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.

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