Ketanji Brown Jackson's candid 2007 take on Justice Clarence Thomas: 'I don’t understand you'
ABC News
The two could soon make history on the Supreme Court.
More than two decades before becoming a top contender to be President Joe Biden's Supreme Court nominee, a young Ketanji Brown Jackson sat across from Justice Clarence Thomas, reportedly perplexed by how someone of his background -- not so different from her own -- could have developed such a conservative bent.
"I don't understand you,'" Jackson, who clerked for Justice Stephen Breyer from 1999 to 2000, remembered thinking, according to a 2007 biography of Thomas, "Supreme Discomfort: The Divided Soul of Clarence Thomas."
"'You sound like my parents. You sound like the people I grew up with.' But the lessons he tended to draw from the experiences of the segregated South seemed to be different than those of everybody I know," the book, by authors Kevin Merida and Michael Fletcher, said Jackson thought as she and Thomas shared lunch.
Jackson acknowledged doing an interview for the book during her confirmation hearings last year for the U.S. Court of Appeals.
