A New York Times book review by Orlando Patterson gives us the following biographical details on Justice Thomas:

Pin Point, where he spent his first six years, comes as close to a scene of rural desolation as is possible in an advanced society. This is black life in the rural South at its bleakest, in which the best hope of the law-abiding is a job at the old crab-picking factory. It is in this sociological nightmare that a 6-year-old boy, by some miracle of human agency, discovers the path to survival through absorption in books. Born to a teenage mother, abandoned by his father when he was a year old, plunged into the even more frightening poverty of the Savannah ghetto, Thomas, along with his brother, was eventually rescued by his grandparents.... Coastal Georgia is one of the few areas in America where a genuinely Afro-English creole — Gullah — is used, and Thomas grew up speaking it.

Let's take race out of the equation for a moment, and take a white person with a similar background: born to a teenage mother, abandoned by the father, grew up in desolate rural and urban environments, grew up speaking creole dialect instead of standard English, raised by an illiterate grandfather... does anyone seriously doubt that such an individual should be given a break on, say, LSAT scores, in admission relative to the typical Yale Law student? (At least when I was there, the prototypical Yale Law Student grew up in either Manhattan or a well-to-do suburban area, attended a fine, often private, high school, had professional parents, often big-shot lawyers, and spent a bunch of money on Princeton Review or Kaplan to prepare for their LSATS; a fair fraction of my classmates had been planning their law school careers, and in some case political careers beyond that, since at least high school--one woman I met, whose family has donated millions to elite universites, said "I knew I was going to Harvard or Yale from the time I was three years old.").

So if Thomas doesn't attribute his getting into Yale to racial preferences, as the review contends (I'm not sure this is true), you can't blame him. ANY sensible admissions policy would have admitted someone of his background who had achieved the successes he had achieved, regardless of race.

Though I hate to sound like a leftist, to a large extent schools like Yale Law both create and perpetuate the advantages of the elite. Engaging in race-based affirmative action puts a fig leaf of egalitarianism on the whole thing, which allows the overwhelmingly liberal members of the elite to feel good about themselves, while still overwhelmingly giving new advantages to folks of already-advantaged backgrounds.

Put another way, Thomas may be an affirmative action success story, but if so, it damns the schools for not looking much harder for Clarence Thomases of all races.

BTW, I don't recommend the review itself, which has too many cliches and inaccuracies--e.g., at least on the mainstream political spectrum, Rush Limbaugh isn't "far right," he's a rather standard-issue conservative; Thomas did not say, as Patterson claims, that "beating a prisoner is not unconstitutional punishment because it would not have appeared cruel and unusual to the framers," he said that extralegal beatings are not "punishment" within the meaning of that word in the 8th Amendment, and that they may violate other constitutional provisions; and so on.