Rightshelf

By Pejman Yousefzadeh Comments (0) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »

There are a great many things wrong with this book. For starters, it is insulting to the intelligence of its readers. We are told that Clarence Thomas has perfected the art of victimology despite the fact that he is a Supreme Court Justice and yet, the authors, Kevin Merida and Michael Fletcher don't seem at all willing to acknowledge that because of the many astounding public efforts to besmirch Justice Thomas's character, perhaps the Justice might actually have the right to be a little aggrieved concerning the way he has been treated in public. We are repeatedly told of some strange prejudice the Justice supposedly has against light-skinned African Americans, but to the best of my recollection, no one is actually quoted for the record as saying this (even if they are, the vast majority of quotes on this bizarre issue are anonymous). We are invited to express incredulity over the fact that liberal African Americans reach out to Thomas and invite him to social events . . . only to see the Justice continue to vote in favor of conservative positions on the Court, and yet, Merida and Fletcher don't seem to understand that a Supreme Court Justice is not some sort of a super-legislator open for lobbying and he is certainly not supposed to change his voting styles simply because someone, somewhere, throws a nice shindig in his honor. Opinions with which Merida and Fletcher disagree are basically dismissed with intimations that Thomas is a meanie. Jonathan Adler proves he is a master of understatement when he notes that the book "devotes less space to doctrinal analysis than some of us lawprofs might like." Orin Kerr notes similar problems with the lack of legal analysis.

We get, of course, a reprise of the Clarence Thomas-Anita Hill wars with intimations that because Thomas--along with a number of his fellow Yale law school classmates--frequented blue movies, he must have done the things that Hill said he did. We even get some people stating that the comments Hill attributes to Thomas are comments they themselves have heard Thomas make. We are also told that Thomas made himself available to a lovely TV reporter for an interview and laughed about the controversy one time in a way that made an onlooker think he was taking pleasure in the fact that he got away with harassing Hill, so he must have been guilty as charged. With such hearsay on hearsay, anonymous sourcing and record-breaking jumps to conclusions, the nasty implications are laid out for the reader to conclude that Clarence Thomas was indeed A Bad Man.

I suppose that one can be outraged by all of this, even if one is not particularly a fan of Clarence Thomas. This is literary dishonesty at its worst and a case against a Supreme Court Justice should not be as weak as the one Merida and Fletcher make out against Thomas. In the end, however, Supreme Discomfort is less outrageous than it is insubstantial. For all of the supposedly pathbreaking interviews with Thomas's associates and others, we learn very little about the Justice that we would not have learned through close attention to the news. If one did not know anything about Clarence Thomas, one would find Supreme Discomfort as valuable as a traveler in the desert would find a drop of water. But if you know even the littlest substantial thing about the Justice, the book is entirely predictable, entirely boring and quite meanspirited in certain places.

One hoped for a better biography of a consequential public figure. Alas, Supreme Discomfort is a disappointment on multiple levels.