Clarence Thomas’s Radical Vision of Race
Clarence Thomas’s Radical Vision of Race
Thomas has moved from black nationalism to the right. But his beliefs about racism, and our ability to solve it, remain the same.
By Corey Robin
September 10, 2019
Illustration by Joan Wong; Source Photographs by (from center): AP; Diana Walker / The LIFE Images Collection / Getty; Wally McNamee / Corbis / Getty; Chip Somodevilla / Getty
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. “Thomas’s views,” the Yale law professor Akhil Reed Amar has said, “are now being followed by a majority of the Court in case after case.” That was in 2011. Today Thomas is joined on the Court by Neil Gorsuch, who frequently signs on to Thomas’s opinions, and Brett Kavanaugh. Eleven of his former clerks have been nominated by Trump to the federal bench. Four of them sit on the Court of Appeals, just one step away from the Supreme Court.
By consensus, Thomas is the most conservative member of the Court. So it’s surprising that the central theme of his jurisprudence is race. When he was nearly forty years old, just four years shy of his appointment to the Court, Thomas set out the foundations of his vision in a profile in The Atlantic. “There is nothing you can do to get past black skin,” he said. “I don’t care how educated you are, how good you are at what you do—you’ll never have the same contacts or opportunities, you’ll never be seen as equal to whites.” This was no momentary indiscretion; it was the distillation of a lifetime of learning, which began in the segregated precincts of Savannah, during the nineteen-fifties, and continued through his college years, in the sixties. On the Court, Thomas continues to believe—and to argue, in opinion after opinion—that race matters; that racism is a constant, ineradicable feature of American life; and that the only hope for black people lies within themselves, not as individuals but as a separate community with separate institutions, apart from white people.
This vision is what sets Thomas apart from his fellow-conservatives on the bench, who believe that racism is either defeated or being diminished. It’s a vision that first emerged during Thomas’s early years, when he was on the left and identified, on a profound level, with the tenets of black nationalism. Like most ideological commitments, Thomas’s politics are selective, but much of the program he embraced in his youth—celebration of black self-sufficiency, support for racial separatism—remains vital to his beliefs today. Those beliefs are coming closer, each term, to being enshrined in the law. Thomas writes, on average, thirty-four opinions a year—more than any other Justice. Despite that, the only things most Americans know about him are that he was once accused of sexual harassment and that he almost never speaks from the bench.
Thomas was born in 1948, in Pin Point, Georgia, an impoverished black community that was founded by freed slaves. In his memoir “My Grandfather’s Son,” from 2007, Thomas’s memories of Pin Point are pastoral—rolling bicycle rims down sandy roads, catching minnows in the creek. His family’s move to Savannah, when Thomas was six, brought this idyll to an end. In Pin Point, Thomas fed himself directly from the land and the water, feasting on “a lavish and steady supply of fresh food: shrimp, crab, conch, oysters, turtles, chitterlings, pig’s feet, ham hocks, and plenty of fresh vegetables.” In Savannah, before he moved in with his grandparents, he spooned up “cornflakes moistened with a mixture of water and sweetened condensed milk.”
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. The darkness of Thomas’s skin—along with the Gullah-Geechee dialect he retained from Pin Point—was a sign of his lowly status and origin. “Clarence had big lips, nappy hair, and he was almost literally black,” a schoolmate told Jane Mayer and Jill Abramson in their 1994 book “Strange Justice: The Selling of Clarence Thomas.” “Those folks were at the bottom of the pole. You just didn’t want to hang with those kids.”
For Thomas, these cruelties are a lifelong hurt. “People love to talk about conflicts interracially,” he told the reporter Ken Foskett, who published a biography of Thomas, “Judging Thomas,” in 2004. “They never talk about the conflicts and tensions intraracially.” From a young age, the primary divide Thomas had to confront came from the privileges associated with black wealth and light skin. “You had the black élite, the schoolteachers, the light-skinned people, the dentists, the doctors,” Thomas has said. “My grandfather was down at the bottom. They would look down on him. Everybody tries to gloss over that now, but it was the reality.” It wasn’t until 1964, when he switched to an élite Catholic boarding school outside Savannah, that Thomas would share a classroom with whites. Later, he would call state-enforced segregation “as close to totalitarianism as I would like to get.”
