Abstract
I
Successive crises have dealt a considerable blow to intellectual parochialism, in and out of the academy. Scholars and intellectuals are scrambling to come to terms with the causes and consequences of the Great Recession, the migration crisis bequeathed by permanent war and religious terror, the cynical manipulation of white resentment and identity by conservative parties throughout the West, and the shattered dream that Barack Obama’s ascendancy heralded a reconciliatory era of postimperial and postracial politics. With many no longer confident that more ready-at-hand texts and traditions are sufficient to grapple with these ills, there has been surprising interest in African American political thought as a central part of the scaffolding by which critique and understanding might regain their lost footing.
Campuses have been riven by protests aiming to bring “diversity and inclusion” or, more immodestly, “decolonization” to the university and its syllabi. Black thinkers are increasingly populating reading lists of canonical political and social thought at elite universities like Oxford and Yale. Even theoretical agendas in adjacent disciplines have been affected, as economists and historians interrogate the aftermath of American slavery and place race at the center of histories of capitalism. 1 Mainstream political discourse, too, has been besieged by concepts harvested from black intellectualism’s archives (e.g., “intersectionality,” “white supremacy,” and the “politics of respectability”), while the New York Times and New York Magazine solicit essays on “racial capitalism” and the ethics of “fugitivity.” 2
Much of the scholarship undergirding these developments has finally been condensed, curated, and engaged in Melvin Rogers and Jack Turner’s forthcoming volume African American Political Thought: A Collected History (Chicago). In over 1,200 pages and thirty contributors, the volume presents an imposing gauntlet of black intellectuals and their competing traditions. More familiar voices—Frederick Douglass, W. E. B. Du Bois, Martin Luther King Jr.—are included, but so too are criminally underappreciated thinkers, from the so-called “father of black nationalism,” Martin Delany; the feminist theorist and poet Audre Lorde; the architect of legal desegregation, Thurgood Marshall; and even Marshall’s controversial Court successor, Clarence Thomas.
II
The entry on Justice Thomas is written by Corey Robin, a political theorist at Brooklyn College, whose The Reactionary Mind: From Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin (Oxford, 2011) and dedicated social media presence has made him a prominent public intellectual. Robin, in many ways, is exemplary of the aforementioned shift concerning black political thought. His first book, Fear: The History of a Political Idea (2004), is an original and often powerful meditation on the experience of fear and its importance for theorizing domination, acquiescence, and resistance. Surprisingly absent, however, is any sustained engagement with black thinkers who wrote with insight on fear and its overcoming from the vantage of political practice, self-examination, and philosophical reflection (e.g., King and Lorde, but also Angela Davis, Frantz Fanon, and Howard Thurman). Fifteen years later, however, we find Robin deeply engaged with scholarship on black political thought, and his reflections on Thomas’s place in the tradition thankfully spilling over from the original essay into an exciting new book: The Enigma of Clarence Thomas (Henry Holt, 2019).
Robin’s book is crisply written, modeling all-too-rare virtues of comprehensiveness, curiosity, and charity without giving up its critical edge. Living up to John Rawls’s maxim to interpret one’s interlocutors in “the best and most interesting way,” and to try to “understand their problem and their solution from their point of view and not from ours,” Robin reveals Thomas as far more interesting and unsettling than most have supposed. 3
The current longest-serving justice, Thomas has more former clerks serving on the federal judiciary than anyone else. Broadly influential, Thomas is nevertheless treated with intellectual contempt. If he is not caricatured as parroting more competent conservatives, he is reflexively portrayed as a figure of black self-hatred. 4 Emerge magazine, for example, proclaimed Thomas “the lawn jockey of the far right” on its November 1996 cover, commissioning a cartoon of Thomas in full equestrian garb to dispense with all subtlety.
