Could it be that Clarence Thomas -- the black Supreme Court justice who gets all this praise from conservative whites for being courageous whenever he sides with the court on decisions that hurt black people -- is really crying out for a hug?

And could it be that if enough light-skinned blacks had given him one when he was growing up, he wouldn’t be on the high court making life miserable for the rest of us?

That’s what crosses my mind as I read “Supreme Discomfort: The Divided Soul of Clarence Thomas.”  The biography, meticulously written by Washington Post journalists Kevin Merida and Michael A. Fletcher, collects all the patches of Thomas’ life and pieces them into one conflicted quilt.

From his beginnings in Pin Point and Savannah, Ga., to his black activism in college, his ascension to Reagan’s Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and finally to George H.W. Bush’s Supreme Court, Thomas appears to be a man whose drive to not be defined by color is actually fueled by his obsession with it.

The obsession, it seems, began decades ago -- when being called black was a deep insult rather than an expression of pride. But it seems that the dark-complexioned Thomas, who claims that he was taunted with the nickname “ABC: America’s Blackest Child,” has never quite shaken his complex about his blackness.

So what we have is a brother on the high court who isn’t bringing independent black thought to it, as he famously likes to say he is persecuted for, as much as he is bringing baggage and old hurts.

And that’s scary.

I can understand why Thomas would be scarred by such an experience. Though many of his Savannah acquaintances tell a different story; they say it was about education and economic standing, not complexion, he did, after all, come up during Jim Crow segregation. That was a time when being black kept most of them from the opportunities that bestowed prestige and high social status.

Segregation was one of the things, in fact, that gave rise to the light-skinned, dark-skinned dynamic among black people. It wasn’t enough to try to escape one’s blackness by getting into the few respectable occupations limited to blacks, but by also resembling something that looked closer to white than black.

“You had the black elite, the schoolteachers, the light-skinned people, the dentists, the doctors,” Thomas has said, according to the book. “My grandfather was down at the bottom, an uneducated man who had money in the bank and took care of himself. And … they would look down on him. Everyone tries to gloss over that now, but it was the reality. It was the reality.”

I’d like to think that success for Thomas, the one-time black activist, would have given him a chance to put his bitterness behind him and to understand the real roots behind that reality and the hurt he suffered as a child -- those roots being racism in society as a whole.

Instead, though, I’m wondering if he sees it as a chance not to give back as much as to get back.

“As much as Thomas disliked having his credentials questioned, he also hated the idea that affirmative action at Yale seemed to help black people who least needed it -- the mostly light-skinned children of the black professional class,” Merida and Fletcher wrote.

“As Thomas (a dark-skinned black) saw it, they were the same caste of people -- the self-important sons and daughters of doctors, dentists, lawyers and educators -- who he felt excluded his family from the upper-social reaches of black Savannah.”

What’s interesting about all this is that Thomas and the light-skinned blacks who shunned him because of his color are really similar creatures. They were trying to separate themselves from their blackness by venerating themselves for having complexions that were close to white.

Thomas is, on the other hand, trying to distance himself from the black experience by opposing the same affirmative action that helped him get into college by interpreting the Constitution in a way that assumes that slavery and discrimination never impacted the lives of black people. Instead, he’s bought into the ultraconservative credo that believes that to give justice means to create victims.
 
That’s crazy -- and it’s a cop-out.
 
And now the Thomas who felt ostracized by light-skinned black people who were operating in a world shaped by white racism now basks in the admiration of conservative white people who hold those same notions; people who would close doors to all black people, regardless of hue.

That’s why I’m not surprised that Thomas, as Fletcher and Merida wrote, sometimes calls his mother at 4 a.m., mostly to talk about the pain of being a black pariah. Because for all his power, he still doesn’t have a home.

Or a chance at finally getting that hug.