Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas wrote a whopping 58-page concurrence in the affirmative action decision that gutted race-conscious admissions in higher education. But it seems he fell short in properly contextualizing everything he wrote, despite his lengthy opinion.
That’s according to author Alison Stewart, who recently spoke out about what she called Thomas’ misinterpretation of her work.
Tucked into a footnote on page 57 of Thomas’ solo opinion concurring with Chief Justice John Roberts’ 6-3 majority opinion is a reference to a book written by Stewart. It’s there that Thomas mentions Dunbar High School, a once legally segregated school in Washington, D.C., from which many Black graduates went on to highly successful careers.
Thomas dropped the footnote at the end of a paragraph about historically Black colleges and universities, to add that Black achievements “in ‘racially isolated’ environments is neither new nor isolated to higher education.” In touting Dunbar’s success, he cited Stewart’s book, “First Class: The Legacy of Dunbar, America’s First Black Public High School.” At first glance, it looks just like any other citation.
But that was before Stewart responded.
In a HuffPost piece setting the record straight, Stewart said she was “appalled that a book I’d written about the impact of education was used to uphold the Supreme Court justice’s anti-affirmative action argument. We are in a sad moment when cherry-picked information now passes as fact.”
“Dunbar, much like the true purpose of affirmative action, was about access and opportunity, not pulling oneself up by one’s bootstraps,” she wrote in her piece. She added that the school “shouldn’t be used to support an argument that opposes what it stood for and stands for still: opportunity. Access. A chance.” In her conclusion, she requested of Thomas, “when it comes to supporting his thoughts on affirmative action, ‘Please,’ as the kids say, ‘keep my name and Dunbar’s out of your mouth.’” It’s unclear if Thomas (or his law clerks) knew the full context of the work cited in his June 29 opinion. But one wonders if he would have changed a word even if he did. Indeed, the majority’s “colorblind” approach to the Constitution depends on ignoring context.
Jordan Rubin is the Deadline: Legal Blog writer. He was a prosecutor for the New York County District Attorney’s Office in Manhattan and is the author of “Bizarro," a book about the secret war on synthetic drugs. Before he joined MS NOW, he was a legal reporter for Bloomberg Law.
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