True diversity on the Supreme Court

John Yoo, in his review of Clarence Thomas's autobigraphy, My Grandfather's Son, points out how Thomas's philosophy of strictly interpreting the Constitution plus his background of rising up from deep poverty has given Thomas a sensitivity to questions concerning the poor and racial minorities that the Justice's opponents just don't recognize.

No one, of course, would deny that Justice Thomas has strong conservative views on constitutional law. He would reject much of affirmative action, end constitutional protection for abortion, recognize broad executive powers in wartime and allow religious groups more participation in public life. What he brings to the court as no other justice does is a characteristically American skepticism of social engineering plans promoted by elites--whether in the media, academia or well-heeled lobbies in Washington--and a respect for individual self-reliance and individual choice. He writes not to be praised by professors or pundits, but for the American people.

As his memoir shows, Justice Thomas's views were forged in the crucible of a truly authentic American story. This is a black man with a much greater range of personal experience than most of the upper-class liberals who take potshots at him. A man like this on the court is the very definition of the healthy diversity his detractors pretend to support.

In his dissent from the court's approval of the use of race in law-school admissions, he quoted Frederick Douglass: "If the negro cannot stand on his own legs, let him fall also. All I ask is, give him a chance to stand on his own legs! Let him alone!" Justice Thomas observed: "Like Douglass, I believe blacks can achieve in every avenue of American life without the meddling of university administrators."

In a 1995 race case, Justice Thomas explained without cavil why he thought the government's use of race was wrong. Racial quotas and preferences run directly against the promise of the Declaration of Independence that all men are created equal. Affirmative action is "racial paternalism" whose "unintended consequences can be as poisonous and pernicious as any other form of discrimination."

Justice Thomas speaks from personal knowledge when he says: "So-called 'benign' discrimination teaches many that because of chronic and apparently immutable handicaps, minorities cannot compete with them without their patronizing indulgence." He argued that "these programs stamp minorities with a badge of inferiority and may cause them to develop dependencies or to adopt an attitude that they are 'entitled' to preferences."

By forswearing the role of coalition builder or swing voter--a position happily occupied by Justice Anthony Kennedy--Justice Thomas has used his opinions to highlight how the latest social theories sometimes hurt those they are said to help. Because he both respects grass-roots democracy and knows more about poverty than most people do, he dissented vigorously from the court's 1999 decision to strike down a local law prohibiting loitering in an effort to reduce inner-city gang activity. "Gangs fill the daily lives of many of our poorest and most vulnerable citizens with a terror that the court does not give sufficient consideration, often relegating them to the status of prisoners in their own homes."

Justice Thomas is an admirer of the work of Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman, both classical liberals. His firsthand experience of poverty, bad schools and crime has led him to favor bottom-up, decentralized solutions for such problems.

He rejects, for example, the massive, judicially run desegregation decrees that have produced school busing and judicially imposed tax hikes. A student of a segregated school himself, Justice Thomas declares that "it never ceases to amaze me that the courts are so willing to assume that anything that is predominantly black must be inferior."

Thomas provides a diversity of thought and background that liberals always claim to prize, but somehow just doesn't seem as worthy when he is a black man who doesn't endorse the liberal nostrums for addressing questions involving race.

Thomas Sowell today also recommends his friend's book and the insights that it gives into the real Clarence Thomas, not the stereotype portrayed by much of the media.

The other great myth about Justice Thomas is that he is a lonely and embittered man, withdrawn from the world, as a result of the brutal confirmation hearings he went through back in 1991.

Clarence Thomas was never a social butterfly. You didn't see his name in the society pages or at media events, either before he got on the High Court or afterward.

In reality, Justice Thomas has been all over the place, giving talks, especially to young people, and inviting some of them to his offices at the Supreme Court.

Summers find him driving his own bus all around the country, mixing with people at truck stops, trailer parks and mall parking lots. The fact that he is not out grandstanding for the media does not mean that he is hunkering down in his cellar.

But such an image doesn't fit the template that liberals have of Justice Thomas. I haven't read his book, but after watching him this weekend on C-Span, I'm certainly looking forward to getting to know the man on his own terms and not through the veil that so much of the media would prefer that we use to look at the man.