"Thomas read 'The Autobiography of Malcolm X' in his first year at Holy Cross. He put up a poster of Malcolm in his dorm room..."

"... and he began collecting records of Malcolm’s speeches, which he could still recite from memory two decades later. 'I’ve been very partial to Malcolm X,' Thomas said, in 1987. 'There is a lot of good in what he says.' On the eve of his appointment to the Supreme Court, Thomas was still summoning Malcolm as a witness for the prosecution against the liberal establishment. 'I don’t see how the civil-rights people today can claim Malcolm X as one of their own,' he said. 'Where does he say black people should go begging the Labor Department for jobs? He was hell on integrationists. Where does he say you should sacrifice your institutions to be next to white people?'...  At Yale [Law School], Thomas developed an understanding of racism that he would never shake. Whites—Southern and Northern, liberal and conservative, rural and urban—are racists.... The most that can be hoped for is that whites be honest about it. Honesty is demonstrated through crude statements of personal animus or intellectual suggestions of racial inequality. Dishonesty is demonstrated through denial of one’s racism and sympathetic extensions of help. Dishonesty lulls black people into a false sense of security, assuring them that they are safe when they are not."

From "Clarence Thomas’s Radical Vision of Race/Thomas has moved from black nationalism to the right. But his beliefs about racism, and our ability to solve it, remain the same" by Corey Robin (in The New Yorker)(drawn from Robin's new book "The Enigma of Clarence Thomas").