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 �lite,
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 �lite 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.

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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?�

In college, Thomas believed that the Black Panthers, one of the many
groups to claim Malcolm�s mantle, offered �another way.� With their
guidance, he helped organize a free breakfast program in Worcester,
serving daily meals out of a church to about fifty poor children. He
championed the Black Panther leader Kathleen Cleaver and the Communist
Party member Angela Davis, who were in flight from the American
government because of radical involvements and allegations of criminal
activity. When he was asked at his confirmation hearings what he majored
in, Thomas said, �English literature.� When he was asked what he minored
in, he said, �protest.� His first trip to Washington was to march on the
Pentagon and against the Vietnam War. The last rally he attended, in
Cambridge�one of the most violent in the city�s history, in which two
thousand cops assaulted three thousand protesters�was to demand the
release of the Black Panther co-founder Bobby Seale and the Panther
leader Ericka Huggins. �I was never a liberal,� he said at a talk in
1996. �I was a radical.� Even in his memoir, Thomas refuses to mock the
cause. �The more I read about the black power movement,� he writes, �the
more I wanted to be a part of it.�

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. �You had
to prove yourself every day because the presumption was that you were
dumb and didn�t deserve to be there,� he told the Washington Post. �Every
time you walked into a law class at Yale it was like having a monkey jump
down on your back from the Gothic arches.� In the South, even at Holy
Cross, Thomas thought that he could force his way into the meritocracy by
the power of his intelligence and will. At Yale, his accomplishments felt
divested of their authorship. �As much as it had stung to be told I�d
done well in [high school] despite my race,� he later wrote, �it was far
worse to feel that I was now at Yale because of it.�

At Yale, Thomas developed an understanding of racism that he would never
shake. Whites�Southern and Northern, liberal and conservative, rural and
urban�are racists. Racism, Thomas would tell students at Mercer
University, in 1993, �has complex and, to a certain degree,
undiscoverable roots.� Not knowing its beginnings, we can�t know its end.
The most that can be hoped for is that whites be honest about it. Honesty
is demonstrated through crude statements of personal animus or
intellectual suggestions of racial inequality. Dishonesty is demonstrated
through denial of one�s racism and sympathetic extensions of help.
Dishonesty lulls black people into a false sense of security, assuring
them that they are safe when they are not. One of Thomas�s favorite songs
is the 1971 hit �Smiling Faces Sometimes,� by the Undisputed Truth. Its
classic lyric��Smiling faces, smiling faces tell lies��resonates with his
experience of Northern white liberals. Among the virtues of the Reagan
Administration, he has said, was the fact that no one there was �smiling
in your face.�

In making sincerity the litmus test of American racism, Thomas took a
strand of the black nationalism that influenced his early development and
wove it into an entire philosophy of race. In the nineteen-twenties, at
an especially acute moment of racist reaction in the United States,
Marcus Garvey also found comfort in the promise of candor. �They are
better friends to my race for telling us what they are, and what they
mean, than all the hypocrites put together,� Garvey said, of the Ku Klux
Klan. �I like honesty and fair play.�

For Thomas, dishonesty was not only about race; it was also about class.
However well intentioned white liberals were about remedying racial
inequality, their �litism was steadfast. At Yale, some of Thomas�s
classmates would query the absence of class rankings and grades. �You do
not separate cream from cream,� a professor responded. �It is your fate
as a Yale Law School student to become one of the leaders in the legal
profession. It will happen, not because of you personally, but because
you are here. That is what happens to Yale Law School students.� But
Yale�s black students were separated from the cream; indeed, the absence
of rankings was used to effect that separation. As he approached
graduation, Thomas tried to secure a position at an �lite law firm in
Atlanta, which had no black associates. One of the marks against him was
that he had no grades. Even if he came from Yale, how could his
prospective employers know how good he was?

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 �Native Son,� 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.
The idea that black people can advance only with the help of whites is
anathema to Clarence Thomas, who has identified with Wright�s protagonist
throughout his life. For him, white benevolence denies black people the
pride of achievement. By contrast, if one is black and overcomes the
barriers of Jim Crow, one can be assured that the accomplishment is real.
Thomas often invokes the example of his grandparents, who, despite
segregation, managed to acquire property and support their family. Though
they �had to work twice as hard to get half as far,� they knew, however
far they got, that the distance was theirs. When black people succeed in
the shadow of white benefactors, that certainty is lost.

This is the loss that Thomas has suffered since his youth: not of the
color line but of its clarity. It�s a loss that he associates with
liberalism, the North, and, above all, integration. �I never worshiped at
the altar� of integration, he declared, five years after joining the
Court. As he told Juan Williams, who wrote a profile of Thomas in The
Atlantic, �The whole push to assimilate simply does not make sense to
me.� It is a loss that Thomas has set out�from his early years as a young
black nationalist on the left to his tenure as a conservative on the
Court�to reverse.

