Clarence Thomas: Details About One Of The Longest Serving Supreme Court Justices

In 2015, ThinkProgress ranked Clarence Thomas as America's fifth-worst SCOTUS justice in history due to his opposition to government regulation in business. Thomas has also had no problem ignoring judicial precedent if he felt it was unconstitutional. And his strict originalism and adherence to what he feels are the original letter and intent of the Constitution is rather old school. All of these have made him a figure of revulsion and love among the American left and right, respectively. But Clarence Thomas is not particularly well understood, and neither are the ideological underpinnings of his rulings.

Thomas' early life informs much of his judicial work. He went from a one-parent poor, coastal Georgia home to the vaunted halls of Yale University. He has developed his views through experiences with Black Power, Catholicism, and a unique life. All of this has produced a judge that defies conventional political labels. But he has also had his share of unignorable problems ranging from allegations of sexual harassment to a sordid personal life in the 1980s to his connections to January 6th. Here is the untold truth of Justice Clarence Thomas.

American political figures are not particularly known for speaking foreign languages. Politicians on both sides have been mocked over their butchering of even the simplest Spanish phrases. But Clarence Thomas can claim to be multilingual, as he did not grow up speaking English at home.

Thomas' family, like many African Americans in the area he grew up, spoke an English-based Creole language called Gullah. According to The University of Hawaii Linguistics, Creole languages arise when pidgins that develop from natural contact between two or more languages gain enough traction to formalize into a new language. Usually, vocabulary is drawn from one language (a.k.a. the lexifier) and the grammar is drawn from the other. Gullah, per Yale University, arose among enslaved people, mostly from Sierra Leone, who developed their unique tongue working on plantations on islands off the coast of the southern United States. As expected, English is the dominant lexifier, but West African grammatical structures underlie the syntax.

This fact about Thomas is virtually unknown because he never speaks it publicly. According to U.S. News, Thomas grew up with a "geechee" (a slur for Gullah speakers) accent, which was considered a mark of poor education. As a result, he was embarrassed about speaking Gullah. He did everything to erase his accent and this might explain why he never has spoken it publicly. It might also just be something that is confined to the family sphere.

Clarence Thomas generated controversy over opposition to policies such as affirmative action. Officially created under the Kennedy Administration (via the University of Rhode Island) to prevent racial discrimination in hiring, the policy has proved a lightning rod in the judicial system, where it has been challenged as discriminatory against whites and Asians. For Thomas, however, his opposition is based on "soft bigotry," which he argues underpins the policy.

Per the Yale Daily News, Thomas complained of isolation from his fellow students, who assumed (he thought) that was unqualified and only able to get into Yale due to affirmative action. Per Business Insider, Thomas felt the attitude extended to his job search, as employers refused to take him seriously. His interviewers again assumed him to be an unqualified candidate that had ridden affirmative action to success. He later recalled that this "soft" racism was the domain of "paternalistic big city whites," a more insidious form of racism – Thomas believed – than the up-front racism of the Jim Crow South.

Thomas' statements have generated debates over affirmative action and over the justice's own educational history. As early as 1991, the Black Scholar ran a piece criticizing Thomas' nomination on the grounds of his poor record. But it also accused him of hypocrisy. The author Karen Wanza claimed that Thomas was actually one of the biggest beneficiaries of affirmative action and that it would be hypocritical of him to oppose it.

Criticism of Clarence Thomas' views and the Anita Hill scandal have dogged the justice as recently as 2017, when supporters accused the National Museum of African American History in Washington, D.C. of excluding him from their exhibits. In an op-ed published in The Hill by Georgia representative Earl Carter, the congressman decried the museum's omission of the justice from its hall of important African American leaders as the result of political bias.

For context, Law.com notes that Thomas was only the Supreme Court's second African-American judge after Thurgood Marshall. Thus, it made sense, as Carter noted, that Thomas – regardless of his personal views – deserved a place in the museum. After all, he had overcome poverty, racism, and legal discrimination to reach one of the highest offices in the U.S. government. Instead, the museum only made a one-line mention of Thomas in reference to the Anita Hill scandal.

