The Supreme Court decides on and interprets material related to the five core tenets of American political development: identity, ideas, institutions, state capacity and history (Mettler et al, 2016). Furthermore, the Supreme Court is upending years of precedent on race-conscious admissions, same-sex marriage and national protections on abortion, which disrupted previous constitutional understandings and reopened patterns of discourse about federalist powers, dignity, identity and power. Justice Clarence Thomas is at the heart of this disruption.

The Supreme Court, with an ultraconservative majority, reversed affirmative action by overturning Grutter v Bollinger and national protections on abortion through Roe v Wade. The Supreme Court is the highest judicial branch in the United States, and arguably the most powerful court in the world. Therefore, the legal decisions passed down over time, ranging from Dred Scott v Sandford to Brown v Board, elucidate the temporal variabilities in power over time related to institutions, identity, state capacity and history.

Thomas is the longest-serving member of the Supreme Court, and since 2011, the majority of opinions from the court have moved in the same direction as his views. Yet, despite this influence on the bench, Thomas “remains more of an enigma than any other Supreme Court nominee in recent history” (Robin, 3, 2020). Corey Robin tells readers that he wrote Enigma to translate [Thomas’s opinions] …by removing them from their legal context to [unpack them] in a larger world (Robin, 13, 2020). Robin adjusts the lens through which we view Clarence Thomas by making the invisible justice visible [and exposing] a secret hidden in plain sight: Clarence Thomas is a Black nationalist whose conservative jurisprudence rotates around an axis of Black interest and concerns (Robin, 8, 2020).

Robin tells Thomas’s “life story using those three central elements of his jurisprudence: race, capitalism and the Constitution” (Robin, 19, 2020). This review uses the three central elements of Thomas’s jurisprudence to summarise and engage with Enigma. Robin’s bold thesis, that “Clarence Thomas is a Black nationalist,” undergirds his message that Thomas’s jurisprudence and nationalism, although “from an enemy…is a vision we share” (Robin, 221. 2020). Despite framing Thomas as a deeply unsettling voice, Robin encourages readers to take Thomas seriously because his views are “distinctly American… and [represent] the anxious aspiration and curdled disappointment of America’s competing traditions for egalitarian ideals (Robin, 219, 2020).

Race

To White Americans, Thomas is deeply unsettling because he is reminiscent of racial rupture and Black Power movements. To many Black Americans, he is a sell-out. The National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People opposed his nomination in 1991, and Anita Hill, Toni Morrison and his sister, Emma Mae, revealed his unscrupulous nature, middle-class upbringing and reactionary politics to Congress (Hooks et al., 1991). To Black and White people alike, Thomas has a distinctly polarising aura. To humanise a loathed figure, Robin begins Enigma with Thomas as a child from the South. He was one of the first pupils to attend integrated schools post-Brown v Board ruling, and his educational background is apparently crucial to unpacking his Black nationalism.

Young Thomas moved from Georgia to Boston to attend Holy Cross, where he was called a racial slur for the first time. This encounter was a lesson and belief that Thomas took to the Supreme Court: racial sincerity in the South was much higher than in the North. According to Thomas, “in Georgia, race was scarcely discussed” and only became politically salient in Boston (Robin, 25, 2020). Robin interjects with scepticism of Thomas’s claim that the first time a racial slur was hurled at him was in Boston. To Robin, Thomas has an “idyll of the South” and perhaps was not called slurs in the South but at the very least heard the word. In response to ostensibly distinct northern racism, Thomas joined the Black Student Union at Holy Cross and read the works of Malcolm X, Marcus Garvey and Eldridge Cleaver, which informs his jurisprudence.

To Robin, these thinkers introduced the core features of Black nationalism to Thomas, which remain today, including “self-sufficiency, separatism, Black manhood and self-defence” (Robin, 6, 2020). As such, Thomas is vehemently anti-integration in any social form outside the economic marketplace, including affirmative action, state involvement or “liberal activism”. Thomas has never “worshipped the altar of integration”, and despite benefiting from affirmative action, he believes that “bringing the races together repeats the longstanding problem of American history” (Robin, 79, 2020). Thomas, obviously recalling his experiences at Holy Cross, believes that “Black people suffer the most from integration” and should thus find their way independent of the state and liberal institutions (Robin, 79, 2020).

Yet, also, according to Thomas, “there is nothing you can do to get past Black skin; no matter how good you are, you’ll never be seen as equal to Whites” (Robin, 3, 2020). To Thomas, blackness is something that needs to be overcome, which reeks of an internalisation of the very system he claims to protest. Additionally, Thomas warns Black people of careers in the Government and politics because they have “no control in those spheres”; instead, he encourages Black men to favour economic development because capitalism and financial power are the only modes where they can find liberation and freedom (Robin, 106, 2020).

