Perhaps the best way to enter into The Enigma of Clarence Thomas is through the ambiguity of the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka (1954). In popular lore, Brown is a simple case: it struck down segregation and ushered in a period of liberal “progress.” In reality, its meaning remains elusive. Was the problem confronted by the Court in Brown that the law denoted group inferiority and produced a system of racial subordination in the United States? Or perhaps the infirmity consisted in the fact that the law used race as a categorical marker, impermissibly dividing the people? Or was the Court affirming a positive vision of an integrated polity and laboring to create it? Attempting to answer the question, “what is the meaning of Brown?,” has divided the Supreme Court for over half a century.

To offer a quite simplistic schematic: conservatives in recent decades have, for the most part, insisted that the Constitution is “color-blind” and that remedial programs using race as a criterion in distributive schemes harms white individuals; however, on occasion the State may for a limited time use race to produce “diversity” in places such as elite higher education. By contrast, liberals have argued that explicitly race-based programs are permissible post-Brown to remedy past wrongs, past wrongs continue to contour the political present, imagined harms suffered by individual whites are mostly a constitutional non-issue as remedial programs do not seek to subordinate whites as a class, and “diversity” is a compelling state interest. For now, diversifying the ruling class to shore up its legitimacy is the common-ground position on the Court, binding together the center-Left and center-Right.

But there is dissent on the Right against this fragile diversity consensus. In affirmative action cases, the far Right has cultivated white grievance and paraded white “victims” before the courts and the public. However, there is another quite different dissent on the Right, and Corey Robin’s magisterial intellectual biography of Justice Clarence Thomas brings it to the fore. It is a radical and bracing dissent authored by a “conservative black nationalist on the Supreme Court” (p. 8) whose “conservatism is overwhelmingly defined by and oriented toward the interests of black people, as he understands them” (p. 4). According to Robin, Justice Thomas’s jurisprudence and political thought “begins with the belief that racism is permanent” (p. 219) and proceeds accordingly. Thus, in the affirmative action cases, Justice Thomas centers the experience of Black students but reconfigures the programs as harmful, white paternalism. Moreover, Justice Thomas takes the anti-subordination reading of Brown (a reading normally associated with the legal Left) and uses it to render race-based affirmative action programs unconstitutional. As he wrote in Adarand Constructors v. Pena (1995), these “programs stamp minorities with a badge of inferiority.” And as Robin argues persuasively, for Justice Thomas “the most important form that racism takes is the stigma or mark it puts on black people” (p. 44). Moving along methodological lines associated with Critical Race Theory, but arriving again at a conservative destination, Justice Thomas writes from “experience.”

The Enigma of Clarence Thomas centers biography because Thomas’s biography “and the beliefs and opinions that developed with it, have found their way into his opinions, structuring and informing his jurisprudence” (p. 13). One of the many virtues of Robin’s book is the care that he devotes to sustaining this claim: to know the jurisprudence you need to know the man. Clarence Thomas was born in rural Georgia and began elementary school the same year the Supreme Court issued its Brown decision. He “spent his first sixteen years in an ‘entirely black environment’” (p. 19). Thomas occupied a “lowly status and origin” within the black community and the stings of class would inform his thinking for the rest of his life: “[i]n Thomas’s view, black liberalism is the language of light-skin privilege” (p. 23). In 1964, he moved to an elite (white) Catholic school before heading to Holy Cross for college. At Holy Cross, Thomas became “steeped in the black nationalism of the late 1960s” (p. 30). Robin highlights this dimension of Thomas’s biography and its enduring importance: “In later years, Thomas would downplay the presence of black nationalism in his mature thinking . . . Yet he never disavowed its role in his development, going so far as to invoke Malcolm X as an analog or precedent for his biography” (p. 32). Thomas spent the early 1970s at Yale Law where he felt the “stigma” of white paternalism that he would come to attack as a Supreme Court justice. Moving rightward during the decade but without ever abandoning his Black nationalism, Thomas rode the Reagan Revolution into Washington D.C. and served as Chair of the EEOC. In 1991, President George H.W. Bush nominated him to the Supreme Court.

During Thomas’s confirmation hearings, “the word ‘enigma’ appears thirty times” (p. 3). Many continue to view Justice Thomas as an enigma. However, Robin argues that the unique fusion of Black nationalism and conservatism (unique, that is, in the history of the Supreme Court) in Justice Thomas’s jurisprudence and worldview has in fact been a “secret hiding in plain sight” (p. 8). Robin offers a sweeping and thought-provoking thesis: Thomas’s Black nationalism is at the core of Thomas’s jurisprudence and not simply confined to Equal Protection cases involving race. Rather, “Thomas is weaving blackness into a new constitutional cloth, one that is race conscious, even race-centric, but with race located in different places and generating different claims from those we have come to expect from contemporary constitutional discourse” (p. 44). As a consequence, Robin engages Justice Thomas’s opinions on Equal Protection, Due Process, Privileges and Immunities, the First Amendment, the Second Amendment, Habeas Corpus, the Eighth Amendment, the Takings Clause, and the Commerce Clause. Across the terrain of constitutional law, Robin spies “a comprehensive worldview” (p. 13). Robin gives us a genuinely illuminating exploration of Thomas’s writings and speeches which yields a myriad of surprising connections between different areas of Justice Thomas’s jurisprudence. It is almost impossible to not see Justice Thomas and U.S. constitutional law in a new light after reading The Enigma of Clarence Thomas.