After congressional Republicans protested the museum's omission on the grounds of political bias, it decided to include Thomas in 2017. It is unclear, however, if Thomas was ever aware of the problem in the first place, since the museum had no idea if he had ever attempted to contact them or cooperate in the design of the exhibit.

Supreme court justices often seem to get along. According to USA Today, ideological rivals on the bench Antonin Scalia and Ruth Bader Ginsburg were "supreme friends" that ate, talked, and even traveled together to India. Thomas also had a close friendship with the late liberal justice, who according to Politico, was famous for her legendary banter.

In his tribute to Ginsburg, Thomas noted that she was known as "Rapid Ruth" among the other justices and staff. She was fast in reading, writing, and responding to opinions and could always be relied upon to get things done early. To avoid risking her "wrath," the other justices would work themselves twice as hard to ensure that opinions were out so she would not be kept waiting. Anyone that was "late" (a.k.a. not early) got humorously reprimanded.

Now, such a friendship might not be expected among regular people in today's polarized climate. But Thomas claimed that ideology never got in the way – despite the fact that he and Ginsburg clashed more than any other pair of justices over Supreme Court decisions. Since, however, Thomas claimed that Ginsburg placed respect and civility over everything else, they became friends and served on the court together for over 25 years.

According to the Wall Street Journal, Jason Riley decried Clarence Thomas' political opponents attacking him with racist epithets such as "Uncle Clarence" (a play on "Uncle Tom") or a "sellout" for his constitutionalist rulings. Thomas' views are disliked among sections of the Beltway elite, but few on either side understand their origins. It is likely that Thomas sees himself as one of Black empowerment's biggest supporters. He just does not want the U.S. government involved.

According to Notre Dame, Thomas' rulings and views are best understood through his past political influences. Thomas' rulings appear to reflect the philosophy of Malcolm X. This firebrand activist argued that Blacks could surmount racism in America by building up their own communities through education, entrepreneurship, and strong families, and supporting each other by buying and hiring Black, thus eliminating the need for any dependence on a racist government. Otherwise, Malcolm X argued, African Americans would become a "mentally-dead political football" in the hands of "liberal whites."

This is the attitude that seems to permeate Thomas' rulings – even though he renounced Black nationalism well before his appointment to the Supreme Court (via Aleteia). Thomas' rejection of affirmative action is based on the idea that the policy tokenizes Blacks. His ruling against desegregation was grounded in objections to the implication that majority-Black schools were inferior to those with more white students. Thus, in a NY Times piece, journalist Corey Robin argued that Thomas is representing the interests of Black America. He just sees them from a completely different standpoint.

Clarence Thomas, never a stranger to controversy, has become embroiled in a scandal regarding the January 6th Capitol riot and the 2020 presidential election. The justice, per the BBC, has been crystal-clear in his belief that the election of Joe Biden was fraudulent. His wife Ginni Thomas holds the same view before between Election Day and January 6. As well as attending the rally before the riot (via Vanity Fair), in the days and weeks before, she sent a series of text messages to Trump's chief of staff Mark Meadows urging him not to concede the election.

The revelation of these texts ignited a firestorm of controversy regarding Clarence Thomas' impartiality and conflicts of interest. Opponents have accused Ginni of influencing her husband's judicial rulings in favor of Republican platforms, making Justice Thomas incapable of rendering objective judgments in cases involving election fraud (via CNN) or the January 6th defendants and their lawyers. Thus, outlets such as NPR have called on Thomas to recuse himself from these cases.

Others, such as the WSJ have argued that Thomas has no reason to recuse himself. Americans are generally split right down the middle on the issue. A Quinnipiac poll (via CNN) found that 52% of Americans want Thomas to recuse, while the rest are either opposed or unsure. As the Brookings Institute noted, he has so far refused, and knowing his independent streak, it is unlikely he will.