The Enigma of Clarence Thomas
(Metropolitan, $30) Clarence Thomas is “a baffling figure,” said Michael O’Donnell in The Atlantic. Famously mute in the courtroom, he is also the Supreme Court’s most ebullient member in the justices’ chambers. Famously angered by the racism he’s experienced, he has spent his three decades on the court opposing policies designed to reduce discrimination. Now comes a book by a liberal political science professor attempting to decode the conservative justice’s jurisprudence, and its bold argument, at first glance, “seems almost as offensive as the Uncle Tom slurs that Thomas regularly faces.” Author
Corey Robin labels Thomas’ legal philosophy “a bitter mix of right-wing revanchism and black nationalism”; he even suggests that Thomas would like to restore something of the social order of the Jim Crow era. Surprisingly, the case he constructs “carries the uncomfortable ring of truth.”
“Let’s start with the good,” said
Theodore Kupfer in the National Review. Robin, a contributing editor to the socialist magazine Jacobin, is “the rare left-wing observer who takes Thomas’ political and legal mind seriously.” Rejecting the common suggestion that the justice’s silence during oral arguments is evidence that he doesn’t think for himself, Robin stresses how often Thomas has gone his own way in his written opinions and how often those opinions reflect an interest in black self-reliance that Thomas has cultivated since his 1960s