Washington (CNN) The question Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas asked on Wednesday -- one of his exceptionally rare queries -- involved race. But as has happened before, there was a twist.

Thomas, only the second African-American justice in US history, has gone for years at a stretch without asking a question, including a full decade, from 2006 to 2016. On the occasions his voice has been heard, it has often related to race but with a counterintuitive thrust, as occurred in the new dispute over a Mississippi prosecutor's repeated elimination of blacks from a jury pool.

Thomas has given many explanations for his singular silence through the years, including that he believes the justices should give the lawyers at the lectern more time to present their cases. He earlier referred to his youth in Pin Point, Georgia, where he developed a dialect he said was mocked; Thomas has said that gave him the habit of listening more than speaking.

Thomas employs a distinct conservative approach that puts him on the far right of the generally conservative Supreme Court and in the exact opposite place of the man he succeeded in 1991, Thurgood Marshall, the first African-American justice.

He opposes governmental racial remedies across the board. He has voted against campus affirmative action and electoral districts drawn to enhance the voting power of minorities who have long faced bias at the polls. The latter issue of "majority minority" voting districts spurred a few questions from him in the 1990s.

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