JOHN MCWHORTER RESPONDS TO A LAZY, BIGOTED ASSAULT ON CLARENCE THOMAS:

As it happens, I just came upon an Esquire article that opens with generous passages in Gullah creole, a dialect similar to Guyanese created by enslaved Black people in and around the Sea Islands of the American Southeast. Its author, Mitchell Jackson, has written a piece on Justice Clarence Thomas that begins in the small Black Georgia town Thomas grew up in, with narration rendered in the Gullah that some locals speak among themselves.

This is intended as a way of shivving Thomas — to point up a contrast between Thomas’s modest Black working-class roots and his life now, circulating happily in largely affluent, white circles, supposedly unconcerned with the welfare of the people he was raised among.

Jackson argues that Thomas’s conservative jurisprudence is fundamentally anti-Black and that therefore Thomas is a broken, sinister figure sabotaging his own people out of disgust with his own Blackness. “We’ve never seen a Black man this powerful this bent on harming other Black folks,” writes Jackson. “He’s alien to me because I love my people and I can see in his hardened heart he’s against us.”

This presumptuous — cartoonish, really — presentation is questionable as analysis. Among other things, it elides the nuance offered fairly recently by the Brooklyn College political scientist Corey Robin, the author of “The Enigma of Clarence Thomas.” Robin, certainly no acolyte of Thomas’s, explains how Thomas’s jurisprudence, whether one agrees with it, is rooted in a coherent and by no means malevolent philosophy compatible in many ways with Black nationalism. As Robin writes, “Thomas is not a conservative man who happens to be Black. Thomas is a Black man whose conservatism is overwhelmingly defined by and oriented toward the interests of Black people, as he understands them.” Jackson’s take, on the other hand, is not only crude and hasty but also written as if the shopworn Thomas-as-race-traitor thesis is something new.

In our moment, we talk a lot about the dismaying degree of partisanship in our nation. We declare fealty to the ideal of being open to the ideas of others. Yet Jackson exemplifies a sense that when it comes to Thomas, none of this interest in comity applies and that it qualifies as insight to discuss him as a horrid, pathetic figure. Once again, apparently, there is a single Black way to think, with Black conservatism valuable only as a demonstration of what Black opinion is not supposed to be.

It’s worthwhile, one would think, to assume first that people’s intentions are good ones. Writing someone off as monstrous should be a matter of last resort. To go with that immediately makes for good theater, but it’s also a kind of ritualistic hostility. . . . Jackson’s article is bile.

There’s a lot of that passing for thought these days, especially when the subject is Clarence Thomas.