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Simon Donoghue's Reviews > The Enigma of Clarence Thomas

The Enigma of Clarence Thomas
by 

Corey Robin

The book succeeds when it carefully analyzes Thomas' legal opinions. He does not emerge as a black nationalist, since Robin never is able to offer a coherent definition as to what that means in the 21st century. Citing everyone from Booker T. Washington to Malcolm X, Marcus Garvey to Thomas Sowell only muddies the definition. Thomas has been a conservative for most of his public career. Robin tries to make the case that Thomas is that way because of his grandfather's strict parenting, and there may be something to the proposition. Certainly Thomas invokes his grandfather's lessons often during speeches and opinions. That being said, it seems less a matter of juridical conservatism --- even Scalia was too liberal for Clarence Thomas --- than a "get off my lawn!" temperament. There are also logistical problems inherent in the Thomas world view attributed to him by Robin. How exactly are black people to live separately from the rest of the nation without a de jure as well as de facto segregation? Thomas' attitudes are incoherent, which is not to say that he doesn't hold them. The evidence is in his decisions and dissents. In Robin's listing of those, Thomas seems to be closest to Thomas Jefferson among the Founding Fathers. He is given to messy pronouncements that get a bit sticky when you parse them. An enjoyable read save for the psychoanalysis. That only starts to get interesting when Robin examines Thomas' misogyny. Thomas dismisses his sister, who is an hourly wage earner, as a "good woman" who has not made the most of herself. He and his brothers have. It never seems to have occurred to Justice Thomas that the patriarchy was at least as important to his grandfather as his race. But in the end Robin is defeated by the most silent member of the Roberts Court in terms of understand why he ticks the way he does. But it is hard to argue with Robin's understanding of Thomas a jurist.