"As the only Black member of the court, Thomas’s views on race and racism may carry particular weight with his colleagues."

"After all, he — and he alone — is positioned to explain, drawing on personal experience, the impact of racism on the Black community. And his conservative bona fides make it hard to dismiss his views as 'wokeness' run amok.... Next term, the justices will hear a critical challenge to affirmative action, and, depending on what happens in the Mississippi abortion case currently pending, there may be yet more opportunities to consider the scope and substance of the right to abortion. On both of these issues, Thomas has been incredibly vocal — and his views have been presented in racialized terms. He is a stalwart critic of affirmative action, arguing that such programs 'stamp minorities with a badge of inferiority and may cause them to develop dependencies or to adopt an attitude that they are "entitled" to preferences.' He has dismissed claims about the supposed benefits of diversity in education as a product of 'faddish social theories' at odds with a constitutional commitment to equal protection of the laws. His opposition to reproductive rights is well known, though recently, his rhetoric has grown more aggressive: He has associated abortion with the eugenics movement of the 1920s and has voiced concern about the eradication through abortion of minority groups.... Serving as a counterweight to Thomas, [Ketanji Brown] Jackson would make clear, through her presence and her arguments, that the Black experience is anything but one-dimensional."

Writes NYU lawprof Melissa Murray, in "A new kind of diversity on the Supreme Court: Two formidable Black voices/It used to be said that there was a ‘Black seat’ on the Supreme Court. But Black legal perspectives are far too diverse to be represented by any single figure" (WaPo).

There are too few Justices to achieve real diversity — the kind of "critical mass" the recent affirmative action cases talk about, where no member of a minority group has to feel that they represent their group. 

But isn't 2 better than 1? With 2, we may be asking which of the 2 really represents black people. We don't ask that about the white Justices. And Professor Murray isn't blatantly asking that. What she says outright is that with 2 black Justices, it will be plain that there isn't just one black perspective. 

And yet, Clarence Thomas has never been thought of as representing the black perspective. For 30 years, he's been battered with the criticism that he doesn't count as the black perspective. I anticipate that people will be saying that Ketanji Brown Jackson represents the real black perspective — finally, after all these years of Clarence Thomas, we've got the real thing. Watch out for that.