Doubting Thomas

from Critical Noir @ Vibe

Doubting Thomas
by Mark Anthony Neal

When Ntozake Shange and Michele Wallace published their respective manifestos for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf and Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman in the 1970s they sparked public debates about the state of relations between black men and women. Waged largely in artistic and intellectual circles—Ms. Magazine, for example published early excerpts of Wallace’s book—the debates were beyond the gaze of most White Americans. Mainstream America fully confronted the gender tensions within Black America in the autumn of 1991 as Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas was accused of sexual harassment in the workplace in the midst of his confirmation hearings.

As political conservatives who were presumed marginal to the political views of large segments of Black America, Thomas and his accuser Anita Hill, were unlikely characters in the on-going dramas between black women and men. With the confirmation hearings being broadcast in real-time, the debates seemed to project stigmas of deviance on relations between black men and women as if these dynamics were unique to black people. This sense of deviance was underwritten by centuries old racist truisms about black male sexuality—Thomas’s apparent sexual appetite—and black female culpability via Hill’s presumed political (gold-digging) ambitions.

Thomas, sensing the new technological terrain in which the drama unfolded, famously bore witness to the uniqueness of the moment with his claim that so-called “left wing” attacks on him were representative of a high-tech lynching. While Thomas’s language, with its clear reference to Jim Crow-era justice, helped congeal the now popular notion of “playing the race card,” his move came at the expense of the real issues that women—and black women in particular—have faced in the workplace. Thus it is ironic that 16 years later, Thomas revisits the drama of those hearings, just as another Thomas—Isiah—is found guilty of sexual harassment of another black woman.

Read the Full Essay at Critical Noir @ Vibe