The Two Clarence Thomases
One of my contentions in the book on Clarence Thomas I’m writing is that while Thomas was championed during his Senate hearings as a man of the South—the Pin Point strategy, they called it—he is in fact very much a product of the North. Specifically, a North that gave lip service to racial equality, that deemed racism a southern problem, but that was either exploding with raw hatred and bigotry or hiding that racism beneath a veneer of liberal do-good-ism.
Re-reading several books about Thomas’s time at Holy Cross, where he was an undergraduate in the late 1960s and early 1970s, you get a strong sense of this, not just from Thomas but also from his black classmates and close friends, men like Edward P. Jones, who would go onto write The Known World, which won the Pulitzer Prize.
You also get an eerie sense of premonition: the problems Thomas and his friends encountered at a relatively elite, predominantly white northern university in 1968— invisibility, condescension, marginalization, well-meaning but often clumsy overtures from administrators, professors, and students—sound almost identical to the problems students of color on elite campuses describe today.
On a different note, Thomas was the Court’s conservative pathbreaker in three critical areas of jurisprudence: campaign finance and the 1st Amendment, gun rights and the Second Amendment, and national regulation and the Commerce Clause. Three cases—Citizens United, District of Columbia v. Heller, and National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius (the Obamacare case)—were, essentially, his babies. Even though he didn’t author the opinions, he was the intellectual godfather, the most right-wing justice, who lay down the markers that pushed the Court to these extremes. As Jeffrey Toobin writes of Citizens United, “the opinion was Kennedy’s, but the victory was Thomas’s.”
The point of this book: to bring the first Clarence Thomas, who speaks a lingua franca that is so familiar to liberals, and the second Clarence Thomas, who speaks a lingua franca that is so familiar to conservatives, together. They are one.