:  (1) He had specifically derided that agency before accepting the leading role there, claiming it offered “black work,” (2) He dismantled just-settled protocols for pursuing sexual harassment cases, dismissing that new crime's very definition as too inclusive, and (3) He proceeded to engage with a now-famous employee in a manner that produced the harrowing, mesmerizing drama called the Hill-Thomas Hearings, a tortured Congressional investigation into allegations that Thomas himself was a sexual harasser, a pornography buff, a crass bully unbefitting any serious role in society much less head of the enforcement agency meant to prevent such criminal behavior.

It's clear that President George H. W. Bush needed a black man to replace the legendary Thurgood Marshall on the bench, a dicey exchange that was sure to bring accusations of cynicism but also protection against complaints that the Republican Party was one of privilege, insensitive to blacks.  As usual, those in the know would see the move as political opportunism in the extreme, but the less informed masses would be charmed. (By the President's—and by extension, their—high mindedness.)  So Clarence Thomas, who had not practiced law for ten years, who had never litigated a case before a jury, who had not issued a single constitutional opinion in his mere two-year tenure as federal judge, who barely passed muster with the American Bar Association,[2] joined the nation’s highest court in 1991.

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I think Justice Thomas is full of rage.  He suggests that his “days of rage” were during his tenure at Holy Cross, referring to typical antics of a college boy in the 60's, but I think they are right now—waning, perhaps, since the public spectacle that tormented him more than a decade ago, but still there, in his glowering presence on the Court.  His humiliation during the nomination process tainted his credentials, his legacy.  The public discussion about his sexual prowess—as extrapolated from comments about his well-developed genitalia and vast experience with women that he allegedly made to Professor Hill—played into the stereotype of the African American male as Sexual Aggressor and fueled the bigots pervasive in the Moral Majority era who were itching to believe that the intra-family fight between Ms. Hill and Judge Thomas was prima facie evidence that blacks are incapable of civilized behavior.  I don't blame him for being angry, but I wonder if he has directed any of that anger toward himself for his disinhibition.[3] And he almost never speaks.  On the rare occasion that Oral Arguments are aired on NPR, listeners witness questions and interruptions and clarifications and musings by eight justices.  Not Thomas.  I have never heard his voice.  He is renowned for his wordlessness.

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Clarence Thomas’s opinions are a radical abandonment of stare decisis, the principal that mandates respect, if not adherence, to precedent; he is instead a disciple of originalism, which tries very hard to follow the Constitution precisely as the Founders intended; but, really, how could one know how John Adams would apply the Second Amendment to the manufacture and ownership of the AK72 automatic rifle, or how Thomas Jefferson would rule on censorship and surveillance in this age of the Internet, or how either of them would view race in America, given their uneasy tolerance of slavery?  But Thomas insists on divining the originalists' intent, so he routinely sets aside precedent if he thinks it doesn't mesh with the views of those wigged eighteenth century landowners, and cases of race are of particular nuisance to him.  He has actually questioned the logic of Brown v. Board, the hallmark civil rights case, and in the landmark case of 2003, Grutter v. Bollinger, he wrote a blistering dissent to the majority opinion, which essentially upheld affirmative action in the University of Michigan law school's admissions process.  Thomas's angry but carefully worded opinion seems intended to set the stage for entirely unraveling race-based preferences sometime in the future, perhaps at the suggested “sunset” mark twenty-five years down the road, and he’ll probably hang around long enough to delight in eliminating enforced diversity for good (a move that would confirm his excitable predecessor's opinion of him as a “goddamn black sellout.”)  Thomas's remarks on this subject are not neutral; they are often bellicose and defensive.  He is not dispassionate on the issue of race, and his resentment at being looked at as a product of affirmative action certainly colors his decisions, all of which espouse, ironically, policies of “colorblindness.”

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It goes without saying that valid intellectual arguments exist on

both sides of the affirmative action issue.  It becomes a little

more interesting, however, when an arbiter and past recipient

himself of preferential treatment makes the case that the

practice is destructive to the character of African-Americans.

Thomas has remarked over the years, both privately and in

public testimony, that preferential treatment is both detrimental

and insulting to minorities.  I don't have an issue with that

sentiment, especially the “insulting” part.[4] It makes sense to

me and elicits a terrible sympathy for worthy people whose

worthiness is constantly questioned.  But he seems tone deaf

to the accusations of hypocrisy, which leaves me wondering if

there isn't a little self-deception going on.  If affirmative action is

so harmful to blacks, one wonders how he thinks he has been

harmed.  It's hard to imagine that he would think the harm to

his credibility—and I am sure that that would be his answer—is

too steep a price for the career itself.  But—and it's here we see

his delusion—he probably thinks he achieved that by virtue of

his own merit; he probably thinks that he wasn't, in fact, a 

beneficiary of affirmative action in the first place.