Who's the most attention-riveting member of the Supreme Court? Antonin Scalia has his fans, but for many people it's no contest: the answer is Clarence Thomas.
Thomas's ability to command popular attention has little to do with his judicial philosophy — most Americans don't know what it is — and everything to do with his arresting demeanor and personal history. Triumphing over adversity has rarely taken such dramatic twists and turns.
Now Justice Thomas is the subject of a new biography, Supreme Discomfort (Doubleday). Written by two African-American journalists at The Washington Post, Kevin Merida and Michael A. Fletcher, it's no hatchet job — Merida and Fletcher are serious writers — but neither is the book as even-handed and unbiased as its authors might like to think.
In their telling, this is the story of a conflicted, sensitive man with, in the words of their subtitle, a "divided soul." The division presumably is between Thomas's race and his conservative philosophy. That an intelligent African-American might come naturally by a conservative view of the world seems not to occur to them. (Thomas's religion — he's a practicing Roman Catholic — is discussed extensively, but at a superficial level.)
Born in poverty in Georgia, raised by a grandfather who practiced tough love, educated in Catholic schools, Holy Cross College, and Yale law school, Thomas rose rapidly in government service, holding posts like chairman of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and a federal judgeship.
President George H.W. Bush named him to the Supreme Court in 1991. Thereupon followed the famous — or infamous — Anita Hill episode during which a former employee accused him of sexual harassment. As recounted here, it's a classic he-said, she-said story, with key facts probably forever in dispute.
For Merida and Fletcher, however, as for Thomas's black critics generally, the heart of the problem he represents is his opposition to race-based affirmative action. Blacks should be for it, the authors make clear, and Thomas deserves much blame for being opposed.
Cited approvingly in this context is the audacious claim made, by African-American historian Henry Louis Gates, Jr., that affirmative action is the contemporary equivalent of the Emancipation Proclamation. If that's so, of course, then obviously no right-thinking African-American — indeed, no right-thinking American of any race — can possibly be opposed.
Thomas's reply is, in effect, that affirmative action is a mistake because it demeans the achievements of blacks. What is accomplished by hard work and ability gets attributed to preferential treatment based on race. Whether that strikes you as right or wrong, it's scarcely a trivial point. As with many complex issues, there's probably truth on both sides of the argument. The Supreme Court itself is still seeking the correct balance in the question.
But Thomas's critics aren't having any part of that — and this ultimately is the biggest flaw in Supreme Discomfort. Merida and Fletcher stack the deck against their man, basing their critique on the debatable assumption that his stand on the fundamental issue raised about him is unacceptable on its face. That's called begging the question. If Clarence Thomas hasn't proved his case on affirmative action, neither have critics like the authors of this biography proved theirs.
Merida and Fletcher talked to hundreds of people in preparing this study. Not all of them know much about Thomas, although they get quoted anyway. But Thomas himself refused to be interviewed. The media are "malicious," he explained. This shunning of the media is offered as evidence of his paranoia, but although Merida and Fletcher aren't malicious — most journalists aren't — Thomas was right about some.