Robin is rightly unsettled by this overlapping consensus between D.C. pundits and ostensibly antiracist progressives. Coming in for special scorn is the mockery of Thomas for not speaking during oral arguments, which not only ignores court scholarship showing the minor influence of speech from the bench but also simply ignores Thomas’s prolific opinion writing and long, fiery dissents. When we read these opinions alongside decades of Thomas’s speeches, press releases, interviews, and books, Robin argues that we discover an idiosyncratic conservative intellectual in plain sight.
The key is that even within the age of so-called “colorblind” conservatism, it is race that is “the foundational principle of Thomas’s philosophy and jurisprudence” (14, emphasis added). “Thomas is not a conservative man who happens to be black,” Robin argues, “but a black man whose conservatism is overwhelmingly defined by and oriented toward the interests of black people, as he understands them.” (4) This is no deconstructive or psychoanalytically suspicious reading either, for Clarence Thomas, Robin suggests, is only an enigma because, like Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, we refuse to see him for what he is or take seriously what he says and writes. 5
Tracing Thomas’s intellectual development through the Jim Crow South and his immersion in the black nationalism of the 1960s and 1970s, Robin argues that Thomas’ understanding of black interests and his role in advancing them bears the indelible impact of this sojourn. The headline-grabbing claim is that Thomas, even today, is a conservative black nationalist. The stunning implication, if Robin is correct, is that if we look beyond militant glamour, the most influential black nationalist in American history is a Catholic, Yale-educated, Republican judge from Georgia, presently married to a white Tea Party activist.
III
Growing out of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century movements for voluntary emigration and forced colonization, black nationalists view African Americans as a political people, or—in Martin Delany’s oft-quoted words—“a nation within a nation,” whose shared destiny, duties, and interests are incongruent with those of the broader American body politic. While many black nationalists, especially in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, aspired to establish independent nation-states and empires, their deeper commitments to institutional autonomy, group solidarity, and the ethical priority of their racial affiliations lived on past the eclipse of these possibilities in the rhetoric of “self-determination” and “self-help.”
More thoroughgoing nationalists, like the early Amiri Baraka, Elijah Muhammad of the Nation of Islam, or the Black Hebrew Israelites, argue for these commitments on the grounds that blacks are essentially different (in culture, spiritual orientation, biology, etc.) and thus mutilate their most vital capabilities by sharing civic and social space with whites. Others make their way toward nationalism on pragmatic and prosaic grounds.
6
They judge whites to be unreliable political allies or the prospects for achieving even proximate racial justice in America as profoundly dim. Malcolm X, for example, proclaimed in 1964: This government has failed us. . . . The white liberals, who have been posing as our friends, have failed us. Once we see that all these other sources to which we’ve turned have failed, we stop turning to them and turn to ourselves. We need a self-help program, a do it yourself philosophy, a do it right now philosophy, an it’s already too late philosophy. . . . Black Nationalism is a self-help philosophy.
7
If this book achieved nothing else, it would be welcome solely for its patient reminder of the existence and endurance of black nationalist and other commitments borne of “racial pessimism,” as Robin calls it. As pundits and commentators on the 2020 election wonder about black voters’ aversion to left-wing or black candidates, or even voting as such, the problem of pessimism should loom far more largely. Indeed, American political commentary generally fails to recognize that “racial” pessimism often leads toward conservatism in a whole range of domains, including economics, democracy’s value, and family and gender norms. After all, such claims must inevitably run afoul of leftist demands for mass interracial solidarity and sustained collective action against the global concentration of wealth, structurally reproduced inequality, and the elite usurpation of democratic politics.
The tradition of black nationalism bears out this tension. The great mass movement leader Marcus Garvey, citing the discriminatory practices of labor unions, argued that “the only convenient friend the Negro worker or laborer has, in America . . . is the white capitalist.” Accusing even those socialists and liberals who helped found the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) of “distracting” African Americans with “the impossible dream of equality,” Garvey argued that blacks would be better off pursuing entrepreneurial opportunities and underbidding white workers.
