By On The Media, November 8, 2019
Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas is hardly the quietest member of the bench. In hundreds of opinions authored during his tenure — longer than any of his present colleagues’ — Thomas has elaborated upon a vision first instilled in him by a stern, business-minded grandfather and later cemented during a turbulent undergraduate education, spent protesting racial injustice, debating black nationalist principles, and memorizing passages of Malcolm X. And despite a deliberate post-college turn toward capitalism and political futilitarianism, his original comprehensive view of America persists: our national government is incapable of bettering the lives of black Americans, just as white Americans are forever incapable of dismantling their own racism.
Still, Thomas remains baffling to some — an enigma, as some senators put it during his confirmation hearings more than twenty years ago. A new analysis of Thomas’s biography and jurisprudence by author and political scientist Corey Robin, The Enigma of Clarence Thomas, leaves no room for confusion. In this segment, Brooke speaks with Robin about Thomas’s views on criminal justice, affirmative action, capitalism, racial equality, and ultimately the fate of the nation.
This is a segment from our November 8, 2019 program, Curiouser and Curiouser.
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Source: On The Media, an NPR program
