"I was sympathetic to virtually all groups that wanted to get away from the old system"
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Clarence Thomas is describing a sensibility formed by growing up under Jim Crow and fighting to carve out a life on his own terms. The old system was not only legal segregation and racial caste; it was also the web of paternalism that, in his view, kept people dependent on institutions that claimed to help them while controlling their choices. As a young man at Holy Cross and Yale in the late 1960s and early 1970s, he gravitated toward anyone promising self-determination: black nationalists who preached self-reliance, antiwar activists questioning authority, and later conservatives who challenged the centralized liberal order. The common thread was an impulse to escape gatekeepers.
Thomas has often emphasized dignity over dependency. He admired Malcolm X for insisting that progress come from within communities, not from condescension by elites. He grew suspicious of what he saw as a bureaucracy of virtue that created new hierarchies under the banner of reform. That is why he could be sympathetic to a wide array of movements with very different agendas: the appeal was not their ideology but their rebellion against structures that presumed to manage the lives of others.
This animating suspicion carries into his jurisprudence. His skepticism of the administrative state, his discomfort with affirmative action as practiced by elite institutions, and his commitment to federalism and originalism reflect a belief that centralized systems ossify into new orthodoxies. He often frames constitutional protections as shields for individual and local autonomy against distant power. To him, progress means reclaiming agency rather than trading one overseer for another.
The line also explains the paradox of his career: a man once drawn to black radicalism becomes the Court’s most conservative voice, yet he sees continuity rather than contradiction. The goal remains the same: break free from entrenched systems that diminish responsibility and choice. What changed were the means he believed could achieve that end.
Thomas has often emphasized dignity over dependency. He admired Malcolm X for insisting that progress come from within communities, not from condescension by elites. He grew suspicious of what he saw as a bureaucracy of virtue that created new hierarchies under the banner of reform. That is why he could be sympathetic to a wide array of movements with very different agendas: the appeal was not their ideology but their rebellion against structures that presumed to manage the lives of others.
This animating suspicion carries into his jurisprudence. His skepticism of the administrative state, his discomfort with affirmative action as practiced by elite institutions, and his commitment to federalism and originalism reflect a belief that centralized systems ossify into new orthodoxies. He often frames constitutional protections as shields for individual and local autonomy against distant power. To him, progress means reclaiming agency rather than trading one overseer for another.
The line also explains the paradox of his career: a man once drawn to black radicalism becomes the Court’s most conservative voice, yet he sees continuity rather than contradiction. The goal remains the same: break free from entrenched systems that diminish responsibility and choice. What changed were the means he believed could achieve that end.
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