Now all the world can see the progression and depth of the intellectual and philosophical convictions of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. Far from personifying the leftist caricature of him as an “insanely self-loathing” black man, Thomas is a proud, thoughtful man of personal integrity.
One of the great achievements of director Michael Pack’s excellent documentary on Thomas, which aired on PBS May 18, is that it shows how Thomas’s convictions developed into an analytical construct that is both logical and consistent. Far from showing that Thomas is willfully blind to racism, the film shows how strongly he has felt it and combated it.
At great length, one sees how Thomas’s outlook is built on a foundation, built by his grandfather, of strong self-discipline, a hyper-rigorous work ethic, a respect for education, and a devout Catholic faith. To that was added the love of (not just respect for) learning instilled by Catholic nuns.
But one also sees Thomas describe his internal anger building against abject poverty, racial slights, overt racism expressed even in the Catholic seminary he attended for nearly four years, and the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr.
That anger and black pride sent Thomas into the “black power” movement as he enrolled at Holy Cross College. One sees him describe and reaffirm the loathing for racism that he felt then and still feels today. Yet, his grandfather’s respect for order and discipline (along with the love of country exhibited by his brother, who served in Vietnam) led him to be appalled with himself when one of the protests he joined turned into a “full-scale riot.”
Thomas’s churchgoing background also played a role. As he wrote in his autobiography, in words he repeated nearly verbatim in the documentary, “I had let myself be swept up by an angry mob for no good reason other than that I, too, was angry. On my way to breakfast, I stopped in front of the chapel and prayed for the first time in nearly two years. I promised Almighty God that if he would purge my heart of anger, I would never hate again.”
So we see Thomas beginning to question whether black radicalism was the best response to white racism. This led to him questioning other shibboleths of the Left’s race-based analysis. The documentary shows him explain how this new questioning led him to recoil at the idiocy of forced busing, which he said often involved sending black children not to better schools but instead all the way across town just to go to “schools just as bad.”
Layered on that was a growing frustration with overly-intrusive government edicts in general, leading to a libertarian bent. Then, despite graduating law school with terrific grades, Thomas received only one job offer — from a Republican, then-Missouri-Attorney General Jack Danforth. Beggars can’t be choosers, so he took the job and was introduced more directly to conservative political thought.
It was black pride and sympathy for blacks, not black hatred, that made him aghast as Danforth’s assistant to see that 90% of the crimes against black victims were being committed by other blacks. Thomas continued evolving rightward. Later encounters with black conservative economists and writers Thomas Sowell and Walter Williams, a sense of buoyant hope embodied by President Ronald Reagan, and long studies of the Constitution and the founding with conservative think tank scholars Ken Masugi and John Marini, all added pieces to Thomas’s puzzle.
Anyone familiar with late 20th century American conservatism recognizes all these elements: a grounding in faith and the Western tradition, a libertarian-leaning distaste for over-concentration of power, an affinity for individual free thought, a respect for clear and simple rules where order is necessary, a strong belief in the equal application of laws but not laws guaranteeing equal results, a respect for self-sufficiency, and a Reaganite optimism that free men and women can work out salutary social arrangements without direction from the state or from self-proclaimed experts.
By the mid-1980s, Thomas said, he saw that the U.S. Constitution provided for a remarkably workable combination of all these elements, one that he said all fit together: “It all made sense.”
Thomas is right. Blessedly, Pack’s documentary helps viewers see why that’s so.
