I Was Anita Hill

from the Huffington Post

I Was Anita Hill
by Duchess Harris

The political event that had an impact on my young adult life more than any other was the Anita Hill/Clarence Thomas hearings.

In October of 1991 I was 22-years-old and in my first month of graduate school. It was the first time I'd left the Eastern seaboard where I'd always used public transportation. Without understanding the Midwestern landscape I moved to Minnesota with no car. I had broken up with my East Coast boyfriend and I was the only Black student in my department. I couldn't afford long-distance calls and Al Gore hadn't invented the internet, so I was often glued to the television.

I watched the Anita Hill-Clarence Thomas hearings every day. Even though Anita Hill was a Republican social conservative, she was a Black woman who taught law, and that was my dream. I watched wondering, what if something horrible like this happened to me? No one believes her.

A few years later, I started teaching in a department (that I am no longer affiliated with), and I soon found out. We went on an international research trip. We were in a warm destination during January term, and my department chair asked me to go to a topless beach with him.

Similar to Anita Hill, I did not come forward. A well-meaning white colleague (like Nina Totenberg), told the Dean who insisted that I file a grievance. I was not tenured and couldn't imagine defying the Dean.

To make a long story short, an investigation was done, and I was not believed. Similar to Professor Hill, I was publicly vilified. Similar to Professor Hill, my career persevered.

I am sharing this story because a few years later I ran into my perpetrator's wife. Unlike Virginia Thomas, she never called my campus phone and she never asked me to apologize.

If Mrs. Thomas thinks that those of us who have experienced this are sorry that we spoke truth to power, well yes Virginia; there is a Santa Claus.

***

Duchess Harris is an Associate Professor of American Studies at Macalester College, author of Black Feminist Politics from Kennedy to Clinton, and co-editor with Bruce D. Baum of Racially Writing the Republic: Racists, Race Rebels, and Transformations of American Identity.

Sister Outsider 2.0: Alexis Pauline Gumbs

Alexis Pauline Gumbs: Technology’s Sister Insider
by Duchess Harris
January 11, 2010

In the Nov./Dec. issue of Utne Magazine, Alexis Pauline Gumbs was recognized as a “media activist” in an article entitled “50 People Who Are Changing Your World.” I initially discovered her work in a November 2009 op-ed piece, “The Revolution Will Be Blogged” for Wiretap Magazine, a re-envisioning of Gil Scott Heron’s famous 1970’s poem/song The Revolution Will Not Be Televised.

I have to admit, forty definitely feels old when people are recognized for things that you haven’t even heard of (media activism?), but then I’m sure Gil Scott Heron can relate. Who could even have imagined the immediate and pervasive power of the internet back in the 70’s when the only mass medium was television, and the only roles for Black people were either based on or touched by minstrel stereotypes (remember Jimmy Walker’s Kid-a-Dy-no-mite?).

In her Wiretap piece, Gumbs writes,

If capitalism slept, it would have nightmares about us. … But capitalism doesn’t sleep. So neither do we. We stay up all night, or wake up early and refresh the screen. We live on each others’ words and prove the lie of the hourly news story about our worthlessness. We speak for far-flung intimate audiences, and when we wind up wounded, we don’t stop because slowly we learn that these words are salve. We stay up, stay connected, send love letters every way we know how. These words are salve. Halfway to salvation.

What I’ve learned from Gumbs is that blogging is the 21st century version of “consciousness raising groups.” Consciousness raising groups were pioneered by Women’s Liberation groups in New York City, and quickly spread throughout the United States. In November 1967, groups began meeting in apartments. Meetings often involved women going around the room and “rapping” about issues in their own lives. Forty-two years later, Gumbs has gotten on the internet highway to embrace Queer Black women and their allies.

Read the Full Essay @ Race-Talk

Book Review: Black Feminist Politics from Kennedy to Clinton by Duchess Harris

Reigniting Black Feminist Power
Review by Christine E. Hutchins

Duchess Harris, Associate Professor of American Studies at Macalester College, opens her important new book, Black Feminist Politics from Kennedy to Clinton, with a problem. In Paula Giddings's 1996 book When and Where I Enter: The Impact of Black Women on Race and Sex in America, Giddings asks, "Who has presented the political agenda for Black women?

Harris and Giddings show that the 1963 March on Washington represented an overwhelmingly male Black consciousness and Betty Friedan's 1966 Feminist Mystique an essentially middle-class and white feminist movement. Harris begins, "Since Giddings did not answer her own question, this is where I enter. I wrote this book because I wanted to take up the analysis of Black women's involvement in American political life where Giddings left off."

Harris's analysis is both hopeful and disheartening. On the one hand, Harris provides oral, archival and literary histories of Black women without whom neither the Black Power nor the feminist movements would have progressed. On the other hand, Harris demonstrates that these movements, so beholden to Black women, have never adequately or fairly represented their needs and desires. Worse, they have too often asked Black women to choose between identities, prioritizing one over others.

