![]() In his provocative new book, The Enigma of Clarence Thomas, Corey Robin, a political scientist at Brooklyn College and the Graduate Center at the City University of New York, seeks to answer this vexing question. Read: Clarence Thomas’s unusual evolution Yet how can a black man make such a commitment when the Founders wrote slavery into the Constitution’s very text? He is the Supreme Court’s foremost originalist-that is, he purports to interpret the Constitution as the Founders understood it in 1789. Thomas’s most uncomfortable contradiction, though, rests on an abstraction. A former black activist and onetime follower of Malcolm X, he champions a criminal-justice system suffused with racism, and has rejected claims of cruel and unusual punishment made by prisoners. He disfavors integration and even seems to resist desegregation. The nation’s second African-American Supreme Court justice and the successor to Thurgood Marshall, Thomas opposes most policies that seek to combat discrimination or help minorities. Yet such are the contradictions of Clarence Thomas. Revanchist politics and a list of enemies to rival Arya Stark’s: These things do not pair naturally with bonhomie at the office. Thomas has since nursed a long list of grievances, vowing to “outlive” his critics and writing in his 2007 memoir, My Grandfather’s Son, about a host of antagonists: “posturing zealots,” “sanctimonious whites,” and-of Hill-“my most traitorous adversary.” By all accounts, including his own, the experience nearly destroyed him-not to mention what it did to Anita Hill, who accused him of sexual harassment. He also endured the most searing confirmation battle of any modern American public servant, an ordeal that put race, sex, and power in the national spotlight. That won’t happen: Unwilling to compromise and often unable to attract the vote of a single colleague, Thomas frequently writes only for himself. He advances a reactionary legal philosophy that would take America back to the 1930s. Thomas is by far the most conservative justice on a very conservative Court. This buoyancy marks a man whose career as a judge is a study in brutalism. As the legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin wrote in 2007, with his “effusive good nature,” Thomas is “universally adored.” Thomas’s booming laugh fills the corridors. ![]() He makes fast friends at work, at ball games, and at car races, and invites people to his chambers, where the conversations last for hours. Unlike most of his colleagues, he learns everyone’s name, from the janitors to each justice’s law clerks. Surprisingly, given his uncompromising public persona and his near-total silence during oral arguments, Thomas cultivates a jovial presence in the building’s austere marble hallways. The first thing to know about Clarence Thomas is that everybody at the Supreme Court loves him. Illustration: Paul Spella Diana Walker / The Life Images Collection / Getty Eddie Adams / AP
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