More Toobin on Clarence Thomas

For almost eight years, Thomas seems to have done a competent job running the E.E.O.C. Reagan’s people had, in a model demonstration of affirmative action, looked beyond the traditional candidates for leadership positions, and taken a chance on Thomas, and he had done as well as any white executive could have been expected to do. But, as Thomas moved through the hierarchy of Republican Administrations, the paternalism didn’t seem to bother him anymore—or else he found it convenient to pretend that it did not exist. Thomas’s rhetoric against traditional civil-rights dogma became more strident, even as he became an ever more prominent beneficiary of it. In other words, Yale and Reagan treated him the same way, but he hates one and reveres the other. Thomas never acknowledges, much less explains, the contradiction.