8
Malcolm X echoed this enthusiasm for the political significance of entrepreneurship, proclaiming that: the American black man should be focusing his every effort toward building his own businesses. . . . As other ethnic groups have done, let the black people, wherever possible, however possible, patronize their own kind, hire their own kind, and start in those ways to build up the black race’s ability to do for itself. That’s the only way the American black man is ever going to get respect.
9
Robin details how Thomas buttresses this traditionally nationalist romanticism of black business under Jim Crow with the neoclassical economics of F. A. Hayek and Thomas Sowell. The combination leads Thomas to champion entrepreneurship as the key site where blacks, or at least their heroic, patriarchal leaders, could carve out at least “some measure of autonomy over their lives, independent of the power and reach of white people” (99).
Unsurprisingly, gender is central here. These men—above all, personified by his grandfather, a small business owner amidst Jim Crow repression—represent for Thomas a “new aristocracy” within black communities, who understand that the self-cultivation of virtue and the “market’s impersonality” are “vastly preferable to the punishments and preferments doled out by whites” (100). This combination of black enterprise, race-conscious consumerism, and a virtue ethics of thrift and modesty, tends, in black nationalism, to sit alongside a mythos of patriarchal sovereignty and an association of femininity with humiliating dependency or the need for protection. 10 Malcolm X, before being excommunicated from the Nation of Islam (NOI), argued that the welfare state turned blacks (especially black males) into “beggars, robbing us of our dignity, of our manhood,” and was a crucial piece of what turned the ghetto into a space of moral degeneracy, family breakdown, despair, and dependency. 11
The underside of this celebration of entrepreneurship is the disparagement of politics. Emerging from a heady mix of racial pessimism and traditional nationalist idealizations of autonomy, independence, and sovereignty, Thomas came to echo the conservative nationalist suspicion of both democratic and protest politics. Elijah Muhammad, for example, criticized the civil rights movement, arguing that “we, the black people of America should be ashamed of ourselves to go sit in the white businesses to force them to serve us” when blacks could “unite and serve ourselves!” 12
A great deal of this skepticism is driven by the overriding suspicion that because whites are intractably racist, white liberals and their reforms are inevitably duplicitous. From this vantage, Thomas’s embrace of conservatives, even quite baldly racist ones, is not particularly surprising; they at least have the rare virtue of sincerity. Yet Thomas’ aversion to white liberals evinces not simply a fetish for sincerity or pragmatism, it is also a judgment that white liberalism paternalistically sustains racial hierarchy in the guise of benevolence.
Consequently, affirmative action is a central preocuppation for Thomas, who condemns it for tarring blacks with a presumption of intellectual inferiority and bad character. It “teaches” whites that “minorities cannot compete with them without their patronizing indulgence,” engendering “attitudes of superiority” while robbing blacks of warranted self-respect and self-esteem by tainting even merited achievements with the stigma of charity (71).
Provocatively, Thomas also thinks white elites, at bottom, share this skepticism. After all, as Thomas argues in Grutter v. Bollinger (2003), if elite universities truly believed in the benefits of diversity and in increasing minority representation, then why not abandon standardized testing, legacy preferences, and other barriers to inclusivity? If liberal jurists truly believed in integration, once defending intrusive busing to achieve it in secondary schools, why show judicial deference to state universities’ awkward marriage of meritocracy, class bias, and complex “racial balancing” instead of forcing more radical integrationist measures? One is reminded, again, of Malcolm X, who when asked if he opposed integration responded, “We don’t have to oppose integration because the white integrationists themselves oppose it. Proof of which, it doesn’t exist anywhere where white people say they are for it.” 13
Affirmative action in college admissions, Thomas polemically states, is a costly and self-aggrandizing “solution to the self-inflicted wounds of [an] elitist admissions policy” (69). The integrationist ideal upon which it rests, he argues further—channeling Stokely Carmichael and Charles Hamilton’s Black Power (1967)—presumptively treats all-black schools and other institutions as inherently inferior. For Thomas, these policies and their justifications attack black pride and waste resources that would be better spent improving black institutions rather than scattering alienated individual blacks throughout predominantly white ones.
