#397: The Clarence Thomas Issue
Great articles and podcast episodes about a complex Supreme Court justice
Thank you for being here, Loyal Readers. If you’ve been a subscriber for a while, you know that I like to follow topics over time. In doing so — by reading tons of articles and then sharing them with you — I find that my knowledge deepens, or my thinking changes, or my empathy grows. Such is the case with Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, the focus of this week’s issue.
I used to know little about Justice Thomas. He was the justice who replaced the revered Thurgood Marshall on the Court and who called his confirmation hearings a “high-tech lynching.” He was the justice who never asked questions from the bench. For me there was nothing much to know, except that he was one of the most conservative justices on the Supreme Court.
But then came the allegations of corruption. And the allegations that his wife believed the last election was stolen and urged the former president not to concede. And the pressure for him to resign, or be impeached. These developments spurred me to read more articles and listen to more podcasts about Justice Thomas.
A weird thing happened when I did. It brought context and nuance. No, it didn’t lead me to condone his sexual harassment or appreciate his jurisprudence. But it did get me to understand a little bit more where he comes from and what makes him tick.
I hope you’ll do some reading and listening, too, and share this issue with friends.
💬 ARTICLE CLUB: You’re invited to our discussion of “How Much Would You Pay to Save Your Cat’s Life?” on Sunday, June 25, 2:00 - 3:30 pm PT on Zoom. You don’t need to be a cat owner to participate! Author Sarah Zhang explores several illuminating and controversial issues in her piece, and even though the article is about animals, I think we’ll find that it’s also about the depths and limits of humanity. It’d be great to have you join Article Club this month. Please sign up below.
1️⃣ America’s Blackest Child
Most profiles of Clarence Thomas involve the reporter visiting Pin Point, the small town in Georgia where the Justice was born. Inevitably, no one wants to talk to the reporter, partly to protect the man, partly to shoo the outsider away. In this outstanding episode of Slow Burn, writer Joel Anderson at first gets the same treatment. Except there’s a difference: Justice Thomas’s mother Leola grants him an interview. What follows is an intimate recounting of the Justice’s childhood, his journey from Pin Point to Savannah to Kansas City, from wanting to become a priest to protesting the Vietnam War to memorizing the speeches of Malcolm X. For many people, Justice Thomas’s political transformation from his radical youth to reactionary adulthood makes no sense. But Mr. Anderson connects the dots and suggests that notions of self-reliance and Black nationalism may explain the Justice’s journey.
➡️ Listen to the podcast | Slow Burn | 56 minutes | Apple Podcasts | Transcript
2️⃣ Clarence X
“I was a bit of a radical, but that’s what happened back then,” Justice Thomas says in this episode of More Perfect, which includes archive clips of the Justice’s past speeches and interviews. “You were Black, things were changing, and we were very, very upset. I was tired of being in the minority, and I was tired of turning the other cheek.” Yes, Justice Thomas believed in the tenets of Malcolm X, but by no means did that make him a left-wing radical. In fact, the opposite was true. This podcast episode explores how Justice Thomas’s worldview is best explained as a response to racism by white liberals. He agreed with Malcolm X that white liberals are more dangerous than white conservatives. Black people are not a monolith, he argues, and should not be treated as such by the white establishment. As a result, Justice Thomas does not want to be lectured about voting rights or affirmative action. He says, “Any effort, policy or program that has, as a prerequisite, the acceptance of the notion that Blacks are inferior is a non-starter with me.”
➡️ Listen to the podcast | More Perfect | 60 minutes | Apple Podcasts | Transcript
3️⃣ Looking For Clarence Thomas
“You want to understand Clarence Thomas?” Pulitzer Prize winner Mitchell S. Jackson asks us this question in his extraordinary piece. His answer? Self-hatred. He continues, “Hatred directed not outward but inward, where it does the oppressor’s work for him. The man’s a human being, so his self-hatred couldn’t have been a conscious choice. But be that as it may, my concern for a single suffering human ain’t the purpose of this writing. My purpose is to try to understand Clarence Thomas not because of what the world did to him but because of what he’s doing to us.”
In other words, Mr. Jackson is not striving for empathy. Although he does the work to understand Justice Thomas more deeply, Mr. Jackson is not interested in making his subject more palatable. Instead, he addresses Justice Thomas head-on. “My god, dude, what the hell happened to you?” he asks.
➡️ Read the article | Esquire | 32 minutes | Paywall-free version
4️⃣ “The Risk Is That You Humanize Him”
Last October, Article Clubber Sarai and I got to interview Mitchell S. Jackson about “Looking for Clarence Thomas.” It was one of my favorite interviews we’ve done. Mr. Jackson was kind and gracious from the start. He laughed that I insisted on calling him Mr. Jackson. And right from the first question, everything felt natural, like we were talking to a friend rather than to a famous writer whose prose is changing the canon (Sarai’s words, and I agree!) of longform nonfiction.
We talked about a number of topics, including:
how he didn’t want to write about Clarence Thomas at first
how his trip to Pin Point inspired the piece’s opening
how James Baldwin’s writing helped him understand Mr. Thomas, and
how Mr. Thomas is a man of deep contradictions, whose time on the Supreme Court has caused “dramatically malevolent things to wide swaths of Americans”
Most of all, though, Mr. Jackson talked about the craft of writing, how if he’s going to spend months on a feature story, he wants to push himself, he wants to break convention, he wants to do something new with form.
I’m very much concerned with the sentence. I’m almost concerned with the sentence over the story. And so the benefit of writing nonfiction is that, You don’t have to invent the scenes, but the kind of ethos of wanting to make beautiful sentences, that’s really what I want to do.
➡️ Listen to the podcast | Article Club | Apple Podcasts | 29 minutes
Thank you for reading this week’s issue. Hope you liked it. 😀
To our 7 new subscribers – including Sherese, Vinci, Megan, Emily, Ale, Suzanne, and Bonnie — I hope you find the newsletter a solid addition to your email inbox. To our long-time subscribers (Irene! Ira! Ivan!), you’re pretty great, too. Loyal reader Angelica, thank you for sharing the newsletter and getting the word out.
If you like The Highlighter Article Club, please help it grow. I really appreciate your support. Here are two ways you can help out:
📬 Invite your friends to subscribe. Know someone who’s kind, thoughtful, and loves to read? I’d love it if you encouraged them to subscribe. Word of mouth is by far the best way to strengthen our reading community. Thank you for spreading the word.
❤️ Become a paid subscriber, like Mike (thank you!). You’ll join an esteemed group of readers who value the mission of The Highlighter Article Club. Plus you’ll receive surprise perks and prizes. It’s $5 a month or $36 a year.
On the other hand, if you no longer want to receive this newsletter, please feel free to unsubscribe. See you next Thursday at 9:10 am PT.
Great issue Mark. Thanks for posting.