The insistence that they choose may be Black women's worst dilemma, pressured as they are under the combined weight of racism, sexism and homophobia. The Black Power movement often asks Black women to set aside concerns over unequal status; feminist organizations often have difficulty recognizing the ways that race factors into equations of gender and power.

Harris shows through examination of media, Congressional records and survey data that in situations in which they feel they must choose, Black women overwhelming concede gender to race. Harris demonstrates that Black women strongly backed O.J. Simpson, accused of murdering his former wife, a white woman. In the hearings on the nomination of Clarence Thomas to the U.S. Supreme Court, testimony by Anita Hill about his sexual improprieties required Black women to balance the possibility of a Black Supreme Court appointment or a gender-troubled appointment. Black women generally excused Thomas, Harris argues, "considering it more important to take a Black hero where one could be found, however flawed he might be."

Read the Full Review @ On the Issues: The Progressive Woman's Magazine

Barack Obama as Walter Lee Younger, Jr.

Special to NewBlackMan


Barack Obama as Walter Lee Younger, Jr.
by Duchess Harris

I never thought I’d be able to analyze a presidential election through the lens of the actor Sidney Poitier.

Over the course of the past year, commentary from prominent voices including Robert L. Johnson, the founder of Black Entertainment Television, and New York Times columnist Frank Rich have compared Barack Obama with Sidney Poitier in the film Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner. Sidney Poitier’s screen characters are an apropos way of accessing Obama, but I think Johnson and Rich have the wrong movie.

This presidential election is more like A Raisin in the Sun.

A Raisin in the Sun is a play by Lorraine Hansberry that debuted on Broadway in 1959. The story is based upon her family's experiences growing up in Chicago's Woodlawn neighborhood, a neighborhood similar to the one that Michelle Robinson Obama grew up in.

The experiences in this play echo the lawsuit Hansberry v. Lee, to which the Hansberry family was a party when they fought to have their day in court because of a previous action about racially motivated restrictive covenants (Burke v. Kleiman). The Hansberrys won their right to be heard as a matter of due process of law in relation to the Fourteenth Amendment. The Hansberry case was not bound by the Burke decision, because the class of defendants in the respective cases had conflicting goals.

The plaintiff in the first action was Olive Ida Burke, who brought the suit on behalf of the property owner's association to enforce the racial restriction in 1934. Her husband, James Burke, was the person who sold the property to Carl Hansberry (Lorraine's father) when he changed his mind about the validity of the covenant.

Mr. Burke's decision may have been motivated by the changing demographics of the neighborhood, but it was also influenced by the Depression. The demand for houses was so low among White buyers that Mr. Hansberry may have been the only prospective purchaser available

Barrack Obama is like Lorraine Hansberry’s father, and the American people are like James Burke. After two stock market crashes, White Americans were willing to cast their vote for a Black man to move, not just into a White neighborhood, but into the White House.

In the 1961 film adaptation (the year Barack Obama was born), Sidney Poitier plays the protagonist, Walter Lee Younger. Similar to Obama’s “alternative blackness,” Poitier was born in Miami, Florida, of Bahamian parents. In addition to racial discrimination, he was also hampered even among people of color because of his thick Bahamian accent.

After his first audition, Poitier was told by the director to become a dishwasher. His effort to get rid of his accent resulted in a distinctive speech pattern that became one of his trademarks, along with his piercing gaze and magnetic smile.

When Poitier plays Walter Lee Younger in A Raisin in the Sun, his character is more of a race man than Dr. John Wade Prentiss in Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner. When the residents of all-White Clybourne Park have learned of their new neighbors, they send an emissary to meet with the Youngers to explain the "rules." Mr. Lindner, the representative, carefully disguises his racist attitudes beneath neutral terms ("not rich and fancy people; just hardworking, honest people who don't really have much but those little homes and a dream of the kind of community they want to raise their children in").

These people are like some of the original Hillary supporters who are “hard-working White Americans.” Mr. Linder makes the Youngers a generous offer that Walter Lee refuses. Just like Barack Obama, he decides that his family has a right to a new life, and they will move to Clybourne Park.

Poitier, the Bahamain-American similar to Obama the Kenyan-American, convincingly speaks for the Black American men of the time. Even though Poitier isn’t the descendant of enslaved Africans, he redeems men whose ancestors have been in this country five generations and states that his Black family deserves to move into the White neighborhood because his daddy earned it “brick by brick.”

In real life, Sidney Poitier's most famous quote is, "If you apply reason and logic to this career of mine, you're not going to get very far. The journey has been incredible from its beginning." If that doesn’t explain the Obama presidency, I don’t know what does.

So, guess who’s coming to dinner now?

***

Duchess Harris, PhD, is an Associate Professor of American Studies at Macalester College. She is the author of the forthcoming Black Feminist Politics from Kennedy to Clinton and co-editor with Bruce D. Baum of the forthcoming Racially Writing the Republic: Racists, Race Rebels, and Transformations of American Identity. She is also a J.D. candidate at William Mitchell College of Law.