To many Americans, Clarence Thomas makes no sense.
[Archive Clip]: One of America's Supreme Court justices is in a major corruption scandal. And you'll never guess who. Okay, it's Clarence Thomas. [Laughter]
Julia Longoria: Today, Clarence Thomas is the most senior justice sitting up there. In five more years, he could become the longest serving justice ever on the Supreme Court. And to some Americans, Clarence Thomas makes no sense. [Archive Clip, Justice Clarence Thomas]: It pains me deeply, or more deeply than any of you can imagine, to be perceived by so many members of my race as doing them harm. All the sacrifice, all the long hours of preparation, were to help not to hurt.
Julia Longoria: Word on the street is you kind of brought Clarence Thomas to the attention of Ronald Reagan. Do we have you to thank for Justice Clarence Thomas, do you think?Juan Williams: I'm a senior news analyst for Fox News Channel, and I formally was a correspondent for the Washington Post, for NPR.
It was December of 1980, and Ronald Reagan had just been elected. Juan was on assignment for the Washington Post to cover something called the Black Alternatives Conference, organized by a conservative think tank. The event attracted Black republicans — who were anomalies at the time — and many disillusioned democrats.Julia Longoria: At lunch he happens to take a seat at the same table as this one guy.Julia Longoria: He wasn’t a headliner or anything.
Juan Williams: She just waits by the mailbox for the mailman, and he found this tragic. Why is his sister in a position where she's just waiting for a welfare check?Juan Williams: I think so, I mean the idea was to try to get him to say more. I mean, It was like, huh, this is fascinating. Why do you say that? Explain it to me. It's not like you just went and talked to the guy who runs the NAACP, this guy's the other side of the tracks here. He's the outsider.
Juan Williams: I had reached out to him afterwards and he shut me down and didn't talk to me. I think it was, you know, close to six months before he agreed to have lunch. Juan Williams: I remember we used to mess around with weights in my basement and it's rare that people ever say this, but physically, Clarence Thomas is built like a football player. He would say he backs off weights at times because he just got too bulky. And for me as a skinny guy, I was like, no, I need to get bulky.
Corey Robin: That for me was really the beginning of the puzzle: how somebody can move from one side of the spectrum to the other without, in some ways, changing very much at all. [Archive Clip, Justice Clarence Thomas]: I always tell my wife my whole life is just one miracle after another because it should have ended tragically.
Juan Williams: He talks with great emotion about, you know, his grandfather doing some kind of farm labor in the back of the house and this white woman driving up. Julia Longoria: His grandfather was just two generations out from slavery and he had high hopes for his grandson. He took Thomas out of all-Black public schools as a kid and put him in a private Catholic School, also all-Black, with a great reputation. But then Thomas moved to a white boarding school to prepare for the seminary to become a priest. There, Thomas was one of the only Black students and became the butt of jokes.
[Archive Clip]: I have some very sad news for all of you. And that is that Martin Luther King was shot and was killed tonight in Memphis. [screams] Julia Longoria: Dropping out of seminary was not part of the plan. His grandfather was so furious he kicked him out of the house. Cut him off financially.
Julia Longoria: And searched for a way to make sense of a cruel world through another Black man, one very different from his grandfather. Julia Longoria: Like walk me through, like what are Malcolm X’s ideas that sort of ring true to Clarence Thomas’ worldview? Julia Longoria: But, as Angela points out, Black Nationalism is complex and there is overlap between Malcolm X and Black conservatism.
And Thomas would ask himself, how could a Black man like his grandfather from the deep South who had survived the worst kind of bigotry possible, refuse to admit that America was tainted, corrupt, and had to be rebuilt from the ground up? Corey Robin: He was wrestling with something that I think the entire Black freedom struggle was wrestling with. Corey Robin: And so in the early or late ’60s and early 1970s, you see a lot of Black power activists at the local level sort of saying, you know, the day of marching and protest is over. We've gotta find other ways. Juan Williams: He goes to Yale Law School.
Julia Longoria: Kind of like the white woman who strut up to Clarence Thomas' grandfather's house and called him “boy.” Juan Williams: The thing that stays with me all these years later about his experience at Yale is that …Juan Williams: … when he went to do interviews for law firms, that all the law firms, he said wanted him to do pro bono work and that we were talking to him about what he could do, in terms of race. And he wanted none of it. He didn't want to be seen as a Black man. He wanted to be seen as a lawyer and a Yale law school graduate.
The confirmation hearing and the allegations against him could fill, and have filled, a whole other series of podcasts.Julia Longoria: Yeah. Julia Longoria: I found that honestly on a personal level, like kind of a rude thing to ask? [laughs]Julia Longoria: What do you make of that kind of question? Like, um, was he a beneficiary, you think, of affirmative action? Julia Longoria: From what we could tell, Thomas was accepted to Yale in 1971 under an affirmative-action program. His graduating class of 1974 had 12 Black people in it.
Stephen Smith: And it was just – it's almost like, you didn't even know you were interviewing. Because I was just sitting there as a young guy, I can't believe I'm in the Supreme Court. Stephen Smith: By and large, people left and right, were completely blind to this. And on the Right, totally blind before I wrote my article. Corey Robin, wrote a book recently on Justice Thomas endorsing the idea that Justice Thomas has a Black nationalist streak.Corey Robin: Apparently I'm a Marxist professor who pretends to understand Clarence Thomas better than his wife. [Julia laughs]
Julia Longoria: After the break, we travel back in time, to the University of Michigan. When Clarence X was in the minority decision. The dissent that could be today’s majority opinion.[RADIO STATIC - MUSIC CHANNELS CHANGING][CHANNELS CHANGING - STATIC DROPS OUT] [Archive Clip, white student]: I think that racial discrimination is wrong. Diversity is about your character and your experiences. It's not about your skin color.
[Archive Clip, Mary Sue Coleman]: We're a highly competitive institution, where we have many, many more students than can possibly be admitted to the university. And I feel sorry when everybody doesn't get in. [Archive Clip]: It's getting much harder to get into a top school and nearly impossible to get into the Ivys today.[Archive Clip]: At Harvard, only 3.4% of all applicants were accepted. [Archive Clip]: Columbia's rate dropped to 3.7%.Corey Robin: … they love that stuff.
Corey Robin: And for Thomas, like, that's what the story of affirmative action is all about, is enhancing the discretionary power of white elites to choose which Black person is gonna sit at the table with them. And, you know, this is to use a, you know, triggering, uh, for him. Um, it reminds him of a, you know, what it was like at Yale Law School. And ultimately I think it makes him think of just the story of white America.
Julia Longoria: Angela would know, she's a law school dean. She says these days, one of the big arguments people make against affirmative action is that these kids who are applying, they might not get into Yale or University of Michigan, but they'll get in somewhere. Julia Longoria: The subtle racism that Clarence Thomas went through at Yale — in a den of Malcolm X foxes — is a fine price to pay.
Julia Longoria: Affirmative action shouldn't be about creating the shiniest brochure with a token hijabi and Black person laughing on a lawn. It should be about righting real wrongs that have been done in our country. Julia Longoria: Digging into Thomas’ decisions, he seems to start with ideas that Malcolm X and many Black people might agree with.
Angela Onwuachi-Willig: I remember reading the Morales opinion and thinking, oh, this is a really interesting angle, because he is asserting things that you hear within African American communities. Julia Longoria: It's honestly kind of surprising to hear you call Justice Thomas an optimist. And I'm trying to think why. It seems like the Black Nationalist perspective is one that kind of takes for granted that white people or Americans — America — will always be racist. And that, I guess, strikes me as a pessimistic worldview.
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