Jack Jackson raises three excellent questions in his review of The Enigma of Clarence Thomas.

First, Jackson queries my decision to focus on those areas of Thomas’s jurisprudence where his distinctive philosophy of conservative black nationalism appears—specifically, in Thomas’s opinions on the Commerce Clause, habeas corpus, the First and Second amendments, the crime and punishment amendments, and the Reconstruction amendments—while ignoring other Thomas opinions that affirm a more conventional conservative position. The reason for my choice was simple: Thomas’s conventional opinions are airless, expressing almost no philosophy at all. In many Thomas opinions, there is a voice, and these are the opinions I wrote about. But in other Thomas opinions, there is scarcely anything audible at all. It seemed beyond my skills as a scholar to make them come to life or to offer anything beyond a rehearsal of their claims.

Jackson makes me wonder about that choice. Might inclusion of these boilerplate opinions, alongside his heterodox opinions, have made Thomas more complicated—and more interesting? Boredom is a rich terrain, ripe for interpretive mining. Merely asking the question, “Why is this opinion complex and interesting, this one flat and boring?” or “Why does the Thomas voice emerge in a decision about campaign finance but not in a decision about anti-trust?” opens up a space for reflection that I wish I had considered.

Second, Jackson asks whether some of Thomas’s opinions on gay rights, and his commitment to heterosexuality, might have been usefully interrogated in my book. Given that I dwell on the masculinist and patriarchal elements of Thomas’s views, I should have examined his hetero-normativity. Though here, again, the question of flatness and voice intrudes: Thomas’s opinions on gay rights have so little going on in them, politically and intellectually, that I probably would have had to consider them in light of what I said above about boredom.

One area of Thomas’s jurisprudence that I wish I had considered further, though I did discuss it briefly, is his opinions about abortion. After my book went into production, Thomas wrote one of the more distinctive statements on abortion (Box v. Planned Parenthood of Indiana and Kentucky (2019)), in which he leveraged the imbrications of race and the movement for birth control to argue that abortion was essentially a form of eugenics, where white people seek to limit the expansion of the black population. Nowhere in his opinion does Thomas mention black women, who support abortion rights at higher rates than almost any other part of the population. As was true of his Senate confirmation hearings—where Anita Hill’s accusation of sexual harassment raised complex questions of intersectionality, in part because Thomas was viewed by many as possessing a racial identity while Hill was viewed as possessing a gender identity—Thomas’s abortion opinion raises the question of who gets to be black: in this case, a pregnant woman or a fetus?

Last, Jackson asks whether the current struggle over police brutality might lead me to revise my interpretation of Thomas’s Black Constitution, which is meant to empower black patriarchs by arming black men, and his White Constitution, which is meant to create black patriarchs by the state punishing black men. If armed black men cannot protect themselves and their families from the police, how viable is Thomas’s Black Constitution? And if it is successful, doesn’t the uprising of black people against police violence, which could be read as an instantiation of Thomas’s Black Constitution, undermine Thomas’s White Constitution, effectively crippling the ability of the state to punish black men and thereby create black patriarchs?

This year’s events don’t change my interpretation of Thomas’s Constitutions because I never thought either of his Constitutions desirable or viable. While politically intelligible on their own terms, Thomas’s two Constitutions do not, and never did, fit together in any coherent way. The closest Thomas comes to making them fit is, maybe, to assume that the armed black patriarch is so innocent of wrongdoing that the state will never go near him, while the punished black man is sufficiently surrounded by wrongdoing—whether his own or that of his associates—as to warrant his punishment by the state. But that assumption (and it’s not clear that it is Thomas’s assumption) sits uneasily with Thomas’s other statements about the inherently racist nature of the state. Again, the two visions do not fit together.

That said, since Trump’s election, journalists have reported an increasing interest among black people in the need to arm themselves against white supremacists and the police. A recent New York Times video titled, “I’m a Black American. I Need a Gun to Feel Safe in This Country,” featured a range of black voices affirming their need to exercise their Second Amendment rights. I have no doubt that Thomas dismisses the protesters against police brutality as the sorts of left-wing adventurers, black and white, he has loathed throughout most of his career. Whether he could so easily disavow the black voices in that video or in various news reports is another matter.