Clarence Thomas and the Tough Love Crowd: Counterfeit Heroes and Unhappy Truths

Oxford and Harvard Law graduate Roberts offers spirited, and partly effective, critiques of the ``unstable dogmas'' of a disparate group of black neoconservatives. However, his continued reference to the term ``Negro crits'' to describe anticonservative thinkers like Derrick Bell is an odd tic. After briefly taking on Shelby Steele's rhetoric of individualism and Thomas Sowell's attacks on civil rights as a displacement of fact by belief, the author proceeds for a deeper-and more abstruse-look at law and lawyers usually considered liberal. He finds disingenuous Yale Law professor Stephen Carter's idea that judgeships are more private distinctions than sites of political power, and he tracks Harvard Law professor Randall Kennedy's pre-tenure ``confirmation conversion'' from activist scholar to disinterested idealist. He also takes a thoughtful and sometimes tart look at Clarence Thomas's early Supreme Court opinions: ``justice is apparently someone else's work.'' He concludes with an attack on writer V.S. Naipaul's view of postcolonial politics: ``the form of his work entails the worth of human life, while the infused vision denies it.'' (Jan.)