Clarence Thomas Was Always A Politician — We Should Not Pretend Otherwise

Clarence Thomas has always been a strange character in American politics. For the majority of his tenure — in fact, for all of it up until Ketanji Brown Jackson takes her seat on the Supreme Court — Thomas has been the only black Justice. Thomas is also a Republican, and was appointed by President George Bush — the first one — who himself ran on a questionably racist platform in 1988. (George Bush infamously attacked his opponent, Democrat and former Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis, for being “soft on crime,” which he personified by using the story of a black man named Willie Horton being released from prison before murdering people.)

Over the years, both black commentators and liberal commentators alike have expressed confusion over just who Clarence Thomas is. Shortly after he was confirmed, a sketch on the Fox show In Living Color — which was best described as Saturday Night Live but made specifically for black people — showed Thomas’s first day on the job. Here, Thomas starts off by sucking up to the other white Republican Justices — before being informed that he’ll have this job for life “no matter who I piss off.” After gaining this information, he suddenly wants to review a police brutality case he had dismissed moments earlier, before declaring himself “your darkest nightmare,” and “a rights machine for…