While most scholars and jurists have debated which model better serves black interests, Justice Thomas rejected both models as misbegotten quests to maximize “the ‘weight’ or ‘influence’ of votes.” The simple fact, he wrote, was that “in a majoritarian system, numerical minorities lose elections.” African-Americans, he suggested, must come to terms with that political weakness. Even if district lines are redrawn to overcome that weakness, it will be (often white) elites who do the drawing.

Or consider the issue of eminent domain, where government acquires private property for public use. Justice Thomas opposes eminent domain not simply to protect the rights of private property, as most conservatives do. He also opposes it because he sees it as a tool of racial oppression.

Midcentury urban renewal programs used eminent domain to clear slums and improve downtown areas. They also uprooted African-Americans. In a 1963 interview, the writer James Baldwin declared that urban renewal “means Negro removal.” Citing that very line in his dissent in Kelo v. City of New London, a 2005 case that upheld the use of eminent domain, Justice Thomas wrote, “Urban renewal projects have long been associated with the displacement of blacks.”

Documenting the devastating effects of such policies on black communities, Justice Thomas cast the court’s support for eminent domain as a jurisprudence of ethnic cleansing. Poorer people will always be the victims of such policies, he said; they are “the least politically powerful” members of society. Invoking a sacred phrase of civil rights jurisprudence, he called the victims of eminent domain one of the “discrete and insular minorities” the political process often fails.

African-Americans, Justice Thomas believes, must look beyond politics. Malcolm X wrote in his autobiography: “The American black man should be focusing his every effort toward building his own businesses and decent homes for himself” so as to “build up the black race’s ability to do for itself. That’s the only way the American black man is ever going to get respect.” Justice Thomas agrees. Indeed, two decades after he read “The Autobiography of Malcolm X,” he could still recite this passage from memory.

Rather than champion the black wage earner, whose subordination to white employers is all too reminiscent of politics, Justice Thomas celebrates the black business owner. He reports that his grandfather, an entrepreneur who helped raise him, liked to say, “I’m doing this for y’all so y’all don’t have to work for the white man.” Rather than amass wealth for himself and his family, Justice Thomas writes, his grandfather assumed “responsibility for the community” in which he lived . That belief in the saving power of black business owners runs throughout Justice Thomas’s philosophy.

Justice Thomas often invokes his grandfather to critique government redistribution of wealth. Attacks on the wealthy, he declared in a 1987 speech, are attacks on “people like my grandfather.”