The great virtue of Robin’s book is how it shows the alliance of pessimism, patriarchy, and neoclassical economics tying together threads from Thomas’s jurisprudence, from affirmative action to gun rights. Unlike his “colorblind” conservative peers, Thomas does not think racism has largely disappeared; “discrimination, racism, and bigotry,” Thomas proclaimed in 1985, “have gone no place and probably never will” (35). Thomas defends peremptory challenges based on race because blacks might reasonably want to avoid the inevitable bias of white jurors (53). He denies that cross burning is a form of protected speech because it is permanently attached to the symbolism of racial terror in America (49). He even defends racial segregation in prisons on the grounds that such segregation is not inferiorizing but simply reflects an enduring social fact: gangs “are organized along racial lines” (51).
Given his views about permanent black minority status, and the antagonistic politics and psychology of race, Thomas’s antagonism toward voting rights is meant to disabuse blacks of the idea that the group even has shared interests that can be effectively pursued as a minority in mass democratic politics. His relentless hostility to the expansion of federal power (including civil rights enforcement) through the Commerce Clause is justified by reducing the power of a hostile and inept state over black life. The enthusiasm for money in politics and a constitutional right to self-defense? Black patriarchs must defend their homes and communities with the most reliable instruments of power and self-respect: money and violence.
Stunningly, Robin even makes some headway in explaining Thomas’s willingness to concede vast, arbitrary powers to police and the criminal justice system despite his ostensible view, backed up by mountains of social scientific research, that racial discrimination and profound violations of human dignity will follow. On Robin’s interpretation, Thomas supports these arrangements as a “condition of self-development,” a way of restoring both the “guardrails” necessary to cultivate virtue and good conduct and the adversity that creates heroic black achievement and communal solidarity. The moral force of social denunciation, the severity and unpredictability of punishment’s consequences, and sweeping police powers, when arranged correctly, can teach personal responsibility, buttress the authority of good parents, and provide “every reason [blacks] need to steer clear of trouble” (202).
IV
Robin seems both impressed with the subterranean systematicity of Thomas’s thought and repulsed by its conclusions. His elegant reconstructions are often punctuated by criticisms of weaknesses or contradictions in Thomas’s arguments. Here, Robin is on his surest footing when dispatching Thomas’s exhortations to black capitalism as romantic fantasy and deepening long-standing criticisms of Thomas’s sexism, with the Anita Hill accusations and beyond.
At times, however, Robin’s charity leads him to pull important punches. Thomas seems stunningly obtuse about the conflict between his ostensible concern with racial stigma and the wide berth he gives to the carceral state, a stigmatizing institution par excellence. For Thomas’s vision of the carceral state as the enforcer of virtue and capitalism’s “social infrastructure” to be defensible, one must presume that many among the black poor are so steeped in pathology that one should no longer make reasoned, public arguments to them about these ostensible goods without brutal punishment looming in the background. Further, Thomas threatens them not with an abstract ideal but this carceral state—the largest in the history of man, rife with sexual assault, violence, psychic trauma, and economic exploitation. What could be more stigmatizing and degrading to the moral agency and civic standing of the black poor than enshrining such a justification within constitutional law and American public philosophy? This punitive, tutelary vision is more commensurate with colonial rule or classically racist talk of a “race in its childhood” than democratic equality. 14
Even more, one wishes that Robin would unmask, with more clarity and consistency, the fallacious attempt by nationalists to partition social and political domains neatly into white and black. Just as Albert Murray sought consistently to resist in the realm of expressive culture, repeating without objection the terms of Thomas’s institutional essentialism make the nationalist case against integrationism and affirmative action appear to stand on more solid ground than it deserves. 15 The idea that affirmative action consists in white benefactors doling out privileges to black beneficiaries forever and ever until the end of time is a caricature of the integrationist ideal, as is even assuming the referential adequacy of ascribing racial proprietorship to institutions. In its most boldly realist form, integrationism aims to unravel the very idea of white and black institutions, emphasizing mutual empowerment and cooperation rather than tokenistic inclusion. 16 Over time, therefore, true integration calls into question existing criteria of merit, the value of social and cultural capital, and traditional determinants of influence and authority.
