Livestream Event: Glenn Loury on Clarence Thomas

featuring Robert George, Ilya Shapiro, and Randall Kennedy

This Wednesday, January 17 at 8:00 p.m. EST, I will appear alongside Ilya Shapiro, Robert George, and Randall Kennedy in a livestreamed conversation hosted by the Manhattan Institute and City Journal. The occasion is the publication of my City Journal essay, “Clarence Thomas and Me.” The piece is an argument on behalf of Justice Thomas’s significance in black American history and an exploration of his demonization by his critics—especially his black critics. As the title suggests, there is also a personal element to this essay. In “Clarence Thomas and Me,” I think through our shared role as African American public figures who are often at odds with mainstream black thought and opinion (though I’m not nearly as influential or as scrutinized as he is).

It will probably be helpful if you read the essay before the event, so I’m providing a short excerpt below with a link to the full text from City Journal. During the event, you’ll have the opportunity to write in questions for me and my co-panelists to consider during the Q&A section. This essay and the accompanying event have been in the works for a while, and I’m pleased finally to be able to share them with you. The livestream is free—all you have to do is click below to register, and you’ll receive a link to the event. Hope to see you there!

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Clarence Thomas and Me: Glenn Loury on Justice Thomas’s Legacy

Wednesday, January 17, 8:00 p.m. EST

As the Supreme Court’s most renowned originalist and longest-serving current member, Justice Clarence Thomas has long been a lightning rod. Among conservatives, he is celebrated for his efforts to limit the power of the federal government, preserve individual liberties, and ensure equal treatment before the law. But on the left, Thomas is routinely denounced not just for his ideological convictions but on unusually personal grounds. Among black critics especially, Thomas is accused of racial disloyalty—a line of argument that seeks to diminish his historic achievements.

In his essay for the Winter issue of City Journal, contributing editor and Brown University economics professor Glenn Loury explores Thomas’s legacy alongside his own experience as a black conservative public intellectual.

Please join us for a virtual discussion featuring Glenn Loury, Paulson Fellow at the Manhattan Institute; Merton P. Stoltz Professor of Economics at Brown University; and host of The Glenn Show. Loury will take part in a panel discussion to explore Justice Thomas’s legacy both as a jurist and black conservative in American public life.

Participants: Glenn Loury (Brown University, Manhattan Institute), Robert George (Princeton), Randall Kennedy (Harvard), and Ilya Shapiro (Manhattan Institute)

This is event is free.

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Clarence Thomas and Me

by Glenn C. Loury
from the Winter 2024 issue of City Journal

Clarence Thomas is a black American icon. There is no more American story, and no blacker story, than his. We should celebrate him as a living embodiment of this nation’s greatness, given his rise from the challenging circumstances of his upbringing—poverty, segregation, colorism, linguistic alienation—to holding a seat on the Supreme Court. Excluding Thomas from any history of African-descended people in this country would render it incomplete, just as ignoring his influence would leave any history of the current Court incomplete. 

Justice Clarence Thomas is unquestionably a towering figure in American jurisprudence. As Scott Douglas Gerber, a leading authority on his legal theories, has noted, Thomas’s impact on constitutional law over the last quarter-century has been stunning. His long-standing views have carried the day in major cases. He has stuck to his principles in his three decades on the Court, and it has paid off. Thus, his insistence that the Commerce Clause does not empower the federal government to regulate everything under the sun is now the law. His position that federal agencies should have relatively restricted power is now the law. His view that the Second Amendment means what it says, and that individuals have a fundamental right to carry firearms, is now the law. His conviction that no constitutional right to an abortion exists is now the law. And, perhaps most poignantly, his passionately articulated view that the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause forbids racial preferences in higher-education admissions decisions is now the law. Indeed, his principled stance that the Court’s job is to discern the original understanding of the constitutional provision at issue in a case has become the Court’s dominant approach. One could even plausibly hold that this is now Justice Thomas’s Supreme Court, not Chief Justice John Roberts’s. Thomas is its longest-serving sitting member, and his legacy will continue well after his time on the bench is over, as many of his former clerks are now federal judges themselves. 

And yet, despite his now-undeniable skill as a jurist and judge, Thomas finds himself the target of criticism that differs in kind from that reserved for the Court’s other conservative justices. One expects public disagreement with his most controversial opinions; we should welcome intellectually rigorous dissent, for no one can test the validity of ideas without it. But too often, critics attack not Thomas’s ideas but the man himself—and this is especially true of black critics, who regard him not merely as mistaken but as a traitor who has forfeited his status as “authentically black.” For them, he is an Iago-like figure, driven by a perverse impulse to degrade African Americans. The quasi-religious conviction that Thomas’s reasoned defense of capitalism, color blindness, and individual liberty amounts to a disgust for his fellow blacks is, in my view, the outcome of a projected disgust for Thomas himself.

Why should this be? Other more or less conservative black figures have attained a status in the nation’s historical memory, and in the folklore of rank-and-file blacks, in line with their achievements. While Booker T. Washington’s program for post-emancipation uplift has fallen out of favor, no serious historian of African American history denies his significance. Ralph Ellison, while too idiosyncratic to pin down to any ideology, looks, from our historical vantage, like a more conservative figure than he may have appeared in his time. Though parts of Invisible Man can easily be read as a rejection of left-radical politics—the book rejects seemingly every conventional political position—its violation of the norms of contemporary mainstream black intellectual life has not kept it off college syllabi. One could argue that Invisible Man is too monumental a literary achievement simply to brush aside because of its purportedly errant politics. Even for those who see Ellison as a retrograde figure, his book is too important to the intellectual and social history of twentieth-century America to write out of the canon.

I would say something similar about Thomas. However controversial he may be, and however unrepentantly conservative his views, it is no longer possible to deny his stature and his influence on American life and law. He is a great man in a position of great power. Like any great man, he makes decisions whose consequences not even he can fully predict. And as with any great man, his very humanity—his virtues, flaws, personality, and persona—appear magnified, and often distorted, by the lens of the media and of history. His occasional errors in judgment and personal quirks take on symbolic significance. Thus, while recent controversies about his plane flights and vacations with friends may appear to tell deep verities about the nature of power, it is also true that his extraordinary biography has become an allegory of race in America. In fact, his identity as a black man sometimes overshadows the more basic, and yet more complex, fact that he is, first and foremost, a man—a human being.