The book is divided into three sections: Race, Capitalism, and Constitution. In the section titled “Race,” Robin fleshes out Thomas’s thinking on stigma and white paternalism, and also traces the contours of a racial pessimism and racial separatism permeating Thomas’s worldview. A strain of Black nationalist conservatism again comes to the foreground: “Thomas posits the separation of blacks and whites to be a necessary condition of black flourishing and advancement” (p. 62). Integration is not an ideal or hope for Justice Thomas.

Black flourishing for Thomas is mostly confined to the economic realm and the economic realm is envisioned as one without liberal welfare-State intervention. In the section on “Capitalism,” we discover that even apparently non-racial economic questions, such as the proper scope of the Takings Clause, are infused with racial meaning in Thomas’s jurisprudence. As an example, Justice Thomas centers the destruction of Black neighborhoods in “urban renewal” (a Left position) to ground a conservative Takings Clause jurisprudence limiting state action in the economy. As Milton Friedman wrote, capitalism is freedom; Justice Thomas concurs.

In the final section organized under the banner of “Constitution,” Robin sees two Constitutions structuring Justice Thomas’s constitutional vision: the Black Constitution and the White Constitution. The former aims to arm the Black Patriarch to defend his family and community from white terror (literally, via an expansive reading of the Second Amendment) and the latter imposes a harsh, punitive, and even racist system to produce the self-responsible Black Patriarch “where he does not exist” (via a rollback of procedural rights in the criminal justice system) (p. 153). And here we circle back to biography: the “absent father and present patriarch” (p. 153) of this constitutional drama mirrors Thomas’s own childhood of being abandoned by his biological father and raised by his stern, demanding, entrepreneurial grandfather, Myers Anderson whom Thomas calls “‘the greatest man I have ever known’” (p. 218).

This clipped summary does not do justice to the richness and texture of Robin’s argument or the masterful and nuanced blending of political theory, constitutional law, and biography in the text. At the end, I find myself in agreement with Robin’s conclusion that “Clarence Thomas is the most extreme justice on the Supreme Court,” a justice who is somewhat paradoxically the most unique in the Court’s history and also “most emblematic” of our time (p. 219). However, two primary questions or issues remain unresolved for me by the conclusion.

First, I wonder if there is a cost to bracketing significant portions of Justice Thomas’s opinions in a book painting Thomas’s portrait with his opinions. Early on, Robin writes that Thomas’s opinions on “issues like unions, war powers, and gay marriage . . . warrant little discussion” because they are mostly “right-wing boilerplate” (p. 13). If the boilerplate claim is true, then that alters the picture of Thomas’s “comprehensive worldview” and perhaps Thomas is less singular in his approach to politics and law than implied—or perhaps he remains singular but even more complicated than suggested. Also, given how absolutely central gender is to the myth of the heroic Black Patriarch in Thomas’s “dreamscape” (p. 164) and how relentlessly heterosexual gender relations are imagined, an encounter with Thomas’s jurisprudence relating to same-sex sodomy laws, DOMA, and gay-marriage seems indispensable to better understanding both the heterosexualized “liberty” of the Right and the potential conservatism in the Court’s purportedly “liberal” LGBTQ decisions. This would have also been a ripe area for Robin to more fully explore how heterosexuality moves in the contested tradition of Black nationalism and where Thomas fits within it.

Second, this review is being written amidst the greatest mass insurrection in generations against Thomas’s punitive White Constitution. The revolt is both Black-led and broadly multi-racial. These events have me turning to Thomas’s Black Constitution where the Second Amendment has a pride of place. Reflecting specifically upon the police murders of Tamir Rice, Elijah McClain, and Breonna Taylor, I am left puzzled by the valorization of the Second Amendment by Thomas. When a Supreme Court justice advocates for a right, it is usually with a vision of it being put into practice. As Robin notes, Thomas’s defense of the Second Amendment is couched in Black nationalist terms and rooted in Black resistance to white terrorism after Reconstruction. If Thomas’s White Constitution cannot protect innocent people like Rice, McClain, and Taylor, then he has apparently failed on his own terms as Black Patriarch; on the other hand, if the insurrection puts Thomas’s Second Amendment theory into practice, the White Constitution Thomas treasures appears doomed. I am curious if contemporary events lead Robin to read Thomas differently or if reading Thomas provides a particular perspective on the rebellion in the streets.

One thing is clear from The Enigma of Clarence Thomas: to understand the political present in the U.S., “we have to go through him” (p. 16).