The real questions raised by Clarence Thomas’s latest scandal

That a person from Clarence Thomas’s beginnings could reach the Supreme Court reifies America’s fondest dream of itself, as a country that greets individual capacity with boundless possibility. Mr Thomas was born in 1948 in a shack with one electric light and no running water, in the isolated hamlet of Pin Point, on Georgia’s coast. When he was about seven he moved with his mother and brother to Savannah, where she worked as a housekeeper and they lived in an apartment that also lacked plumbing.