Thomas: an embarrassment to the Court and his race

Let’s face it: Only pathological self-loathing explains this:

Justice Clarence Thomas recently hired a law clerk who was previously accused of sending racist text messages. … In late 2017, a New Yorker story reported that Ms. [Crystal] Clanton, who had served for five years as the national field director at Turning Point USA, a conservative student group, had sent the text messages, including the statement “i hate black people.”…

The justice has called the allegations against Ms. Clanton unfounded and said that he does not believe her to be racist.

(The New York Times, February 24, 2024)

Frankly, it’s arguable that Clanton’s racist statement is why Thomas hired her. After all, this is the same Thomas who wants the world to know that his best friend is a White billionaire who collects Nazi memorabilia. 

But I suspect, like most Republican hacks these days, he’s merely following Trump’s scandal playbook: deny, deflect, repeat. After all, while wallowing in self-loathing, Thomas was getting up to his neck in scandal. 

ProPublica recently won a prestigious Polk Award in journalism for its exposé on the millions Thomas accepted in bribes disguised as gifts from his billionaire “friend.” Those reports so blackened the reputation of the Supreme Court that the chief justice introduced new ethics rules.

For over two centuries, more than 110 White justices conducted themselves so judiciously that implementing ethics rules seemed unnecessary. However, this second Black justice has behaved so injudiciously over the past 30 years that public outrage has compelled the Court to introduce ethics rules for the first time in its history. 

Admittedly, compliance is voluntary. But the scandal that made those rules necessary is such that Thomas clearly wants to deflect media coverage. And doubling down on his abiding self-loathing is bound to overshadow his scandal. 

‘Roots’ is fiction to Thomas

I have written many commentaries denouncing Thomas for spending his tenure on the Court – not just disowning his Black roots but channeling White racists. Telling titles include the following:

• “Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas Speaks…?” on October 1, 2007
• “Justice Thomas Would Ban Same-Sex Marriage, Contraceptives, Even His Own Interracial Marriage…” on July 14, 2022
• “Supreme Court Ends Affirmative Action, Continuing Thomas’s Personal Vendetta” on June 29, 2023
• “Justice Clarence Thomas Accepted Luxury Trips from GOP Donor Who Collects Nazi Memorabilia” on April 9, 2023

Yet, no published work betrays Thomas’s self-loathing more starkly than his memoir, My Grandfather’s Son, and his biopic, Created Equal. Both paint a picture of a self-made man who disdainfully rejects the mechanisms that propelled his success. 

Indeed, his scholarship to an all-white prep school, law degree from Yale, and Supreme Court nomination make Thomas a veritable poster boy for affirmative action. Yet, the more he benefited from affirmative action, the more he denounced it.

And let’s not forget the White billionaires courting him like a kept woman. Frankly, that’s just a perverse and hypocritical form of affirmative action. 

Thomas’s 1992 nomination: Still fueling his hatred of Blacks

Thomas has denounced his 1992 nomination hearing as not just a spectacle but a “high-tech lynching.” Arguably, it was a transformative humiliation that set him on a tenured path of revenge. 

For example, Thomas has wielded his judicial power like a hammer on voting rights and affirmative action. In doing so, he has willfully smashed policies he benefited from and aided the community he hailed from.

It appears his congressional hearing merely reinforced deep-seated childhood feelings of racial inferiority and resentment. Alas, Thomas has compensated for these feelings by adopting the racist attitudes of the Whites he felt were his superiors. 

The unwitting result is that no White racist can be more racist than the self-hating Black Thomas. That alone explains why he feels perverse camaraderie in hiring a White clerk who proudly proclaimed, “I hate Black people.”

Thomas’s judicial wrath knows no bounds

Each Supreme Court justice hires 3 to 4 clerks each year from among thousands of law school graduates who apply for these prestigious and career-setting jobs. Thomas has hired over 120 during his tenure. 

Yet, you’d be hard-pressed to find a single Black among Thomas’s former clerks. On the other hand, it speaks volumes that 10 of them have played key roles in crafting the racist rhetoric and championing the racist policies of former president Donald Trump.

Indeed, one of them, John Eastman, is facing criminal charges and disbarment for conspiring with Trump to disrupt the peaceful transfer of presidential power. Apropos of which, I’d be remiss not to mention that Thomas’s wife is also implicated in this conspiracy. And perhaps it goes without saying that she’s a White woman too.

This brings me back to Ms. Clanton. Because I cannot overstate the racial insult inherent in Thomas hiring a clerk who declared, “I hate black people.” And this is no oversight. It’s just the latest thumb in the eye of a community Thomas believes betrayed him.

But this hiring alone makes a mockery of the theme of his biopic, Created Equal. And it betrays that his professional motivations are steeped not in justice but in deep-rooted personal grievances.

Meanwhile, Thomas is the first justice in modern times to hire a clerk with such blatant hatred for Black people. But that fateful irony seems completely lost on him. He couldn’t care less that this hiring will stain his legacy even more than his ethical lapses will. 

There’s a special place in hell for minorities who, after getting a hand up the ladder, pull it up behind them. That’s where Thomas is headed. He’s arguably the most pathetic and tragic figure in the annals of American judicial history.