Clarence Thomas: Racial Pessimist or Vulgar Opportunist?

Vox recently published an article by Sean Illing titled "The racial pessimism of Clarence Thomas: Corey Robin on Thomas’s black nationalism and why more people should understand it." It is a lengthy article, and of course it examines how Clarence Thomas advocates a weird mixture of "Black nationalism" and Booker-T-self-help-nonsense.
Toward the middle of the article there is an interesting exchange. According to Illing:

"Thomas’s opposition to affirmative action or really any attempt at improving race relations looks a lot different to me after reading your book. You argue that Thomas isn’t objecting to these things because he denies the underlying injustices but rather because he rejects anything that smacks of “white paternalism.”

Robin responds: "For Thomas, it means that there’s an assumption among white liberals that the job of the American ruling class through the state is to improve the lot of African Americans and to use the state to rectify these past injustices. And Thomas just doesn’t believe that it’s impossible to remedy these injustices, he also believes that the acts of paternalism end up perpetuating the injustices."

The thing is that Thomas himself owes his position to the "paternalism" of white conservatives. So what's the difference? Clarence Thomas is pernicious stooge who has sold out his own people to the racist white establishment.