The most important question, however, which strikes to the heart of Robin’s project, is whether in the last instance Thomas really should be considered a black nationalist properly construed? While Robin exhaustively demonstrates a great deal of overlap between Thomas and the black nationalist tradition, I remained unpersuaded that Thomas is a black nationalist himself. What Thomas seems to lack, compared to other nationalists, are two commitments: (1) a sense of primacy, or a way of answering questions about civic obligation and legitimacy when the obligations between blacks qua blacks and blacks qua American citizens conflict and (2) a conception of soulcraft that aspires to discipline individualism in service of race loyalty and institutional autonomy.
Take the question of ethical primacy. In the Black Power era, for example, nationalists often encouraged blacks to evade the draft, not only because the war was unjust but because blacks were an oppressed group, not obligated to fulfill duties of military service that would otherwise arise in a truly cooperative society or international order. Thomas, on the other hand, seems to give hardly any thought to these problems of legitimacy, or the moral force of black resentment, self-respect, and oppositional loyalties that inevitably arise when an unjust polity makes demands upon us.
While many black nationalists think that some blacks need dramatic cultural reformation and intrusive forms of soulcraft to reorder their familial, sexual, moral, and vocational lives, it is difficult to find nationalists who think it legitimate for existing (white-dominated) state agencies to be the principal bearers of these tasks. 17 Even black nationalists who, in the midst of what they understood to be a ghetto crime and drug abuse epidemic, embraced the expansion of policing and punitive law enforcement, coupled their demands with calls for sweeping socioeconomic changes and grasps at sovereignty such as all-black police patrols or deputized paramilitary units. 18 Thus, when Robin moves breezily past Thomas’s mockery of his old belief that black prisoners are “political prisoners” to make a point about Thomas’s concern with protecting the victims of so-called “black-on-black” crime (206-7), we lose an important site of tension with the broader black nationalist tradition—its fundamental concern with the legitimacy of (white) state power and attempt to build alternative bases for civic and ethical obligations. 19 Perhaps even more importantly, we lose important tethering for the nationalist obsession with self-respect. Thomas, perhaps in the thrall of conservative Christianity or class bias, never seems to reckon with why blacks might find acquiescence to the impositions of discriminatory policing not simply illegitimate but far more contrary to self-respect than going to Yale Law School under a diversity program.
Further, Thomas’s commitment to the black nationalist projects of institutional autonomy and solidarity seem undermined by his recalcitrant individualism. Black entrepreneurial capitalism, when elevated to the level of collective political project, bears unique burdens given blacks’ lesser access to capital and lack of state power to enforce monopolies or capture spending by government or private consumers. 20 Jim Crow created a base for black capitalists by introducing legal prohibitions on certain types of exchange, violently enforcing customs about patronage, and inserting intolerable humiliation into white-dominated consumer spaces. Absent this external bulwark, however, black capitalism has to control capital, sustain consumer bases, and discipline labor without the inherited market advantages or political tools of their competitors.