Thomas�s rightward drift, which began in the seventies, was inflected by
the very ethos that once put him on the left: namely, disaffection with
black liberalism and the mainstream civil-rights movement. In his memoir,
Thomas notes that part of the appeal of black nationalism was tied to his
sense, in the wake of the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr., and
Robert F. Kennedy, that �no one was going to take care of me or any other
black person in America.� Eventually, this notion extended to the left.
�I marched. I protested. I asked the government to help black people,�
Thomas told the Washington Post, in 1980. �I did all those things. But it
hasn�t worked.� The whole repertoire of black politics�from mainstream
activism to Black Power radicalism and beyond�now seemed pointless. By
the eighties, Thomas, a member of the Reagan Administration, believed
that state action could do nothing for African-Americans. Problems of
racial inequality �cannot be solved by the law�even civil-rights laws,�
he told an audience at Clark College, a historically black school in
Atlanta, in the nineteen-eighties.

And yet it was on the bench that Thomas began to pursue his own
particular vision of racial justice. In his first decade on the Court,
Thomas often met with high-achieving black students from Washington�s
poorer neighborhoods. One meeting�with a high-school student named Cedric
Jennings�was immortalized in a 1998 Esquire piece. After several hours of
warm conversation, Thomas asked Jennings what his plans were for college.
�I�m off to Brown,� Jennings replied. Thomas frowned. Finally, he said,
�Well, that�s fine, but I�m not sure I would have selected an Ivy League
school. You�re going to be up there with lots of very smart white kids,
and if you�re not sure about who you are, you could get eaten alive. . .
.. It can happen at any of the good colleges where a young black man who
hasn�t spent much time with whites suddenly finds himself among almost
all whites.�

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 (published with an acknowledgment to �the
invaluable assistance of Anita F. Hill�), Thomas notes pointedly that �it
must be decided . . . whether integration per se should be a primary
goal.� At Thomas�s confirmation hearings, the Republican senator Arlen
Specter pressed him on that claim, asking, �If you end segregation,
doesn�t it necessarily mean that you are requiring school integration?�

At the time, Thomas dodged the question, but he has since given his
answer on the Court. In the 1995 case Missouri v. Jenkins, the Court�s
conservative majority held that federal courts could not force Missouri
to adopt policies designed to entice suburban white students to
predominantly black urban schools. Thomas joined the majority. In the
Court�s private deliberations about the case, he argued, in the
paraphrase of a profile of Thomas in The New Yorker, �I am the only one
at this table who attended a segregated school. And the problem with
segregation was not that we didn�t have white people in our class. The
problem was that we didn�t have equal facilities. We didn�t have heating,
we didn�t have books, and we had rickety chairs. . . . All my classmates
and I wanted was the choice to attend a mostly black or a mostly white
school, and to have the same resources in whatever school we chose.�

This private sentiment made its way into Thomas�s public statement about
the case. His concurrence in Missouri v. Jenkins was �the only opinion,�
legal scholar Mark Graber argues, �that questioned whether desegregation
was a constitutional value.� If anything, Thomas believes that the state
should�where it can, within the law�support the separation of the races.
Looking back on his education, in an all-black environment, Thomas has
admitted to wanting to �turn back the clock� to a time �when we had our
own schools.� Much of his jurisprudence is devoted to undoing the �grand
experiment� of which he believes himself to be a victim. As he made clear
in 1986, �I have been the guinea pig for many social experiments on
social minorities. To all who would continue these experiments, I say
please �no more.� �

Perhaps the most insidious of those experiments, for Thomas, is
affirmative action, which he has long opposed. His critics call him a
hypocrite. �He had all the advantages of affirmative action and went
against it,� Rosa Parks said of Thomas, in 1996. His defenders believe
that Thomas is advancing a common conservative line�that affirmative
action is a form of reverse racism, which imposes illegitimate burdens on
whites. In fact, Thomas�s arguments are considerably more unorthodox than
that. According to Thomas, affirmative action is the most recent attempt
by white people to brand and belittle black people as inferior.
Affirmative action does not formally mirror the tools of white supremacy;
for Thomas, it is the literal continuation of white supremacy.

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.� When the state and social institutions identify
African-Americans as beings in need of help, they reinforce that stigma.
It doesn�t matter if some African-Americans succeed without affirmative
action. In the same way that enslavement marked all black people, free or
slave, as inferior, affirmative action�here Thomas borrows directly from
the language of Plessy v. Ferguson�stamps all African-Americans with �a
badge of inferiority.�

The second way affirmative action continues white supremacy is by
elevating whites to the status of benefactors, doling out scarce
privileges to those black people they deem worthy. The most remarkable
element of Thomas�s affirmative-action jurisprudence, and what makes it
unlike that of any other Justice on the Supreme Court, is how much
attention he devotes to whites, not as victims but as perpetrators, the
lead actors in a racial drama of their own imagination. Put simply,
Thomas believes that affirmative action is a white program for white
people.

