You know… For a second when he was talking about Brown V Board of Education I wondered if he maybe he was actually going to refer to some of the major desegregation issues. Like how a lot of quality education was actually negatively impacted because the way it was handled. Desegregation caused a massive firing of black teachers because parents of white kids coming into previously black only schools pulled all manner of nonsense like "Well what if my sparkling white menstruating girl child has to share a room with a male black teacher… That’s just wrong! " (yup… That was a ‘legit’ concern from white parents of the time) or how sudden staff redundancies would two teachers one from the black school and the other from the white to be considered and the one chosen to stay was damn near always from the white school despite the teachers being both very qualified. The narrative of "well the black schools were impoverished with budget staff and students had sub par outcomes so we should choose the ‘most qualified’ candidate " was a lot of the justification used at the time and a lot of it was blatantly untrue… The black schools may have seen less infrastructure funding but the teachers were just as good. That lack of black teachers also spiraled into a lot of biases on behalf of the sudden white dominant teacher population that turned black students into “problem children” amd second class citizens in schools where they had once been absolutely comfortable causing a lot of issues to domino out from that move.

I doubt that’s his reasons because it seems like Clarence Thomas is well bought and paid for…But… Maybe it’s coming from a genuine place? He’s old enough to have seen that change happen first hand and be very negatively effected… If so maybe he does fondly remember an all black school? His takeway may be influenced by that kind of rosy nostalgic lens.