Emigrationists tried to resolve this by establishing (or imagining) a nation-state that could replicate traditional tools for market capture and success (e.g., currency controls, trade agreements, police powers, etc.). When the dream of state sovereignty faded, groups like the NOI sought to enforce the necessary norms of collective saving, patronage, and investment on a smaller scale through religious indoctrination and coercion (sometimes physical). The dogmatism and coercion required by this project, however, seems at odds with Thomas’s appeals to freedom of thought and the good of individuality when he has been pilloried as a disloyal race-traitor. Further, while such impositions are barely possible in a small religious sect, they seem utterly unimaginable when meant to encompass forty million black consumers in the era of Amazon Prime. Without these constraints, however, one is left principally with underwhelming exhortations to racial loyalty and pride in a marketplace fundamentally structured by global dynamics of scale, asset accumulation, and unprecedented forms of consumer manipulation (not to mention the unique problems of black capitalists, like racial stigma on interest, insurance, and appreciation rates).
If anything, Thomas’ political philosophy is less black nationalism proper than what happens to a black nationalism that retains the racial pessimism thesis while being shorn of genuine faith in the tradition’s sustaining visions of the future—sovereign separatism, political revolution, thick ethnic solidarity, or collective cultural regeneration. Nevertheless, this makes Robin’s book more important and interesting, not less so.
Arguably not since the Civil War has black nationalism has been so thoroughly marginalized, defeated, and fragmented. Louis Farrakhan remains (setting the contentious Thomas aside) the most recognizable black nationalist figure in America at 86 years old, reliably trotted out largely to be disavowed or reluctantly embraced by rising black political figures. 21 Yet, the NOI’s influence is likely at an ebb, eclipsed by orthodox Sunni Islam. Other nationalist sects, like the Five-Percent Nation or the Black Hebrew Israelites, are largely limited to street corner and social media proselytizing. Afrocentrists and self-identified nationalists have long been marginalized even in Black Studies programs created by their activism. Even the growing enthusiasm for the so-called “black radical tradition” at academic conferences often papers over the broader tradition in favor of its most leftist and internationalist figures.
Yet, despite its political degeneration and the eclipse of its imagined futures, black nationalist philosophy and social theory lives on in mutated form, its core commitments having migrated to rival traditions and figures. The ground that the likes of Amiri Baraka once staked out for defenses of black rage and standpoint epistemology have been ceded to black feminist theorists. 22 Strident defenses of cultural patrimony and descriptive representation have shifted to the professional class and multiculturalist ideology. 23 Even the radical left has rediscovered reparations and prison abolition while also bringing aboard—in some corners—the rhetoric of racial pessimism. 24
Robin, in tracking down the movement of black nationalist ideas through conservative jurisprudence, provides an important model for theorizing American politics in the age of integration. As more African American individuals wield genuine power over state, corporate, academic, and media institutions, we are sorely in need of more work that combines the rigorous study of black political thought traditions with the study of institutions and the kinds of justifications they produce for their decisions and practices. This is especially vital if the left, self-consciously incorporating the ideas of black radicalism, ever manages to seize power.
Fittingly, The Enigma of Clarence Thomas ends with an all-too-brief meditation on the resonance between Thomas’s pessimism and the racial pessimism that prevails in pockets of the left. It is here that one sees Robin at his most unsettled. In a sense, the overlap between Thomas’s pessimism and excoriation of white liberals and similar claims on the left are the most important subtext of the book. Robin doesn’t explicitly argue the point, perhaps hoping that the juxtaposition is enough to frighten the pessimist back into the fold, but he is clearly worried that the left may not survive recent attempts to treat racial suspicion as axiomatic.
For decades, Thomas’s greatest intellectual legacy to the left has been that his predatory and callous treatment of Anita Hill, and brazen call for black solidarity, occasioned a resurgence of black feminist thought that is still unfolding with remarkable influence. 25 For Robin, however, Thomas might play another role as well—a mirror image and frightening portent of where radicalism shorn of hope in interracialism might lead. To take Robin’s overarching invocation of Invisible Man to its proper conclusion, we might imagine Justice Thomas, deep in an underground cellar beneath the Supreme Court, surrounded by 1,369 light bulbs. There, while the Temptations’ “Smiling Faces Sometimes” plays in the background, he turns and whispers to his leftist antagonists with a knowing grin: “Who knows but that on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?”