We see this argument in Grutter v. Bollinger, a 2003 affirmative-action
case concerning the University of Michigan Law School. In the early
nineteen-nineties, the school adopted an affirmative-action policy in
order to create a more diverse student body. Barbara Grutter, a white
applicant who was denied admission, alleged that she was a victim of
racial discrimination and that the policy violated the Fourteenth
Amendment. In a 5�4 ruling, the Court decided that because the policy
involved �a narrowly tailored use of race,� with a candidate�s race
weighed as only one factor among many, the program was not
unconstitutional. Chief Justice William Rehnquist dissented, arguing that
there was nothing narrow or tailored about the program; it was more like
a quota, he wrote, �designed to ensure proportionate representation . . .
from selected minority groups.�

Thomas also dissented in Grutter. But his dissent focussed, uniquely, not
on Grutter or other putative white victims but on what the law school�s
affirmative-action program revealed about its creators. The leading
interest of the school, he wrote, was to be �elite.� Affirmative action
reflected that �litism. The simplest, most effective way for the Law
School to diversify itself would be to become less selective. It could
accept anyone who completed a certified program. It could stop relying on
the LSAT, which, Thomas insisted and the Law School admitted, is an
�imperfect� diagnostic tool. But the school refused to adopt such
inclusive measures, not because it was committed to meritocracy�policies
such as �legacy preferences� proved otherwise�but because exclusivity was
its central objective.

For Thomas, affirmative action is merely a �solution to the self-
inflicted wounds of [an] elitist admissions policy.� If a school insists
upon maintaining �an exclusionary admissions system that it knows
produces racially disproportionate results,� the only way to diversify
itself is to rely on measures that maximize its discretion regarding
race. Affirmative action, then, is not about racial equality; it�s about
preserving the prerogatives of white �lites, allowing them to bestow the
blessings of society upon a few lucky African-Americans. Thomas does not
believe this to be a constitutional value, much less one the Court should
honor.

Much of Thomas�s skepticism flows from his rejection of diversity writ
large. The key argument for affirmative action�and the grounds for the
Court�s landmark 1978 decision in University of California v. Bakke,
which declared the policy constitutional�is that diversity has an
educational benefit: students will be exposed to different views and
voices, which will challenge their beliefs. Thomas doesn�t quite buy
this. If it were truly the case that diversity is a critical educational
good, he thinks, �lite institutions would stop prizing selectivity. The
fact that they don�t suggests that the benefit argument is a ruse. What
these institutions really believe is that diversity �prepares . . .
students to become leaders in a diverse society.� It burnishes the style,
image, and credentials of those students, mostly white, who will go on to
run American society. Diversity, in other words, does not benefit
students academically, or even produce diverse leadership; it just helps
beautify �classroom aesthetics,� which are critical to the self-image of
the ruling class. (�Racial aesthetics� and �aestheticists� are words that
recur throughout Thomas�s opinions.) Diversity, as a value, is how white
�lites signal to other �lites their sophistication, fashion, and taste.
It marks black people as victims and whites as saviors.

In keeping with his conservative black nationalism, Thomas sees in such
integration real harm to black people. In 1995, after a lower court
argued that �racial isolation� in education�that is, continuing
segregation of black and white schools, without formal state
compulsion�was a constitutional injury to black schoolchildren, Thomas
took offense. �If separation itself is a harm,� he wrote, �and if
integration therefore is the only way that blacks can receive a proper
education, then there must be something inferior about blacks.� For
Thomas, seemingly egalitarian policies like integration thus become
evidence of racial paternalism. His argument echoes that of Stokely
Carmichael and Charles Hamilton�s �Black Power.� Integration, Carmichael
and Hamilton wrote, �reinforces, among both black and white, the idea
that �white� is automatically superior and �black� is by definition
inferior. For this reason, �integration� is a subterfuge for the
maintenance of white supremacy.�

In 1992, in one of his first opinions on the Court, Thomas wrote,
�Conscious and unconscious prejudice persists in our society. Common
experience and common sense confirm this understanding.� Ten years into
his tenure, he was still affirming that idea. �If society cannot end
racial discrimination,� he wrote in a concurrence, �at least it can arm
minorities with the education to defend themselves from some of
discrimination�s effects.� That �if� flies by so quickly that the reader
may not notice what Thomas is doing. Rather than setting up a
conditional, he is presenting the inability to end racism as the
condition of American society.

In this sense, the story of Clarence Thomas is the story of the last
half-century of American politics. It is a story of defeat, not only of
the civil-rights movement and the promise of black freedom but of a
larger vision of democratic transformation, in which men and women act
collectively to alter their estate. The citizens of the freedom struggle
believed that society was made, and could be remade, through politics.
Many of their successors, including Thomas, no longer believe that kind
of change is possible. A deep and abiding pessimism now pervades our
politics, transcending the divisions of right and left. Clarence Thomas,
the most extreme Justice on the Supreme Court, turns out also to be the
most emblematic. Should he remain on the bench for another nine years, he
will be the longest-serving Justice in American history.

This piece was drawn from �The Enigma of Clarence Thomas,� which is out
this month, from Metropolitan Books.