If the move from Pin Point to Savannah introduced Thomas to one side of the color line, his journey north, for college, introduced him to another. Thomas spent one year at a Catholic seminary in Missouri, then enrolled, in 1968, at the College of the Holy Cross, one of the poorest of nineteen young black men recruited by John Brooks, a liberal Jesuit who would become the school’s president. Holy Cross was located in Worcester, a small city near Boston with a black population of two per cent. At the time, the college was even whiter than its environs. The summer before Thomas arrived, the school contacted incoming white students to see if they would object to having a black roommate. In a survey, between a quarter and a half of Thomas’s classmates agreed with the following statements: that black people “have less ambition” than whites; that black people have “looser morals” than whites; that black people “smell different” from whites. In a 1987 letter to the Wall Street Journal, Thomas wrote, “A new media fad is to constantly harp on the plight of black college students on predominantly white campuses. Believe it or not, the problems are the same as they were 20 years ago. . . . The major difference is that the media paid little attention to them then.”
Before heading north, Thomas had a situation, not a story. He knew Jim Crow and, like many African-Americans, endured the shape-shifting violence of its demise. He had read and loved Richard Wright: “He’s an angry black novelist, and I was an angry black man,” he said in “Judging Thomas.” But he hadn’t yet come to a world view about race. In the North, which he thought to be even more hostile than the South, Thomas found that world view in the black nationalism that inspired many African-Americans of the era.
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. They prefaced their demands with a rousing affirmation of black identity: “We, the Black students of the College of the Holy Cross, in recognizing the necessity for strengthening a sense of racial identity and group solidarity, being aware of a common cause with other oppressed peoples, and desiring to expose and eradicate social inequities and injustices, do hereby establish the Black Student Union of Holy Cross.” Thomas typed up the document and was elected secretary-treasurer.
The B.S.U. also published an eleven-point manifesto, which included these rules:
The Black man must respect the Black woman. The Black man’s woman is the most beautiful of all women.
. . .
The Black man must work with his Black brother.
. . .
The Black man wants. . . the right to perpetuate his race.
. . .
The Black man does not want or need the white woman. The Black man’s history shows that the white woman is the cause of his failure to be the true Black man.
The last rule caused some playful friction in the group. After the B.S.U. learned that a member was dating a white woman, the group convened a mock trial, found him guilty, and broke his Afro comb as a punishment. Thomas took the rule more seriously, particularly after meeting Kathy Ambush, a black woman, whom he would marry in 1971 and divorce in 1984. In a poem he called “Is you is, or is you ain’t, a brother?” he set out the obligations of black men to black women. Even in that milieu, Kevin Merida and Michael Fletcher reported in their 2007 biography, “Supreme Discomfort,” Thomas’s “edgy race consciousness” stood out. When he saw an interracial couple strolling on campus, he’d loudly demand, “Do I see a black woman with a white man? How could that be?” Until 1986, when Thomas met Virginia Lamp, who is white and would become his second wife, he opposed interracial sex and marriage.
It’s not surprising that Thomas and his classmates would affirm their solidarity in gendered terms. “Masculinism,” as the historian Steve Estes has argued, was not uncommon in the black freedom struggle—or, indeed, in many of the movements of the late nineteen-sixties. Militants often framed their demands in the idiom of black male honor, which could be met only by recognition from white men and deference from black women. For them, that was the measure of black freedom. “The black man never will get anybody’s respect until he learns to respect his own women,” Malcolm X wrote in his “Autobiography,” outlining a belief system, from his early years in the Nation of Islam, in which respect for black women would seem to be a means to a more important end.
Thomas read “The Autobiography of Malcolm X” in his first year at Holy Cross. He put up a poster of Malcolm in his dorm room, and he began collecting records of Malcolm’s speeches, which he could still recite from memory two decades later. “I’ve been very partial to Malcolm X,” Thomas said, in 1987. “There is a lot of good in what he says.” On the eve of his appointment to the Supreme Court, Thomas was still summoning Malcolm as a witness for the prosecution against the liberal establishment. “I don’t see how the civil-rights people today can claim Malcolm X as one of their own,” he said. “Where does he say black people should go begging the Labor Department for jobs? He was hell on integrationists. Where does he say you should sacrifice your institutions to be next to white people?”
Earlier this year, he called for reconsideration of New York Times Co. v. Sullivan, from 1964, which established modern libel law, with its protections for journalistic expression. And in a decision earlier this month, Thomas made the case that the Court should be more willing to overturn its precedents. It’s customary for the Justices to at least pretend to defer to past decisions, but Thomas apparently no longer feels obligated even to gesture to the Court’s past. As he put it last fall, in a concurring opinion in 