Capitalism

Inspired by Thomas Sowell, Malcolm X and other Black Power activists, Thomas’s jurisprudence reflects the belief that “state involvement in the economy harms [Black] people” because the state, although a necessary instrument for slavery, Jim Crow and racial separation, cannot fix the race problems it institutionally mandates, and thus must not try. Most of Thomas’s views are founded and developed exclusively from his experiences. For example, his orientation towards the entrepreneurial market as salvation comes from Anderson, his father figure. Anderson quit his job after a White man questioned his presence on a job site and, by extension, his manhood by asking, “What are you doing, boy?” (Robin, 99, 2020). Anderson, with his “dignity disputed”, vowed never to work for a White man again (Ewing, 2023). After opening up a small business, his manhood was reaffirmed because the company was his, and his only, protected from interference from other White men and the state (Robin, 99, 2020). To young Clarence Thomas, Anderson’s move was illogical. As a Supreme Court nominee, Thomas understood and used Anderson’s story to exemplify Black self-sufficiency and manhood.

As a Supreme Court justice, Thomas has wielded his power to thrust this Black nationalism on to other Black people, White people, and even the Constitution. His jurisprudence, which Robin describes as “against politics”, is a plea for Blacks to favour entrepreneurial and commercial activity over political power by minimising “the power of voting” and invoking the long memory of violence against Blacks by the state to show that the “state is unable to improve the lives” of Blacks by reducing legislative tools (Robin, 104, 2020). As Robin argues, even Thomas’s “deflation of politics” in favour of commercial activity is political, underscoring Thomas’s often erratic yet consistently self-serving positions. For example, unlike his colleagues in McConnell v Federal, and Buckley v Valeo and Citizens United, Thomas pressed “the notion that commercial speech is like political speech, and [perhaps] is better thought of as political” (Robin, 140, 219). To Thomas, politics happens in the market for “men of money” who are equal competitors, evaluated for productivity and competence, unlike politics, which depends on the charity of Whites to validate Blacks (Robin, 144, 2020).

Constitution

The final element of Thomas’s jurisprudence is his constitutional interpretations, which Robin argues are twofold: a Black constitution and a White one. The White constitution “empowers the policing and punishment elements of the state as a means to an end” (Robin, 219, 2020). The Black constitution is split and includes Blacks who “will themselves to become patriarchs” and those who waste life in the absence of a patriarch” (Robin, 193, 2020). Both constitutions are made for men to earn their rights and for women to benefit through exclusively nuclear family structures. Thomas’s positions are made clear through his dissent on gender and sex-based causes in cases such as Obergefell v Hodges, and secondarily, in statements like “the salvation of Blacks depends on the will of Black men” (Robin, 156, 2020).

Here, Thomas may be alluding to the “will of Black men” becoming politically salient because it has been lacking or absent, as in the case of his biological father (Robin, 156, 2020). Thomas’s biography resembles an authentic Black male chauvinist, yet Robins argues that reducing Thomas’s two constitutions to a biographical account is a mistake. However, Thomas’s resentment spilt on to his jurisprudence in Brumfield v Cain, where he wrote that “unlike Brumfield, Dunn did not use the absence of a father figure as a justification for murder” (Robin, 193, 2020). Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito removed themselves from this part of Thomas’s opinion, writing that “[Thomas’s opinion] will serve a beneficial purpose if widely read, but [is not] essential to any legal analysis'” (Robin, 193, 2020).

This concerted effort from Alito and Roberts to remove themselves from Thomas’s statement underscores Enigma’s message: Clarence Thomas has an ideology that has never been on the Supreme Court, a presence that disturbs and an influence that, if ever to be undone or reckoned with, must first be understood.

• Tierrai Tull is the founder of Bermuda Youth Connect, studying at Oxford in the Department of Politics and International Relations on the Rhodes Scholarship

Works cited:

Connor M. Dignity Disputed. Journal of Law and Courts 11, no. 2 (2023): 370–88. https://doi.org/10.1017/jlc.2022.18.

Hooks, Benjamin L., NAACP, and Julian Bond. The NAACP Position on Clarence Thomas. The Black Scholar 22, no. 1/2 (1991): 144–50. http://www.jstor.org/stable/41067770.

Robin, Corey. Enigma of Clarence Thomas. New York, NY: Metropolitan Books, Henry Holt and Company, 2020.

Suzanne Mettler & Richard Vallely. Introduction: The Distinctiveness and Necessity of American Political Development (2016)